About the Society

The Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, constitutes a continuing effort to think expansively about the anthropological endeavor. That is, to explore how different people inhabit the imponderabilia of everyday life, to situate how they navigate conditions of both possibility and constraint, and to remain both ethnographically engaged and theoretically pioneering. Founded in the 1980s to highlight a concern for culture and to foster interdisciplinary connections, the Society is dedicated to interrogating and challenging the boundaries of the discipline. This includes experimental, multimedia, and engaged forms of scholarship, as well as the increasing recognition of a wider pluriverse of beings both human and nonhuman.

As the sponsor of the journal Cultural Anthropology, the Society strives to foster the highest standards of scholarship, analysis, and writing, and understand the world across and alongside the wide horizon of human experience. We encourage our members to think deeply, reassess critically, and engage politically in enacting the anthropological enterprise. As a collective project, our ethos remains resolutely plural and conceptually open, accommodating a diverse range of subjects, styles, and theoretical perspectives.

Beyond the journal, the Society for Cultural Anthropology supports an array of experimental initiatives and digital forums. We also host a biennial conference and award prizes to scholarly work that resonates with our vision for anthropology: one that is responsive to shifts in times, multiple ways of being, and contested understandings within the academy and beyond. We welcome new points of view and approaches to a world forever in a state of becoming.