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

Judith Irvine jti at umich.edu
Wed Mar 1 16:17:20 SAST 2017


Many congratulations, Keith! This is wonderful news.

Judy

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 1, 2017, at 8:35 AM, Sarah Charlton <Sarah.Charlton at wits.ac.za>
wrote:

Wonderful news Keith!  Many congratulations indeed.

All best wishes

Sarah



*From:* Gabrielle Hecht [mailto:hechtg at umich.edu <hechtg at umich.edu>]
*Sent:* Wednesday, 01 March 2017 2:42 PM
*To:* sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za
*Subject:* [Sugarman] Fwd: WiSER’s Keith Breckenridge wins the Academy of
Science of South Africa (ASSAF)’s first Humanities Book Award



A huge congratulations to Keith!



Begin forwarded message:



*From: *"WISER" <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>

*Reply-To: *"WISER" <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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University of the Witwatersrand
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South Africa


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