[Sugarman] Fwd: WiSER’s Keith Breckenridge wins the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF)’s first Humanities Book Award

[Maria Suriano]

We are proud of you! Bravo!

Maria

From: Daniel Herwitz [mailto:herwitz at umich.edu]
Sent: 01 March 2017 02:44 PM
To: Gabrielle Hecht
Cc: sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za
Subject: Re: [Sugarman] Fwd: WiSER’s Keith Breckenridge wins the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF)’s first Humanities Book Award

Keith you truly deserve this. Bravo.

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 2:41 PM, Gabrielle Hecht <hechtg at umich.edu<mailto:hechtg at umich.edu>> wrote:
A huge congratulations to Keith!


Begin forwarded message:

From: "WISER" <info.wiser at wits.ac.za<mailto:info.wiser at wits.ac.za>>
Subject: WiSER’s Keith Breckenridge wins the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF)’s first Humanities Book Award
Date: March 1, 2017 at 06:18:16 EST
To: Gabrielle Hecht <hechtg at umich.edu<mailto:hechtg at umich.edu>>
Reply-To: "WISER" <info.wiser at wits.ac.za<mailto:info.wiser at wits.ac.za>>


WiSER is extremely proud to announce that:

Professor Keith Breckenridge, Deputy Director of WiSER, has won the The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)’s inaugural  Humanities Book Award.

The award will be presented to Professor Keith Breckenridge for his book Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present. The book shows how the South African obsession with Francis Galton's universal fingerprint identity registration served as a 20th century incubator for the current systems of biometric citizenship being developed throughout the South.

The ASSAf Humanities Book Award is presented to a writer/s of a scholarly, well-written work of non-fiction, published up to three years prior to its nomination. The book should be noteworthy in its contribution to developing new understanding and insight of a topic in the Humanities.

Chosen from among 58 entries, this book is claimed to have reawakened international interest in the fine details of South African state-building, showing that our history can reveal and explain patterns of state-formation in Europe, the Americas and Asia, and our peer states on this continent. The book, as reviewers have commented, engages problems that have broad interdisciplinary significance, reworking them to place South African history at the centre of a new global explanation. It has produced new explanations of the roots of Galton's eugenics, of social Darwinism, of Gandhi's distinctive anti-progressivism, of the limits of the colonial state's will to know, of the surveillance capacities of the apartheid state, and the current global enthusiasm for biometric social welfare. The book does this by combining very wide comparative reading with the fine-grained archival research that has been the hall-mark of South African historiography for two generations. It is carefully and fluently written and encourages South African social scientists, historians in particular, to be comparative, and theoretically ambitious, deploying the detail of what we know best about our own society to shape debates in the global academy.

Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present was published by Cambridge University Press.

Keith Breckenridge is a Professor and Deputy Director at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. He writes about the cultural and economic history of South Africa, particularly the gold mining industry, the state and the development of information systems.

The prize will be awarded at the inaugural ASSAf Annual Humanities Lecture and Book Award event on 9 March 2017 in Pretoria.

Our warmest congratulations to Keith.

Sarah Nuttall

Director

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WISER, 6th Floor Richard Ward Building
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, GT 2050
South Africa

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--
Daniel Herwitz
Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor
Department of Comparative Literature
University of Michigan
2010 Tisch Hall
435 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
tel: 734-764-8781
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