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 Section Editor Janita Van Dyk at [email protected] with any questions. Authors must be current members of the SCA.

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

Redesigning the Annual Conference: Contagion, Carbon, Access, Equity

Redesigning the Annual Conference: Contagion, Carbon, Access, Equity

Spring is a time to look ahead in places like where I live on the East Coast of the United States, as people come out of doors and dormant plants and other crea... More

Rooftop “Recipes” for Relating: A Commentary on Recipes, Ethnography, and Theory

Rooftop “Recipes” for Relating: A Commentary on Recipes, Ethnography, and Theory

I titled my 2018 anthropology MA thesis for The American University in Cairo “Rooftop Recipes for Relating: Ecologies of Humans, Animals, and Life,” but it took... More

Co-authorship as Feminist Writing and Practice

Co-authorship as Feminist Writing and Practice

This collection of essays builds on a 2018 American Anthropological Association roundtable that brought together scholars whose experiences with co-authorship i... More

Rural Development and Alternative Agriculture in Italy: Cultivating the Future by Governing Expectations of Change

Rural Development and Alternative Agriculture in Italy: Cultivating the Future by Governing Expectations of Change

In the wake of the “Friday for Future” demonstrations across the world, as well as the shift in food consumption driven by consumers’ new preference for organic... More

Challenging Art as Cultural Systems . . . for Cliff from the Twenty-First Century: Light Shows, Shadow Plays, Pressure Points

Challenging Art as Cultural Systems . . . for Cliff from the Twenty-First Century: Light Shows, Shadow Plays, Pressure Points

The following piece is a lightly edited version of a lecture delivered as the Clifford Geertz Memorial Lecture at Princeton University on April 25, 2019, by Mic... More

China’s Respiratory Communities

China’s Respiratory Communities

“It’s always busier here when the pollution is bad,” Lili, a community engagement coordinator, told me. Worried I would not be able to find the place, she had w... More

Reimagining the Annual Meeting for an Era of Radical Climate Change

Reimagining the Annual Meeting for an Era of Radical Climate Change

This is less a blog post than a virtual and distributed happening. We bring you the account of a roundtable at the November 2019 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting in Van... More

Bateson Book Forum: Dust of the Zulu

Bateson Book Forum: Dust of the Zulu

Louise Meintjes’s Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics After Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2017) is an ethnography of post-aparteid ngoma dance—a competitive ... More

A Conversation Around Keith Hart: Swimming into the Current of Human Society Through History

A Conversation Around Keith Hart: Swimming into the Current of Human Society Through History

Many of Keith Hart’s students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends have long wanted to express their appreciation for the influence that the man and his idea... More