Entanglement Wins Victor Turner Prize

4th September, 2017

Entanglement – The Secret Lives of Hair by Emma Tarlo has won 1st Prize for the 2017 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing

A fascinating and surprising book, Entanglement explores just how much our locks and curls tell us about who we are.  

Emma Tarlo travels the globe, tracking its movement across India, Myanmar, China, Africa, the United States, Britain and Europe, where she meets people whose livelihoods depend on hair.  Her journeys take her inside Chinese wig factories and Hindu temples, Afro hair fairs, Jewish wig parlours, fashion salons and hair loss clinics in Britain and the United States, where hair reveals the lives of all it touches.

Here’s what the judges had to say about Entanglement and the other winners:

“The committee evaluated seventy-five ethnographies for their originality, innovative methods, experience-near approach, quality of writing, presentation and engagement with humanistic anthropology and anthropological scholarship in general. We chose the ethnographies that we found to be exemplars of the best ethnographic writing, the ones destined to make a significant impact on the doing and writing of ethnography. The winners exemplify the broad and deep diversity of anthropologists’ approaches to their craft.”