Member Voices showcases the intellectual vitality of the SCA by featuring the work of its members, as well as archived content from discontinued Fieldsights sections. We publish short pieces which engage contemporary disciplinary conversations within anthropology. We welcome submissions which put current events in conversation with anthropological thought and literature. We encourage creativity and collaboration, aiming to create a forum which propels the discipline in new and exciting directions.
Interview: Patchwork Ethnography
Last year, Member Voices published Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe’s “A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography.” The authors posted their manifesto ah... More
Abayas: Shopping for Floor-Length Convenience, Modesty, and Transgression in Urban Cairo
Typically floor-length, black, and loose, abayas are dresses worn by women of working, middle, and upper classes in Egypt and other regions in the world. Conven... More
Global Protest Movements in 2019: What Do They Teach Us?
Amid an unprecedented sense of global uncertainty, protest movements around the world are opening new horizons. This series, which was assembled before the star... More
Gauging the Toll: Auto-reflexivity, Sexual Violence, and Fieldwork
In Letters from the Field, Margaret Mead (1977) wrote, “The way to do fieldwork is to never come up for air until it is all over.” This quotation demonstrates t... More
Bateson Book Forum: Animal Intimacies
Radhika Govindrajan's Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas (University of Chicago Press, 2018) reconfigures relatedness as a... More
Ethnography is Key for Computer-to-Computer Communication that Enhances Veteran Experiences
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is using ethnographic approaches to designing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that connect more than nine mill... More
A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography
Even prior to the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, “traditional” anthropological fieldwork was in trouble. For some time now, ethnographers have been questioni... More
Assimilation, Dispossession, Erasure, or Refusal
As we reach the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Adivasi lives in India, whether the mainland or Andaman Islands, challenge us to rethink o... More
Social Distancing: A Multispecies Perspective
Social distancing is all the rage. As health officials from the WHO to the CDC actively promote it, this is a good moment to ask what cultural anthropologists c... More
Visualize-ing Air: Data, Icons, and Translations of Smog in Lahore
My city, Lahore, is disappearing. There is nothing figurative about that sentence. I genuinely cannot see my hometown outside my window. The skyline is a haze .... More