Theorizing the Contemporary

Created in 2012, Theorizing the Contemporary seeks to extend the horizon of social analysis in new directions, including challenges to what constitutes "theory" in the first place. Theorizing the Contemporary series are reviewed by the editors of Cultural Anthropology; series editors must be current members of the SCA.

How to Submit

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

Geological Anthropology

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

Green Capitalism and Its Others

Green Capitalism and Its Others

Whither the Earth? From the Amazon fires to the Arctic melt, School Strikes for Climate and an American Anthropological Association meeting focused on the topic... More

Pathways

Pathways

(Con traducción al español)How does personhood survive after death? In this collection of essays, written in light of Thomas Abercrombie’s sudden and premature ... More

Topology as Method

Topology as Method

Topology is a branch of mathematics that studies spaces that remain continuously invariant through distortion. In doing so, it offers tools for the study of the... More

An Otherwise Anthropology

An Otherwise Anthropology

In recent years, the concept of the otherwise has been tracking across anthropology to frame political potentialities that are emerging, often drawing on phenom... More

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements

In the 150 years since its construction by the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, the periodic table of chemical elements has become both a ubiquitous and iconic... More

Embodied Ecologies

Embodied Ecologies

The materiality of human bodies at the smallest scales—genes, microbes, chemicals, hormones—is increasingly being understood as both responsive to broader envir... More

Temporary Possession

Temporary Possession

Around the world, experiences of ownership are turning toward temporary and contingent forms of possession. This Theorizing the Contemporary series explores tem... More

Speculative Anthropologies

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

Time of Monsters

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