The Department of Anthropology would like to congratulate Christopher Krupa, whose book, A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) has won the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (SLACA) 2023 Book Prize.
The SLACA Book Prize recognizes distinguished anthropological work that advances the understanding of the Americas in innovative and potentially transformative ways.
A Feast of Flowers goes behind the scenes in Ecuador's massive cut flower industry, which dominates the supply of cut flowers into North America and relies heavily on Indigenous labour. Combining nearly two decades of historical and ethnographic research, the book is an examination of how capitalism expands in post-colonial conditions, and the legacy of the racial constructs that colonialism imposed on the region.
“As anthropologists, the fieldwork-based research we often do compels us to ground our analyses in pressing issues affecting real people in real places, and so an award of this sort—identified with the vibrant intellectual and political traditions of Latin America and the Caribbean—holds a special sort of recognition for me,” says Dr. Krupa. “This is especially true for the book’s efforts to examine its place of focus—highland Ecuador—in a global and historical context, a dynamic site constituted in its local and regional peculiarity by the larger forces acting on and through it.”
The book was also recently awarded the Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize.
In May 2022, we discussed the book with Professor Krupa. You can read that interview here.