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.

How to Submit

View the submission guidelines. Please email Member Voices Contributing Editor Riddhi Pandey at [email protected] with any questions. Authors must be current members of the SCA.

Interview: Patchwork Ethnography

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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: 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

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