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.
Reflections on Ethnographic Writing Today
Serving as the jury for this year’s Gregory Bateson Book Prize gave the four of us a remarkable opportunity to take the pulse of the discipline. It provided a r... More
Race-ing Fargo
On July 25, 2017, what started as a parking dispute in Fargo, North Dakota turned into a verbal altercation between Amber Hensley, a white woman from the small ... More
The Household
How are the worlds in which we live shaped by the ways that households are thought and made? How does the scale of the household shape the spatial and temporal ... More
Activist Mobilities and the Viacrucis Migrant Caravan
As we arrive at the first checkpoint in Huehuetan, Chiapas, everyone seems to hold their breath, uncertain of how the authorities are going to respond when a gr... More
Fieldnote as Political Weapon: James Comey’s Ethnographic Turn?
Watching the testimony of former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey live on television, I came to realize—one more time and with politic... More
Proficiency
When it comes to the study of practice, one of the main challenges for ethnographers is often the question of their own proficiency. If it is widely regarded a ... More
Bateson Book Forum: The Mushroom at the End of the World
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s beautifully written ethnography The Mushroom at the End of the World evokes the forms of life that emerge in the ruins and fissures—the ... More
Race and the Good Liberal
The black man is perfect, cried James Baldwin. Surely he knew the pitch of his prose. Those like me—the middlebrow intellectual, proud reader of Black thought—t... More
Reflections on a Multimodal Experiment: On the Golden Snail Opera
At a snail’s pace . . . how long can we humans live that way—or if not live, at least look at a patch of silty ground under the water of a rice paddy? There’s a... More
