These Fieldsights sections feature series of ten or more short-form essays, which bring together scholars across institutions and career stages to weigh in on a shared topic. These pieces are reviewed by the editors of Cultural Anthropology.
Emptiness
This series argues that emptiness is emerging as a concrete spatial-temporal coordinate in the global landscape of capitalism and state power, and a heuristic d... More
An Anthropologist for Dinner
Editors' Foreword In a 2018 Theorizing the Contemporary series for Fieldsights titled, “Speculative Anthropologies,” contributors pondered what “epistemologica... More
Decameron Relived
As anthropologists we often tell stories in our work to introduce a setting, to illustrate a point, to “try to grasp the fragments of the real world” (Fassin 20... More
Geological Anthropology
Geology has become a principal field and framework in the social sciences and humanities in the past decade to understand anthropogenic environmental crises. Th... More
The Psychedelic Revival
Over the last decade, psychedelics—named for their “mind-manifesting” quality—have made a comeback in modern science, public discourse, and cultural significanc... More
Responding to an Unfolding Pandemic: Asian Medicines and Covid-19
Scholars across disciplines working on Asian medicines are currently encountering a multitude of responses to the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease (Covid... More
The Danger of a Single Threat
In a well-known public talk, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie details the danger of letting a single story define a world. Collective experience d... More
Buying Bread in Santiago, Chile: Engaging with Documents in Times of Pandemic
“My application got accepted, I can go to the bakery!” announced my father, excited that he’d be able to go buy bread after one week of strict confinement. He h... More
Quarantine Urban Ecologies
As of April 2020, billions of people around the world are living under differing degrees of physical confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic, reshaping the way... More
Caring for Italy: The Solidarity of Filipino Women Workers
Eight weeks into Italy’s countrywide lockdown, Covid-19 has quickly become more than a question of health. It is a question of livelihood. On March 22, 2020, Gi... More