<div dir="ltr">Thanks everyone. I'm very aware of the great books that have been written here in the last three years, many of them by my esteemed colleagues. It is wonderful to be marked out for special notice like this. Unnatural good fortune. But I'll enjoy it, don't worry. <br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div style="text-align:left">-------<br>Keith Breckenridge <b><span style="color:rgb(153,0,0)">W I S E R</span></b><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)"> - The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand | Pbag 3, PO Wits, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2050 |<font size="2"> Phone +27(0)11-7174272 | </font></span><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)">Web</span>: <font size="2"><a href="http://wiser.wits.ac.za" target="_blank">wiser.wits.ac.za |</a> <a href="http://goo.gl/nJKK5N" target="_blank"><i>Biometric State</i>, CUP, Sept 2014</a> | Co - Editor, <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=AFH" target="_blank">Journal of African History</a>.<br></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 2:41 PM, Gabrielle Hecht <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:hechtg@umich.edu" target="_blank">hechtg@umich.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word">A huge congratulations to Keith!
<div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><br class="m_-6587791868958950662Apple-interchange-newline"><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px"><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgba(0,0,0,1.0)"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif">"WISER" <<a href="mailto:info.wiser@wits.ac.za" target="_blank">info.wiser@wits.ac.za</a>><br></span></div><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px"><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgba(0,0,0,1.0)"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif"><b>WiSER’s Keith Breckenridge wins the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF)’s first Humanities Book Award</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px"><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgba(0,0,0,1.0)"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif">March 1, 2017 at 06:18:16 EST<br></span></div><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px"><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgba(0,0,0,1.0)"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif">Gabrielle Hecht <<a href="mailto:hechtg@umich.edu" target="_blank">hechtg@umich.edu</a>><br></span></div><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px"><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgba(0,0,0,1.0)"><b>Reply-To: </b></span><span style="font-family:-webkit-system-font,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif">"WISER" <<a href="mailto:info.wiser@wits.ac.za" target="_blank">info.wiser@wits.ac.za</a>><br></span></div><br><div><p><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><strong>WiSER is extremely proud to announce that: </strong></span></span></p><p><span style="color:#b22222"><strong><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Professor Keith Breckenridge, Deputy Director of WiSER, has won the The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)’s inaugural Humanities Book Award.</span></span></strong></span></p><p><span style="color:#4b0082"><strong><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">The award will be presented to Professor Keith Breckenridge for his book <em>Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present</em>. 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.</span></span></strong></span></p><p><span style="color:#696969"><strong><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">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.</span></span></strong></span></p><p><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">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.</span></span></p><p><span style="color:#4b0082"><strong><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><em><u>Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present</u> was published by Cambridge University Press.</em></span></span></strong></span></p><p><span style="color:#696969"><strong><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">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.</span></span></strong></span></p><p><span style="color:#b22222"><strong><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><em>The prize will be awarded at the inaugural ASSAf Annual Humanities Lecture and Book Award event on 9 March 2017 in Pretoria.</em></span></span></strong></span></p><p><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Our warmest congratulations to Keith.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Sarah Nuttall</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size:12px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Director</span></span></p>
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