Society for Cultural Anthropology
Cultural Horizons Prize

SCA is proud to award the eighth annual Cultural Horizons Prize to

Omri Elisha
(Queen's College, CUNY)

for his article

"Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism"

(Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (February 2008): 154-189).

This year's doctoral student jury, consisting of Hannah Appel (Stanford U), Emily Yates-Doerr (NYU), and Mareike Winchell (UC Berkeley), writes:

“Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great,” begins Omri Elisha’s article, with this quote from Luke. In “Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism,” Elisha traces the mutually-constitutive and at times irreconcilable ethical demands of compassion and accountability as they shape the work of evangelical activists in Knoxville, Tennessee. Elisha uses rich and convincing ethnographic material to show that evangelicals themselves “explicitly recognize the paradox” between compassion and accountability, seeing the relation as dialectical rather than contradictory. Elisha’s attention to this paradox and his informants’ awareness of it illuminates not only the everyday practices of the evangelical activists, but also informs much larger projects of care and compassion—be they humanitarian, governmental, religious, or even anthropological. As Elisha notes, the “unsettling indeterminacy” introduced by these competing and dialectical demands relies on and in turn creates specific objects of intervention – “obstacles and hardships” – ones that “reinforce narratives of embattlement.” That such languages of embattled gifting create vertical relations of accountability rather than empowerment raises provocative questions about the daily intimacies not only of evangelical activism but also of international humanitarian work, philanthropy and democracy-serving military action.

Read the entire 2009 commendation here.

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About the Cultural Horizons Prize:

The SCA has long been distinguished by having the largest graduate student membership of any section of the AAA. Recognizing that doctoral students are among the most experimentally minded--and often among the best read--of ethnographic writers, this award asks of SCA's graduate student readers, "Who is on your reading horizon?"

This spirit gave rise to the Cultural Horizons Prize, awarded yearly by a jury of doctoral students for the best article appearing in Cultural Anthropology.

Cultural Horizons Prize winners include:

Saba Mahmood (U Chicago), 2002
Paul K. Eiss (Carnegie Mellon), 2003
William Mazzarella (U Chicago), 2004
Sarah Jain (Stanford U), 2005
Peter W. Redfield (UNC, Chapel Hill), 2006
Shao Jing (Nanjing U), 2007
Ilana Feldman (George Washington U), 2008
Omri Elisha (Queen's College, CUNY), 2009

 

Call for Jury Members