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.

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

Stigma and the Logics of Wartime

Covid-19

Stigma and the Logics of Wartime

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service has been subsumed in recent weeks by military metaphors. Health workers are “servicemen” on the “frontline” “battli... More

Impact of Covid-19 on Hijras, a Third-Gender Community in India

Covid-19

Impact of Covid-19 on Hijras, a Third-Gender Community in India

On Tuesday, March 24, 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on the telly that India will put its population of 1.38 billion under lockdown to curb commun... More

Birthing under Investigation

Covid-19

Birthing under Investigation

Covid-19 has ushered in a new grammar of intimacy. Every physical interaction inspires a calculation of risk management. Consequential decisions are made over t... More

"Bigas Hindi Dahas": Covid-19 and State Violence

Covid-19

"Bigas Hindi Dahas": Covid-19 and State Violence

Fifteen days after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte ordered a Luzon-wide “enhanced community quarantine” to curb the spread of Covid-19, the residents of Si... More

Communion in Quarantine: How Liturgical Christian Churches Celebrated Easter

Covid-19

Communion in Quarantine: How Liturgical Christian Churches Celebrated Easter

Good Friday liturgical services in the Armenian Apostolic Church—under normal circumstances—include a grand procession carrying a wooden recreation of the Tomb ... More

Corona Chronotopes

Covid-19

Corona Chronotopes

A viral video produced by a collective of filmmakers based in Milan shows Italians recording messages to their selves of ten days ago. The video illustrates the... More

Hope and History in South Africa’s Pandemic

Covid-19

Hope and History in South Africa’s Pandemic

April 10, 2020. Lockdown Day 15. A few nights ago, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a further two weeks of lockdown, on top of the three we are... More

They Sow the Wind and Reap the Whirlwind (Covid Doubt in St. Petersburg)

Covid-19

They Sow the Wind and Reap the Whirlwind (Covid Doubt in St. Petersburg)

I’m in Russia, vacationing like everyone else: on March 25, 2020, President Putin gave most people a week off work, and then another three weeks. It’s sort of l... More

Lonely Death in Pandemic Times

Covid-19

Lonely Death in Pandemic Times

As anthropologists who research and write about death and trauma, we are troubled by accounts of pandemic-related deaths that fail to account for the intimacies... More

The Comfort of Things? A Meditation from Coronaland

Covid-19

The Comfort of Things? A Meditation from Coronaland

About a decade ago, Daniel Miller (2008) published an ethnography of objects in a London neighborhood, entitling it The Comfort of Things. I leafed through it (... More