Three PhD students honored at American Anthropological Association meeting

Three Yale PhD students were honored with prizes at the American Anthropological Association’s fall meeting in New Orleans. Al Lim, Botao Zhao, and Yuefei You are in the combined PhD program in Anthropology and Environment.

Lim won the H Russell Bernard Student Paper Prize from the Society for Anthropological Sciences for his paper on how taxes and fiscal design shape subjects in AI–crypto ecosystems. The paper is an offshoot of his dissertation research on cryptocurrency in Thailand, for which he completed extensive fieldwork in Bangkok and across Southeast Asia.

Lim, who is half Thai and half Singaporean, attended Yale NUS as an undergraduate, where he majored in urban studies and developed an interest in water infrastructure. He intended to continue his research about smart cities and water systems, but the COVID-19 pandemic upended his plans. Lim’s graduate research journey took several turns along the way—including projects that examined Bitcoin mining in Laos and decriminalized cannabis in Thailand—before focusing on crypto communities in Bangkok for his dissertation.

With encouragement from a Yale faculty mentor, Lim began to consider how tax policies impact cryptocurrency markets and their “builders” (the coders, entrepreneurs, and community operators in the crypto community). Crypto tends to fall in between legal categories and national governance frameworks and is not easily trackable by the state — a grey area that Lim finds fascinating. His research shows how state tax frameworks underpin crypto markets, even as AI agent platforms impose fiscal regimes through fees, tokenomics, and protocol-level taxes. Lim submitted his dissertation in December and expects to graduate in May.

Zhao, a first-year PhD student, received the Nancy Abelmann Prize for the best graduate student paper from the East Asia Society. The prize includes $300 and expedited review in the journal Asian Anthropology.

The paper—which Zhao wrote while completing his master’s degree at the Yale School of the Environment—examines the abrupt decline and eventual disappearance of horse caravans in Yanjing, Markham, Tibet, by analyzing the interplay between global economic upheaval and local economic transformations.

Zhao has traveled extensively in the vast ranges of the Tibetan Plateau and has long been fascinated by the rich cultures and livelihoods of the region.

“I realized that this rugged and complex landscape was undergoing profound social and environmental transformations,” he explained, and was a topic he wanted to explore further in his graduate studies. Yale offered a unique interdisciplinary PhD program that would allow him to explore research that cut across the fields of anthropology, geography, agrarian studies, and history.

“Yale offers a particularly strong environment for agrarian and peasant studies in terms of faculty expertise and institutional support,” he said. “I feel very lucky and well supported to have two insightful and responsible advisors: Professor Michael Dove and Professor Douglas Rogers. Many of the core ideas that ultimately shaped my study began from those seemingly ‘unremarkable’ but lingering and inspiring sparks from our conversations,” he said.

You, a fellow first-year PhD student, won the 2025 best student film prize from the Society for Visual Anthropology Festival of Film and Media for her documentary film, “What Do Ghosts Think?”

The film, created during her master’s studies at the University of Amsterdam, examines how various communities in East Kalimantan respond to displacement, supernatural tales, and political censorship surrounding the construction of the new city of Nusantara, where Indonesia plans to move its capital due to rising sea levels near Jakarta. You, who grew up in China, saw parallels between the local reaction to development projects in China and what was happening in Indonesia. 

Narrated as a letter to her mother, the film blends personal reflection with cultural analysis, offering a unique lens on development and memory.

In her research at Yale, You is exploring how different groups mediate the environment with their practice, imagination, and experiences into the process of worldmaking.

"Ultimately, I'm interested in people—their ways of thinking, their feelings, and the political dynamics underlying their experiences," she explains. "I chose Yale for its combined program in anthropology and environmental studies, which offers insightful training in ethnography and excellent regional experts for global concerns. It opens up a valuable space for interdisciplinary dialogue."

Zhao, Lim, and You all work in the lab of anthropologist Michael R. Dove—whose research focuses on the environmental relations of local communities, especially in South and Southeast Asia—as well as in the lab of K. Sivaramakrishnan, who is the co-director of the combined program in the Anthropology Department.

“The unique dynamics of crypto currency in Thailand and the traditional ideas of risk and fortune that drive this market besides simple economics; the transformation of Tibet’s ancient salt trade in a single decade, an ‘incidental’ effect of a global recession that spurred China to subsidize vehicle sales in remote regions; and the mega-project to relocate Indonesia’s capital to the lowland rainforests of Borneo, where high-modern planning sits alongside traditional ritual beliefs—all are incredibly imaginative and boundary-defying projects,” said Dove.

“All are supported by the interdisciplinary combined doctoral program between the Yale School of the Environment and the Department of Anthropology,” he added. “This recognition is well-deserved.”