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Society for Cultural Anthropology

@culanth.bsky.social

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Challenging the boundaries of the discipline since 1983. Account managed by a volunteer team of Contributing Editors. Posts this week by Social Media Team.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · Aug 15

🚨The latest issue of Cultural Anthropology is now published!🚨
Featuring 7 original research articles: from waste+charity & debt+coal in Turkey to earthquake sickness in Mexico & rice science in China; from police training in Maryland to exile in east Africa & industrial waste in India.

The cover of the latest issue of Cultural Anthropology. The title of the journal, black font on light blue, and below it a black and white photo from article author Rishabh Raghavan, showing a two men crouched on a beach examining a catch of small fish, with industrial smoke stacks reflecting on the nighttime water in the distance.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 11d

ICYMI, our latest journal issue is waiting for you! Take a look at the line-up 👇 journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 14d

Reminder that SCA Fridays is today discussing our Unbuilding series - register below and take a look at the new essays here: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 14d

Read Randa Wahbe on dignity and resistance in our series from July: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Dignity as Indigenous Refusal: Palestinian Resistance to the Politics of Death

Almost a decade ago, Palestinian scholar Rana Barakat authored a critical essay challenging theorists of Israeli settler colonialism to reconcept...

www.culanth.org

Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 14d

Amid genocidal violence in Gaza, "the dead body becomes a site of anticolonial resistance for the living, an example of Palestinian refusals to relinquish autonomy over death, and a form of self-determination and agency that is necessary to imagine and achieve liberation."

Yet paying attention to how Palestinians navigate the assaults on their world, which are meant to punish, degrade, and dehumanize them, lets us all see the captive dead body as a site of refusal and anticolonial resistance. Alongside the horrors of death, we have witnessed the haunting images of children collecting and carrying the body parts of their parents in plastic bags, Palestinians reburying the bodies of the dead according to tradition, and writing names on body bags so that they may be identified. These moments of endurance should not be celebrated as resiliency—doing so entails accepting the crazed, colonial-manufactured conditions that Palestinians were miraculously able to survive. Rather, these moments of witnessing the living lend a form of dignity to the dead in its revocation should be understood as a rejection of Israel’s sovereignty and colonization. The dead body becomes a site of anticolonial resistance for the living, an example of Palestinian refusals to relinquish autonomy over death, and a form of self-determination and agency that is necessary to imagine and achieve liberation for both land and its peoples.

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 14d

Instead of maintenance or repair, how might curation offer a lens into the acts of redesign and reformulation that urban residents enact amid an incomplete or unfit built environment? Rebekah Plueckhahn explores curation and unbuilding in Ulaanbaatar: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Curation

This piece focuses on how curation (as opposed to repair and maintenance) characterizes the ways in which residential groups navigate states of i...

www.culanth.org

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 14d

Tomorrow!!

Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 17d

SCA Fridays is BACK!! Please join us this Friday for a discussion launching our recent Theorizing the Contemporary series on *Unbuilding* - details below.

The Society for Cultural Anthropology presents SCA Fridays: A Monthly Series
September 26th, 11am-12pm ET
Theorizing the Contemporary: Unbuilding
series editors and participants including: Constance Smith (U Manchester), Hannah Knox (U Manchester), Maria Salaru (University College London), Penny Harvey (U Manchester) moderated by Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins U)

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Anthropology of Work Review @anthropologyofwork.bsky.social · 16d

A new article from AWR!

In 'Visualizing Transborder Lifeworlds in the Polish-German Border Region' Iepke M. Rijcken, @piotrgoldstein.bsky.social, & Maksymilian Awuah reflect on transborder lifeworlds using photography and sound recording as a research method.

Anthropology of Work Review | AAA Labor Studies Journal | Wiley Online Library

The work of migrants and transborder commuters in rural and peripheralized localities is often considered invisible or, in fact, actively ignored. This multimodal essay reflects on transborder lifewo...

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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AAUP chapter @UT Austin @utaustinaaup.bsky.social · 16d

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

‘Fear and hopelessness’: study finds one in four professors consider leaving US south

Survey by American Association of Professors shows nearly quarter of respondents are switching due to states’s politics

www.theguardian.com

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 16d

journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

On Chainsaws and Acoustic Violence: Sound and Deforestation in Ajusco-Chichinautzin, Mexico | Cultural Anthropology

journal.culanth.org

Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 16d

What does deforestation sound like?

ON CHAINSAWS AND ACOUSTIC VIOLENCE: Sound and Deforestation in Ajusco-Chichinautzin, Mexico by Andrew J. Green, King's College London

It’s August 2022; I’m speaking to Antonio,1 a musician in his sixties from Mexico City, who now lives on the outskirts of the town of Ajusco. We’re sitting outside his house, self-built, surrounded by trees that he planted and maintains. There’s a song-bird—a zorzal, or thrush—sitting on the wooden roof, singing; Antonio calls it Woodstock. Partway through our interview, we hear one neighbor walk outside and begin to rev up a chainsaw—likely preparing to cut down trees nearby. Occasionally residents fell trees for personal use; logging is also carried out at a larger scale by organized commercial groups. At any rate, deforestation is a major problem locally

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 17d

And if you haven't read it yet, check out the Unbuilding series now! Eleven essays on reimagining the built environment: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Unbuilding

Confronting the entangled legacies of failed infrastructures, toxic materials, and compromised futures, this series opens up the concept of unbui...

www.culanth.org

Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 17d

You can register for this week's virtual SCA Fridays event (11am-12pm ET) here: zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: SCA Fridays: A Monthly Series. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

Please join us for the latest edition of SCA Fridays: A Monthly Series A conversation with the editors and contributors of the new SCA Theorizing the Contemporary series on Unbuilding, moderated by ...

zoom.us

Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 17d

SCA Fridays is BACK!! Please join us this Friday for a discussion launching our recent Theorizing the Contemporary series on *Unbuilding* - details below.

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Reposted by Society for Cultural Anthropology

Joseph Howley @illdottore.bsky.social · 23d

The President of Barnard College calls for more controversial speakers like the late Kirk (without citing any of his controversial views), a position at odds with what Barnard colleagues describe as a track record of censoring events and speakers on Palestine. (1/4) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/o...

Colleges and universities have long resisted polarization and monolithic thinking by invoking these commitments to open discussion and inquiry, and we must continue to do so. College campuses must remain places where students are able to ask and grapple with hard questions, especially those that are uncomfortable and even hurtful. Higher education’s role is not to erase conflict but to channel it into dialogue, debate and learning. To do so, educators and students must face ideas we find offensive and speakers whose words cause pain.

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 23d

🧪

Paul Guinnessy @paulguinnessy.bsky.social · 23d

What to see where Trump's administration is destroying the science base? There's an app for that.

UMD Researchers and Colleagues Map the Impact of… | Maryland Today

Open Philanthropy Award to Expand Work Tallying Billions in Terminated Grants, Projected Losses

today.umd.edu

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 23d

Check out this interview with 2024 Bateson Prize winner Naisargi Davé on interspecies relationality, ethics and politics in anthropology, and ethnographic writing! www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

On ‘Indifference’: A Conversation with Naisargi Davé

Naisargi N. Davé won the 2024 Gregory Bateson Book Prize for her book, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being. In awarding the prize, ...

www.culanth.org

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 24d

In our most recent Theorizing the Contemporary series, eleven scholars write about the built environment reimagined—check out Unbuilding here: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Unbuilding

Confronting the entangled legacies of failed infrastructures, toxic materials, and compromised futures, this series opens up the concept of unbui...

www.culanth.org

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 25d

Read more from Nsabimana here: journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

On Exile and Postcolonial Nationhood in Rwanda and Burundi | Cultural Anthropology

journal.culanth.org

Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 25d

In our current journal issue, Natacha Nsabimana explores how repetitive exile—the cycles of political violence and forced expulsion in Rwanda and Burundi—reshape political subjectivity and understandings of the nation.

On Exile and Postcolonial Nationhood in Rwanda and Burundi

By Natacha Nsabimana

https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.06

Abstract

This essay makes an argument about the relationship between political life and the familiarity and repetitiveness of exile in postcolonial Rwanda and Burundi. I argue, first, that the memory, recurrence, and anticipation of displacement constitute central aspects of postcolonial nationhood and life in both countries. With each cycle of forced expulsion, the boundaries of the nation are unmade and remade. Second, this rhythm of repeated collective exile makes for specific forms of political subjectivity and activism that though tethered to the geography of the nation also always exceed it, making exile a constitutive aspect of postcolonial nationhood.

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Louis Römer @lromeranth.bsky.social · 25d

How did "free speech" become a cudgel to silence dissent? My latest in @bostonreview.bsky.social

www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-ri...

In past rounds of moral panics on campus, when “cancel culture” and “trigger warnings” were still the threats du jour, pundits and social media outrage peddlers converged to frame campus protests at large as threats to “free speech.” Responding to the steady churn of outrage-bait framing protesting students as “snowflakes” and “crybullies,” state legislatures across the country passed a flurry of “campus free speech” bills drafted by right-wing think tanks, which expanded the range of anti-protest measures available to college administrators. To be sure, boycotts and deplatforming protests were useful props in these efforts. Still, what made it possible to inflate deplatforming incidents into threats that required expansion of repressive state power was the failure to question a securitized vision of liberty that, since Bush’s “they hate our freedoms” speech, has become increasingly dominant.

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Dominic Boyer @dominicboyer.bsky.social · 25d

New episode of the Cultures of Energy podcast! Hannah Knox joins us to talk about the challenges climate change has posed to the concepts and methods of governing a city. Case in point: Manchester! tinyurl.com/3yax7euh @cymene.bsky.social @culanth.bsky.social @4sweb.bsky.social

Cultures of Energy: 238 - Thinking Like a Climate (feat. Hannah Knox)

Cymene and Dominic talk about screamo music and the band Phish and how you can’t fake the feels on this week’s intro to the podcast. Then (13:07) expert in all things Mancunian, the great and wondrous...

tinyurl.com

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Anand Pandian @anandian.bsky.social · Sep 9

I talked with the Baltimore Sun about my new book, Something Between Us: on American landscapes of isolation, anthropology as a means of unexpected connections, and Baltimore as a space of both enduring inequality and emerging forms of environmental justice.

www.baltimoresun.com/2025/09/08/d...

Hopkins anthropologist traveled America to explore our dividedness. Here’s what he found

Pandian’s new book, “Something Between Us: The Walls of Everyday Life and How to Break Them Down,” chronicles the eight years he spent crisscrossing the United States.

www.baltimoresun.com

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Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · 29d

In this interview, Tanya Jakimow expands on her recent article about elections, examining how elections produced discarded candidates and the role they can fill in democratic communities, as well as the ambivalent effects of gender quotas: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

Discarded Candidates: An Interview with Dr. Tanya Jakimow

In her article “Discarded Candidates: Waste as Metaphor in Local Government Elections in Australia (and Elsewhere),” Tanya Jakimow explores Austr...

www.culanth.org

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m @keptsimple.bsky.social · Aug 27

like so many products to come out of silicon valley in the last decade or so, AI is a legal innovation masquerading as a tech innovation. the legal theory seems to be that AI is entitled to everything but liable for nothing.

Ars Technica @arstechnica.com · Aug 27

AI advocates have warned that if every author in the class action filed a claim, it would "financially ruin" the entire industry.

Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action

Advocates fear such settlements will “financially ruin” the AI industry.

arstechnica.com

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Association for Political and Legal Anthropology / PoLAR journal @polar-journal.bsky.social · Sep 8

Come discuss the future of our journal at a time of transition!APLA/PoLAR want to pursue a publication arrangement with a top university press. But there are many unknowns and challenges.

Please join us Monday, September 15, 3 pm Eastern US time. Hope to see you there!

Town Hall Meeting on the Future of PoLAR (Political and Legal Anthropology Review)

Monday, September 15, 3 pm Eastern US time (9 pm Central European Time ) Zoom link: Meeting ID: 689 4580 6343 The challenge at hand: As the AAA prepares to negotiate its next publishing cont…

politicalandlegalanthro.org

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