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.
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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