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.
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
Guiding Lines
The author guidelines for Postmodern Culture, by its own account one of the first scholarly journals to be published on the Internet, includes the following not... 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
Captivity
In a global order marked, on the one hand, by unfettered mobility for the powerful and their resources, and, on the other, by the strengthening of borders to ke... More
It Can’t Be Revolution: An Interview with Tania Li
What can anthropology add to the larger complex of forces that bring about social change? What follows is a lightly edited transcript of an interview between co... More
The Banality of the Anthropocene
I want to propose an Anthropocene territorialization and a subject-making project in which anthropologists might want to engage. The territory of which I write ... More
Science and the Senses
Scientific inquiry eschews and embraces sensory experience. Yet sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, and movement all inform scientific work. Across disciplines, ... More
On the Travel Ban: An Interview with Darryl Li
On Friday, January 27, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that temporarily bars the entry of refugees into the United States and bans citizens of ... More
What Are You Reading? Responses to the Election and Inauguration
Like many anthropologists, we responded to this postelection moment by turning to books. But confronted by the long lists of readings in crowdsourced syllabi, w... More