Editors’ Forum

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.

How to Submit

View the submission guidelines. Please email [email protected] with any questions.

Art and Ethnographic Forms in Dark Times

Theorizing the Contemporary

Art and Ethnographic Forms in Dark Times

What are the ethnographic arts through which we know and express the worlds we encounter? How does ethnographic experience become translated into/as art? How ca... More

Firestorm: Critical Approaches to Forest Death and Life

Hot Spots

Firestorm: Critical Approaches to Forest Death and Life

The earth is aflame. The now annual fires—in Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, the United States, and beyond—are the most visible way that forests are dying. Forest... More

Technology and Anthropological Ways of Knowing

Hot Spots

Technology and Anthropological Ways of Knowing

In this series, we ask anthropologists working in tech to reflect on the place of anthropology in their quotidian practices and professional lives. We use the d... More

3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan: Ten Years Later

Hot Spots

3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan: Ten Years Later

In July 2011, three months after the Tohoku tsunami and subsequent nuclear reactor destabilization, we published the first Hot Spot series on the Society for Cu... More

American Fascism

Hot Spots

American Fascism

“Every age has its own fascism,” Primo Levi famously wrote in his essay, “A Past We Thought Would Never Return.” “And we see the warning signs wherever the conc... More

Majoritarian Politics in South Asia

Hot Spots

Majoritarian Politics in South Asia

The last decade has been witness to the seemingly meteoric rise and consolidation of a wide range of majoritarian and authoritarian political regimes across Sou... More

Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction

Theorizing the Contemporary

Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction

The rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus reminds us, once more, of the porous boundaries between species, and the social and ecological disasters of growth-driv... More

Emptiness

Theorizing the Contemporary

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

Fictions

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

Fictions

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