Society for Cultural Anthropology

@culanth.bsky.social

1030 Followers 299 Following

Challenging the boundaries of the discipline since 1983. Account managed by a volunteer team of Contributing Editors. Posts this week by Social Media Team.

The cover of the new issue of Cultural Anthropology, includes the journal title on a light blue background and then below it, a black and white photo taken in Taranto’s cemetery in 2019 (photograph by issue author Jasmine Clotilde Pisapia). It depicts an older couple with their backs to the camera, looking on as a worker in a small backhoe digs up a small grave.
Dissonant Ecotones, Fractured Strata: Histories of Environmental Anthropology
American Anthropological Association unified call for submissions, now open through April 29 accepting all submission types
Levi-Strauss' structural rendering of Oedipus Rex
Ambrym diagram of kinship structure
diagrams of meat distribution among relatives
a complex chart from Levi-Strauss
Call for Contributions: AI and the Anthropology Classroom The SCA’s Fieldsights Teaching Tools page seeks short contributions about AI and the anthropology classroom. While there is no shortage of broader reflection about generative AI, in this series, we want to hear from anthropologists about what they actually do (or not) with AI in their teaching. Do you ban computers, pivoting to pen-and-paper only classrooms and handwritten, blue book exams? Use AI together with students and reflect on its limitations and possibilities as a tool? Introduce anthropological approaches to AI through ethnographies of technology? Our goal is to bring together a range of actionable insights and practical teaching strategies. We welcome a diversity of approaches and orientations to AI. Interested contributors please send the below via email to dana.mclachlin@duke.edu by April 1st, 2026: 1) a copy of your class policy or assignment guidelines on AI usage, or an AI-related activity you use with students and 2) a separate 250-300 word reflection on your approach. In your reflection, you can consider the factors that shaped your strategy, assess the success/limitations of your approach, or offer what you might do differently in future classes. Please contact dana.mclachlin@duke.edu if you have any questions.
#CiteBlackWomen by Anne-Maria B. Makhulu and Christen A. Smith
Cover of the new issue of Cultural Anthropology. A light blue header with a black and white picture of a snack in a rocky alcove below it.
Screenshot of the post title and cover photo: A mixed herd of goats and sheep graze below the high passes in the Dhauladhar range of the Himalaya. The shepherds experience ecological stress mediated through the animals that they care for. Photo by Suraj Gupta shared with permission.
Deceptive Sanctity: The Geopolitics of Shrines and Concealed Antiquities in Afghanistan By Shamim Homayun
Cultural Anthropology volume 41, issue 1, February 2026 cover image, which features a photograph of a snake.
Image with the Cultural Anthropology logo and headshots of the new editors: Bridget Guarasci, Sarah E. Vaughn, Amelia Moore, Eleana Kim and Ryo Morimoto, listed along with their university affiliations.
Where Have All the Workers Gone? Re-Imagining Labor in the Post-Pandemic World by Jelena Tošić and Agnieszka Pasieka
Title and cover image of the article, linked in the threaded tweet below: "Fugitive Work: On the Criminal Possibilities of Anthropology" From the Series: From Reciprocity to Relationality: Anthropological Possibilities By Gilberto Rosas
Photo from the post of protestors chained together, all wearing white t-shirts, lying down in the road on top of a light snow, with other protestors with signs in the background and a police car and half a dozen police in the street in front of them. 12/10/2013 is stamped in the corner.
The cover of Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983), only teal and black, with mostly horizontal stripes
Header image from @culanth showing ‘Vol. 40 No. 4 (2025) – Articles’ and the article title in large text: ‘Marine Inequality, Borderization, and the Radical Potential of Kinship.’
Header image from @culanth displaying ‘Vol. 40 No. 4 (2025) – Articles’ and the article title in large text: ‘Fugitive Kinships: Imperial Legacies, Wayward Acts, and Queer Bonds among Filipino Migrants in Japan.’
Header image from @culanth showing ‘Vol. 40 No. 4 (2025) – Articles’ and the article title in large text: ‘My Neighbor the Gringo: Commercialized Intimacies and Newcomer Hospitality in a Rio de Janeiro Favela.’
Header image from @Culanth showing the label ‘Vol. 40 No. 4 (2025) – Articles’ and the article title in large text: ‘The Financial Activist: Shareholding and the Inconvenience of Collective Ownership.’
Part 1: Teaching Orientalism at the Intersection of History and Anthropology by Girish Daswani and Katherine Blouin
a crack in a wall, with dated marks
a stack of open books
Several telecommunications satellites and buildings stand amid a field, shot from a car window.
Necessary but Never Sufficient: Rethinking Facts from Latin America edited by Kregg Hetherington, Andrea Ballestero, and Eden Medina This collection is a reflection on the changing nature of facts, written by authors who do their thinking from Latin America. Conceived during a time where facts were thought to be in crisis in North America, we invited authors to think facts otherwise by starting from situations that never assumed facts to be stable and self-standing in the first place. Instead, what emerges are a series of stories in which facts never walk alone, since they are profoundly embedded in material circumstances. They prop up empires, hint at the absurd, and inspire art. This isn’t to say though that the facts in these stories cease to be tethered to an idealized approach to truth. No matter how stretched and flexible they become, they are continuously shadowed by a normative epistemology, sometimes as a horizon of hope, at other times as a colonial shadow.
Society for Cultural Anthropology presents: SCA Fridays, a monthly series. 2025 Reading Recap. Hosts: Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins) and Jessica Cattelino (UCLA) Friday, December 19, 12pm-1pm ET
Debt and the American Dream: The Specter of Debt and Its Slow Violence among Irregular Migrants from Nepal By Ina Zharkevich Drawing on research with irregular migrants from Nepal who borrow up to $60,000 to reach the United States, this article explores what I call the invisible slow violence of debt. By focusing on how debt is embodied in cases of spirit possession, tension, and dis-ease among migrants and their families—the article demonstrates how debt can become a haunting specter that exhausts the vitality of debtors who cannot pay off loans. By following cases in which debts multiplied and became so huge as to become impossible to repay, I show how unproductive debts became destructive and haunted failed migrants. I contrast these unproductive debts with the debts of migrants who made it to the United States and were, however exploitative, productive of social relations and future possibilities beyond the here and now. Debt not only begs to be returned: it can turn into a specter haunting people, or “eating” them out, leading to bodily affliction, dis-ease, social death, or death itself.
Concrete blocks and rebar protrude from a retaining wall.
a notebook with sketches in it
On and In Their Bodies: Masculinist Violence, Criminalization, and Black Womanhood in Trinidad By Leniqueca A. Welcome In this article, I place in conversation multiple forms of violence against those who occupy the category of poor black woman in Trinidad: the abuse and premature death of these women at the hands of their partners or strangers, the physical and discursive violence against black women by the state, the theft of their children due to inter/intra-community and police violence, and the grief black women are often forced to carry. I show how these different forms of violence converge on and in black women’s bodies and, rather than being distinct in causation and effect, constitute multiple iterations of the ongoing colonialist extraction of black women’s lives for the creation of different forms of masculinist state and economic power. Ultimately, I show how masculine and feminine subjectivities are produced in tandem with racialized positionings through violence and comprehensively document what is gendered violence and how it is embodied.
Articles Heads in the Stars, Feet on the Ground: Scale and Astronomy Initiatives in Southern Africa by Hanna Nieber and Davide Chinigò Debt and the American Dream: The Specter of Debt and Its Slow Violence among Irregular Migrants from Nepal by Ina Zharkevich Marine Inequality, Borderization, and the Radical Potential of Kinship by Fiona McCormack Fugitive Kinships: Imperial Legacies, Wayward Acts, and Queer Bonds among Filipino Migrants in Japan by Suma Ikeuchi The Financial Activist: Shareholding and the Inconvenience of Collective Ownership by Sohini Kar The Revolutionary’s Two Temporalities? Activism, Failure, and Uneventing by Elliott Prasse-Freeman My Neighbor the Gringo: Commercialized Intimacies and Newcomer Hospitality in a Rio de Janeiro Favela by Alessandro M. Angelini and Gareth A. Jones Soil Forensics: Property and the Buried Truth in Medellín by Meghan L. Morris
Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore by Chloe Ahmann
In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles by Lisa Messeri
Cultural Anthropology vol 40 issue 4 November 2025
Culture@Large: Spectral City––Walking New Orleans through Slavery’s Present Pasts with Rashauna Johnson Sat, November 22 | Sheraton – Orpheus (8th fl) (access via elevator only) 4 PM – 5 PM New Orleans was a critical hub for the global circulation of slaves and became a metropolis with an explosion of slave population, who claimed one third of the city's population in the early nineteenth century. Society for Cultural Anthropology presents its flagship event, Culture@Large, to trace the lasting legacies of slavery etched onto the urban landscapes of New Orleans and to reflect upon geographies of unfreedom, which have shaped the city and beyond. This event consists of a lecture (open to public) and walking tour of New Orleans (for registered participants). Rashauna Johnson, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the award-winning author of Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2016), will deliver a lecture entitled "Where Sidewalks Talk: New Orleans and Global Geographies of Unfreedom" at the AAA conference venue. Professor Johnson will then lead a walking tour of New Orleans.
Spectral Remix: A multimodal exhibition featuring over 40 artists and anthropologists. Joint reception 11/20/2025 7:30-9:30PM at Merchant House | Hall 1150 Magazine St. New Orleans, LA 70130 Society for Visual Anthropology, Society for Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnological Society. Music, Media, Art, Food, Cash Bar
Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora issue on Sudan
Text: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025) Waste Donations: Shopkeeper–Waste Picker Relations in Istanbul and the Limits of Hospitable Giving
Text: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025) Morally Immunizing Debts: Wage Bank, Gendered Credit Access, and Intimacy in the Soma Coal Basin
Text: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025) Green Involution: Mediating Plant Times and Lifetimes in a Chinese Rice Genetics Laboratory
Article details mentioned in the image: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025) Articles Officer Safety Time: Police Scenario Training and Thinking Threat First
The image mentions the text: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025) Articles “Do they do our thozhil?”: Toxic Industrialization, Uncertainty, and Refusal in North Chennai
Yet paying attention to how Palestinians navigate the assaults on their world, which are meant to punish, degrade, and dehumanize them, lets us all see the captive dead body as a site of refusal and anticolonial resistance. Alongside the horrors of death, we have witnessed the haunting images of children collecting and carrying the body parts of their parents in plastic bags, Palestinians reburying the bodies of the dead according to tradition, and writing names on body bags so that they may be identified. These moments of endurance should not be celebrated as resiliency—doing so entails accepting the crazed, colonial-manufactured conditions that Palestinians were miraculously able to survive. Rather, these moments of witnessing the living lend a form of dignity to the dead in its revocation should be understood as a rejection of Israel’s sovereignty and colonization. The dead body becomes a site of anticolonial resistance for the living, an example of Palestinian refusals to relinquish autonomy over death, and a form of self-determination and agency that is necessary to imagine and achieve liberation for both land and its peoples.
ON CHAINSAWS AND ACOUSTIC VIOLENCE: Sound and Deforestation in Ajusco-Chichinautzin, Mexico by Andrew J. Green, King's College London It’s August 2022; I’m speaking to Antonio,1 a musician in his sixties from Mexico City, who now lives on the outskirts of the town of Ajusco. We’re sitting outside his house, self-built, surrounded by trees that he planted and maintains. There’s a song-bird—a zorzal, or thrush—sitting on the wooden roof, singing; Antonio calls it Woodstock. Partway through our interview, we hear one neighbor walk outside and begin to rev up a chainsaw—likely preparing to cut down trees nearby. Occasionally residents fell trees for personal use; logging is also carried out at a larger scale by organized commercial groups. At any rate, deforestation is a major problem locally
The Society for Cultural Anthropology presents SCA Fridays: A Monthly Series September 26th, 11am-12pm ET Theorizing the Contemporary: Unbuilding series editors and participants including: Constance Smith (U Manchester), Hannah Knox (U Manchester), Maria Salaru (University College London), Penny Harvey (U Manchester) moderated by Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins U)
On Exile and Postcolonial Nationhood in Rwanda and Burundi By Natacha Nsabimana https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.06 Abstract This essay makes an argument about the relationship between political life and the familiarity and repetitiveness of exile in postcolonial Rwanda and Burundi. I argue, first, that the memory, recurrence, and anticipation of displacement constitute central aspects of postcolonial nationhood and life in both countries. With each cycle of forced expulsion, the boundaries of the nation are unmade and remade. Second, this rhythm of repeated collective exile makes for specific forms of political subjectivity and activism that though tethered to the geography of the nation also always exceed it, making exile a constitutive aspect of postcolonial nationhood.
a crack and hole appear on a wall. they have been annotated by pencil with dates.
The reducción was founded on a transactional wager, wherein Indigenous life was to be preserved from genocide conditionally. The strike violated an implicit settler contract that proposed concentrated labor as an alternative to extermination. Napalpí workers demanded not just livelihoods, but autonomous movement in their homelands. In abnegating their use-value to the settler state, they negated the original terms of their right to life. Exterminability is a form of racism (Hage 2016). Yet not all racisms are the same, nor are all colonial situations alike. In a settler-colonial case like Napalpí, Indigenous exterminability is foremost about land, even when targeted at striking workers. Labor may be touted as a humane alternative to genocide (as many Latin American histories attest). Yet the design of the reducción worked towards Indigenous exterminability as a predetermined infrastructure. Under a settler wager like this, it takes only the flip of a switch—in this case a strike—to convert the exploited into the exterminated.
Students cross a university quad
Waste Donations: Shopkeeper–Waste Picker Relations in Istanbul and the Limits of Hospitable Giving https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.01 Kevin Yildirim Morally Immunizing Debts: Wage Bank, Gendered Credit Access, and Intimacy in the Soma Coal Basin https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.02 Ferda Nur Demirci Green Involution: Mediating Plant Times and Lifetimes in a Chinese Rice Genetics Laboratory https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.03 Lyle Fearnley Chen Sun Touched by Deep Time: Earthquake Sickness in Mexico City https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.04 Lachlan Summers Officer Safety Time: Police Scenario Training and Thinking Threat First https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.05 Jessica Katzenstein On Exile and Postcolonial Nationhood in Rwanda and Burundi https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.06 Natacha Nsabimana “Do they do our thozhil?”: Toxic Industrialization, Uncertainty, and Refusal in North Chennai https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.07 Rishabh Raghavan
Screenshot of a headline and many joking tweet responses: Disney Reportedly Planning Full Reboot of the INDIANA JONES Headline: It looks like Indiana Jones might actually be headed for the reboot treatment. According to a recent report from Disinsider, Disney and ... Michael A. Levin @michaelalevin.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE POST TENURE REVIEW Pi @therationalpi.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE RESEARCH ETHICS BOARD Melissa Stewart @lissajostewart.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE LOST NEH GRANTS Ken MacLennan @historiken.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE ANTIQUITIES EXPORT PERMITTING PROCESS Meredith Rose @mrose.ink INDIANA JONES AND THE INTERMINABLE FACULTY MEETING Sarah Fackrell @design-law.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE NEW COURSE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE Maggie Koerth @maggiek.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE CURSORY EXCAVATION TO MAKE WAY FOR A NEW INTERSTATE ON-RAMP
The cover of the latest issue of Cultural Anthropology. The title of the journal, black font on light blue, and below it a black and white photo from article author Rishabh Raghavan, showing a two men crouched on a beach examining a catch of small fish, with industrial smoke stacks reflecting on the nighttime water in the distance.