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.
Speculative Anthropologies
At the intersection of speculative fiction and anthropology, we find a sense of epistemological humility about the kind of worlds we could or should inhabit. ... More
Archiving Postcolonial Modernity: The Foreign Service Family Slide Show
My father worked for the Indian Foreign Service from 1955 to 1982. During this period our nuclear family lived in several countries across Africa, South America... More
Navigating the Anarchy of Debris: Observing the Loss of Material Sovereignty
This essay is an immersive exploration of an abandoned industrial site, which addresses the degeneration of materials and the imagery of ruination. By visually ... More
Time of Monsters
In her contribution to the 2016 Hot Spots series on liberalism’s contemporary crisis, Andrea Muehlebach aptly and beautifully rendered our current political s... More
From Reciprocity to Relationality: Anthropological Possibilities
Recently, the discipline of anthropology has faced much-needed critique from a chorus of young and dynamic scholars. These critiques emerged in the face of the ... More
The Naturalization of Work
The naturalization of work usually refers to social processes that make a life underpinned by labor seem unquestionable, inevitable, and even desirable. This ki... More
Speaking Volumes
Having engaged with the recent volumetric turn in architecture and political geography, anthropologists are increasingly concerned with realms such as air, oc... More
Repetition and Extraordinary Living in the Gaza Camp
On a winding two-lane road, just a few kilometers southwest of the ancient city of Jarash, a small refugee camp punctuates the Jordanian landscape. Established ... More
Lessons for Liberalism from the “Illiberal East”
The cumulative effects of Brexit, the resurgence of populist politics in Europe, and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States have given r... More
Keywords for Ethnography and Design
This series of short essays explores issues facing ethnographers working on or in collaboration with design as a field. It begins from the proposition that the ... More