Harry J. Benda Prize

The Harry J. Benda Prize of the AAS is given annually to an outstanding newer scholar from any discipline or country specialization of Southeast Asian studies for a first book in the field. The award, which honors one of the pioneers in the field of Southeast Asian studies, has been presented since 1977.

Prize

$1,000 to the author.

Guidelines for Submission

• Original, scholarly, nonfiction works in English with a copyright date of 2020 or 2021 are eligible for the 2023 prize.
• Reference works, exhibition catalogs, translations, textbooks, essay collections, poetry, fiction, travel books, memoirs, or autobiographies are not eligible.
• Publishers must complete the book nomination form. Each press may nominate a maximum of six books for the Benda Prize.
• Only publishers may nominate books.
• Upon receipt of a completed nomination form, publishers will be provided with addresses for prize committee members. A copy of each entry, clearly labeled “Benda Prize,” must be sent to each member of the committee.

Deadline

Nominations must be received by June 30, 2022 to be eligible for the 2023 awards.

Benda Prize Committee

2022 Awards

Winner and Citation

Teren Sevea, Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

The Benda Prize committee is thrilled to select Miracles and Material Life as the winner of this year’s Benda Prize.

Sevea’s book Miracles and Material Life is a remarkable scholarly achievement that breathes new life into the intractable themes of cultural hybridity and religious syncretism in Southeast Asian studies. This extraordinary book combines ethnography, oral histories, archival research, pilgrimage, and translations to depict the cosmopolitan imaginations of pawangs and bomohs in colonial Malaya—the miracle workers who operated simultaneously as powerful, resourceful, and problematic actors in the development of colonial capitalism. Miracles and Material Life is a highly original approach to the study of vernacular Islam and colonial statecraft and their zones of overlap and interaction. Its turn to colonial historiography revivifies colonial texts by analyzing the contradictory scenes and terms of their production, acknowledging the multilayered collaborations between scribes, pawangs, courts, and fastidious colonial officers. Tracing the vital economic role of pawangs in colonial Malaya, Sevea shows how indigenous knowledge and spiritual prowess were foundational to the colonial state project of territorial expansion, resource extraction, and cultural control. Pawangs paved the way for locating veins of ore in mines, taming elephants as beasts of burden, and producing successful rice yields. That their knowledge and power derived from a lineage that stretched far beyond Malaya, traversing the routes traveled by Sufism, contributes to the ambivalences of their reception in the present. Sevea introduces new problematics to the study of Islam by centering a historically significant yet sectarian point of view that appears marginal to both institutionalized religion and the developmental nation-state.  A pathos of ruinology haunts the book, as sites of pilgrimage, revelation, and reverence are bulldozed to make way for state projects in present-day Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Sevea’s skillful translations pay homage to the oral histories and genealogical traditions of men and women of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds who embody this disappearing tradition. Miracles and Material Life offers a new and encompassing approach to the study of Southeast Asia, challenging us to expand our research boundaries and imagination.

Honorable Mention

Past Awards