iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

What does the shifting climate of gender and sexuality hierarchies reveal about the paradoxes that allow wounds, healing, and violence to coexist in Mexico's gay football scene? Read Max D. López Toledano's "Wounds in Utopia: The Politics of Gay Football in 4T Mexico," in our latest issue.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

What if studying a community meant not decoding what people mean, but protecting their freedom to stay undefined? Check this new article on men who race pigeons in Surabaya's alleys—where being hard to read is survival, and opacity is a shield against a state that sees too much.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

🎙️ A new episode of Anthropod is out! In the second installment of our miniseries on love and anthropology, Yichi Zhang and Dr. Luisa Schneider explore how love is inseparable from the inequalities and insecurities that shape intimate life. www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

As instructors in higher education wrestle with how to design assignments that foster genuine learning in the age of AI, Alyssa Paredes offers a timely reflection on an alternative form of assessment: the oral exam tradition. www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

How did Brexit and COVID-19 reveal the temporal regimes in contemporary England, implicitly reinforcing ageist marginalization and unequal power dynamics among different generational groups? Read Cathrine Degnen’s article in our latest issue: journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/5951

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

New AnthroPod!🔊 In the first of a three-part miniseries, we listen to the stories people tell themselves about themselves: how people come to connect with history, how traditions are carried and transmitted, and how emotional performances help people move forward.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

🚨Have you heard? The new issue of Cultural Anthropology is out now! Featuring eleven original papers with ethnographic insights into topics ranging from evasion & repair to belonging across African, Asian & European geographies. Find all the articles ⤵️ Open Access as always!

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.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Our latest series tackles climate change, human-environment interactions by looking at histories of environmental anthropology: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Dissonant Ecotones, Fractured Strata: Histories of Environmental Anthropology

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

How do queer youth in Zimbabwe reimagine ancestor spirit mediumship, reworking ancestral epistemologies and responding to colonial demonization of both queerness and ancestors? Read Raffaella Taylor-Seymour's article in our latest issue: journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

In our inbox, from @americananthro.bsky.social! Get your submissions in for this fall's AAA meeting in St. Louis! annualmeeting.americananthro.org

American Anthropological Association

unified call for submissions, now open through April 29
accepting all submission types

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Prompt 3. Can kinship be interpeted as structural phenomena?

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Prompt 2. I have three buffalo. What should I do with them?

diagrams of meat distribution among relatives

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Prompt 1. How many types of family and social relationships does marriage involve?

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Teachers, professors, instructors! Our Teaching Tools team is looking to publish short contributions about AI policies and pedagogy—usage, bans, activities, etc. See the full call below:

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.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

In our 2022 #CiteBlackWomen special section, authors discuss Black women scholars' limited visibility in anthropology as well as the means and methods for overcoming erasure. You can read all six essays here: journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

#CiteBlackWomen by Anne-Maria B. Makhulu and Christen A. Smith

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

IKYMI the first issue of Cultural Anthropology of 2026 is now published! It features seven original articles with ethnographic insights into topics ranging from vulnerability, the genetic diaspora, and collective life across African, Asian, and South American geographies. ⤵️

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.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

In our classrooms we are increasingly encountering ecological distress & many of our students seek anthropological thinking as a way of making sense of the everyday challenges of climate change & ecological destruction. Read our Teaching Tools series on the topic ⤵️

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.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

How do geopolitics and distrust of foreign intervention get taken up in vernacular narratives? Our latest issue features this article from Shamim Homayun on Afghan folk tales and beliefs about shrines and antiquities:

Deceptive Sanctity: The Geopolitics of Shrines and Concealed Antiquities in Afghanistan

By Shamim Homayun

Abstract

This article explores a widely circulated legend in Afghanistan in which foreigners are believed to create shrines to conceal buried antiquities. It represents one of several narratives in which locals express mistrust of foreign motivations and geopolitical deception. Building on recent scholarship on speculative undergrounds and conspiracy theories, this article examines how Afghans use folktales to explain obscure events and convey anxieties about literacy, knowledge, and exploitation. Narratives of deception flourish in marginal spaces, such as unknown shrines, which often become sites of doubt, uncertainty, and storytelling. In this legend, foreigners sometimes assume the role of a trickster, reflecting the “intelligent outsider” motif common in Afghan stories that speak to local simplicity and cunning intelligence. This article argues for increased scholarly attention to folktales within the context of conspiracy theories and lived geopolitics, as these stories offer valuable insights into the everyday values, fears, and experiences of people living in unstable environments.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Out now! 📢 The newest issue of Cultural Anthropology is now available open access - please check out the seven articles at the link below:

Cultural Anthropology volume 41, issue 1, February 2026 cover image, which features a photograph of a snake.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

We are happy to announce the new editorial collective of Cultural Anthropology! Bridget Guarasci and Sarah E. Vaughn, Amelia Moore, Eleana Kim and Ryo Morimoto will serve from 2026 to 2029! Journal submissions are open!

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

How did the Covid-19 pandemic lay bare and exacerbate changes in work and labor? Our latest Hot Spots series is a global look at how labor has changed as a social form and object of study.

Where Have All the Workers Gone? Re-Imagining Labor in the Post-Pandemic World
by Jelena Tošić and Agnieszka Pasieka

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

From the archives: "The present and the future demand that we work as insurgents, as fugitives: across real and imagined borders and against pessimisms of the will, but perhaps not the intellect."

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

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Hoping to join anthropology & activism in protest of the U.S. illegalization system, I decided to break the law. On Dec. 10, 2013, 7 activists & I rose early. We chained ourselves together & laid down in the snow outside the Elizabeth Detention Center, a 300-bed facility operated on behalf of ICE.

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.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

RIP German anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who passed away last Tuesday. Fabian was most widely known as the author of "Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object" (1983), a then-radical & still-influential critique of anthropological writing, knowledge-making & fieldwork relations. RIP.

The cover of Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983), only teal and black, with mostly horizontal stripes

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

Fiona McCormack’s essay, “Marine Inequality, Borderization, and the Radical Potential of Kinship,” engages with climate, capitalism, and decolonial critique, examining how marine spaces materialize global inequalities through regimes of extraction, governance, and labor.

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.’

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

In conforming to the official standards of family in the presence of the state while privately engaging in potentially subversive acts of alternative kin-making, new manifestations of kinship form in what Ikeuchi conceptualizes as fugitive kinships.

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.’

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

In “My Neighbor the Gringo,” @aangelini.bsky.social and Gareth A. Jones explore the different meanings of convivência in Rio de Janeiro’s self-built communities transformed into tourist accommodations over recent decades.

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.’

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

Based on fieldwork in London, interviews with global activists, and analysis of corporate materials, Sohini Kar’s essay, “The Financial Activist,” draws on Lauren Berlant’s theory of inconvenience to show how activists learn to live with and inconvenience financial systems,

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.’

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Sending you into the weekend with a new two-part pedagogy piece on Teaching Orientalism, from @girishdaswani.bsky.social and @isisnaucratis.bsky.social:

Part 1: Teaching Orientalism at the Intersection of History and Anthropology by Girish Daswani and Katherine Blouin

Part 2 (Epilogue): Teaching Orientalism in a Time of Genocide and Rising Fascism by Girish Daswani and Katherine Blouin

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

In our journal article "Touched By Deep Time," Lachlan Summers thinks with those who continue to suffer long after living through one of Mexico City's earthquakes. For many, structural volatility continues to reverberate in a sort of earthly seasickness. journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Instead of a wrapping up the year with most-read, most-cited, or any of those metrics, we want to hear a more qualitative review. What were your favorite books or articles that you read this year? The most memorable? The ones that you're thinking about the most?

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

“We sometimes have our heads in the stars, but we really do need to have our feet firmly planted on the ground.” This article shows how astronomers engage different scales from the grounds of southern Africa—like this future (maybe) telescope site in Madagascar:

Several telecommunications satellites and buildings stand amid a field, shot from a car window.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Can't believe it's almost been a year since kicked off 2025 with this series on rethinking facts from Latin America - still relevant, still waiting for you to read: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

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.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Here's one for all the readers! 📚🤓📚📑 Join us for our last SCA Fridays of the year as we reflect on, appreciate, and read from publications from 2025.

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

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

From our latest journal issue, Ina Zharkevich on the invisible slow violence of debt, which haunts Nepali migrants unable to repay loans that they hoped would enable them to pursue life in the U.S.

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.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

In our series on unbuilding, Simón Uribe examines concrete and corrosion from building roads to managing waterways in Colombia—like this retaining wall. Read more here: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Concrete blocks and rebar protrude from a retaining wall.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

What happens when we bring our sketchbooks and sketching practice with us into the field? Or into the classroom?

A notebook with sketches and writing utensils

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Congratulations 🎊 👏 💐 to Leniqueca Welcome for winning this year's SCA Cultural Horizons Prize for her article, "On and In Their Bodies: Masculinist Violence, Criminalization, and Black Womanhood in Trinidad"

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.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Have *you* checked out our latest journal issue? Full table of contents here, articles available open access at journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

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

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

A big shout out to our two Bateson Book Prize 🏆 Honorable Mentions! Congrats to @chloeahmann.bsky.social and Jean Dennison for these phenomenal books from @uchicagopress.bsky.social and @uncpress.bsky.social:

Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore by Chloe Ahmann

Vital Relations: How the Osage Nation Moves Indigenous Nationhood into the Future by Jean Dennison

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Now that #AAA2025 is a wrap—time for an award 🏆 thread! Congratulations @lmesseri.bsky.social for winning this year's Gregory Bateson Book Prize!! Awarded for In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles. More info here @dukepress.bsky.social: dukeupress.edu/in-the-land-...

In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles by Lisa Messeri

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

It's that time of year!! 🎁❄️📚📚🤓 That's right! The latest issue of Cultural Anthropology is out now! Check out all eight new research articles open-access here: journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca

Cultural Anthropology vol 40 issue 4 November 2025

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

Coming up this Saturday! Our annual Culture@Large event—now with New Orleans walking tour! Join historian Rashauna Johnson for an event you won't want to miss this AAA. (Talk open to all, tour requires registration)

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.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

Are you on your way to New Orleans for this year's AAA? Join us, @amethno.bsky.social, and the Society for Visual Anthropology for a multimodal exhibiton and reception on Thursday!

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

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

"Many in the West have dismissed [the war in Sudan] as another African war that does not concern them, but in fact, this war and its genocide are emblematic of the complex, new imperialisms sweeping the globe and taking democracy with them."

Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora issue on Sudan

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

In “Waste Donations,” Kevin Yildirim explores how interdependencies are forged within precarious urban conditions through the auspices of charitable giving. 1/2

Text:

Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025)
Waste Donations: Shopkeeper–Waste Picker Relations in Istanbul and the Limits of Hospitable Giving

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

In “Morally Immunizing Debts,” Ferda Nur Demirci explores how underground mineworkers in Soma, a lignite-coal basin in Turkey’s North Aegean region, forge new approaches to self and intimate other through readily available consumer loans and ongoing financial obligations.

Text:

Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025)
Morally Immunizing Debts: Wage Bank, Gendered Credit Access, and Intimacy in the Soma Coal Basin

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

Lyle Fearnley and Chen Sun's “Green Involution” takes on China's Green Revolution through an ethnographic analysis of young rice scientists caught between fast-paced academic careers and the slow cycle of agricultural research. 1/2

Text: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025)
Green Involution: Mediating Plant Times and Lifetimes in a Chinese Rice Genetics Laboratory

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

such as role-playing and virtual training, inevitably frame threats as omnipresent and prioritize officer survival. Moreover, in so doing, they stage a form of radical presentism that elides the historical and structural conditions of violence. 2/2

Article details mentioned in the image:

Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025)
Articles
Officer Safety Time: Police Scenario Training and Thinking Threat First

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