Lisa Messeri awarded Gregory Bateson Book Prize

Lisa Messeri, Associate Professor of Anthropology, was awarded the 2025 Gregory Bateson Book Prize for her book In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2024).

The Gregory Bateson Book Prize is awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Named after distinguished anthropologist, semiotician, cyberneticist, and photographer Gregory Bateson, the award celebrates theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded research that engages the most current thinking across the arts and sciences.

The Bateson Prize committee described the book as “impressive” in scope and “a page-turner of an ethnography,” adding: “With deep ethnographic sensitivity, Messeri does not dismiss this ambition but instead takes as her primary object of investigation the fantasies that animate it, fantasies shared in various ways by techno-optimists, artists, and even anthropologists. If fantasies index dreamed-of futures, Messeri develops, alongside and often against those abstract aspirations, the concept of the unreal: that space of the everyday in which the instability of reality is a lived experience that cannot be ignored or dreamed away.”

In the Land of the Unreal is an ethnographic exploration of a community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, tech innovators, and artists that formed in the mid-2010s around the promise—and fantasy—of virtual reality as a cure for societal issues like sexism and racism. Messeri explores the community’s idea of virtual reality as an “empathy machine” and why “technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.”

The prize was awarded at the 2025 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in New Orleans, which took place November 19–23, 2025.