Minh Nguyen’s book Waste and Wealth: An Ethnography of Labor, Value, and Morality in a Vietnamese Recycling Economy is the winner of the 2019 Book Prize of the Society for the Anthropology of Work. The Society for the Anthropology of Work is part of the American Anthropological Association. Read an excerpt of the public annoucement from the committee below.

"We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2019 Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize is Minh T. N. Nguyen's Waste and Wealth: An Ethnography of Labor, Value, and Morality in a Vietnamese Recycling Economy (Oxford University Press, 2019). It explores the extended family livelihoods that developed over several decades from marginal trash scavenging into the salvage, repair, transport, and sale of construction materials and a remarkable variety of consumer goods. Contextualized within the long history of traumas experienced by the Vietnamese people, the study describes and analyzes a distinctive moral economy involving care of the very young and the very old and emergent networks linking urban businesses to rural community development".