Society for Cultural Anthropology
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culanth.bsky.social
Society for Cultural Anthropology
@culanth.bsky.social
820 followers 240 following 120 posts
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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culanth.bsky.social
A big shout out to our two Bateson Book Prize 🏆 Honorable Mentions! Congrats to @chloeahmann.bsky.social and Jean Dennison for these phenomenal books from @uchicagopress.bsky.social and @uncpress.bsky.social:
Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore by Chloe Ahmann Vital Relations: How the Osage Nation Moves Indigenous Nationhood into the Future by Jean Dennison
November 25, 2025 at 11:01 PM
culanth.bsky.social
Now that #AAA2025 is a wrap—time for an award 🏆 thread! Congratulations @lmesseri.bsky.social for winning this year's Gregory Bateson Book Prize!! Awarded for In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles. More info here @dukepress.bsky.social: dukeupress.edu/in-the-land-...
In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles by Lisa Messeri
November 24, 2025 at 10:19 PM
culanth.bsky.social
It's that time of year!! 🎁❄️📚📚🤓
That's right! The latest issue of Cultural Anthropology is out now! Check out all eight new research articles open-access here: journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca
Cultural Anthropology vol 40 issue 4 November 2025
November 18, 2025 at 8:53 PM
culanth.bsky.social
Coming up this Saturday! Our annual Culture@Large event—now with New Orleans walking tour! Join historian Rashauna Johnson for an event you won't want to miss this AAA. (Talk open to all, tour requires registration)
Culture@Large: Spectral City––Walking New Orleans through Slavery’s Present Pasts with Rashauna Johnson Sat, November 22 | Sheraton – Orpheus (8th fl) (access via elevator only) 4 PM – 5 PM New Orleans was a critical hub for the global circulation of slaves and became a metropolis with an explosion of slave population, who claimed one third of the city's population in the early nineteenth century. Society for Cultural Anthropology presents its flagship event, Culture@Large, to trace the lasting legacies of slavery etched onto the urban landscapes of New Orleans and to reflect upon geographies of unfreedom, which have shaped the city and beyond. This event consists of a lecture (open to public) and walking tour of New Orleans (for registered participants). Rashauna Johnson, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the award-winning author of Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2016), will deliver a lecture entitled "Where Sidewalks Talk: New Orleans and Global Geographies of Unfreedom" at the AAA conference venue. Professor Johnson will then lead a walking tour of New Orleans.
November 17, 2025 at 7:58 PM
culanth.bsky.social
Are you on your way to New Orleans for this year's AAA? Join us, @amethno.bsky.social, and the Society for Visual Anthropology for a multimodal exhibiton and reception on Thursday!
Spectral Remix: A multimodal exhibition featuring over 40 artists and anthropologists. Joint reception 11/20/2025 7:30-9:30PM at Merchant House | Hall 1150 Magazine St. New Orleans, LA 70130 Society for Visual Anthropology, Society for Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnological Society. Music, Media, Art, Food, Cash Bar
November 17, 2025 at 1:15 PM
culanth.bsky.social
"Many in the West have dismissed [the war in Sudan] as another African war that does not concern them, but in fact, this war and its genocide are emblematic of the complex, new imperialisms sweeping the globe and taking democracy with them."
Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora issue on Sudan
November 12, 2025 at 5:53 PM
culanth.bsky.social
In “Waste Donations,” Kevin Yildirim explores how interdependencies are forged within precarious urban conditions through the auspices of charitable giving. 1/2
Text: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025) Waste Donations: Shopkeeper–Waste Picker Relations in Istanbul and the Limits of Hospitable Giving
October 26, 2025 at 1:57 PM
culanth.bsky.social
In “Morally Immunizing Debts,” Ferda Nur Demirci explores how underground mineworkers in Soma, a lignite-coal basin in Turkey’s North Aegean region, forge new approaches to self and intimate other through readily available consumer loans and ongoing financial obligations.
Text: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025) Morally Immunizing Debts: Wage Bank, Gendered Credit Access, and Intimacy in the Soma Coal Basin
October 25, 2025 at 11:45 AM
culanth.bsky.social
Lyle Fearnley and Chen Sun's “Green Involution” takes on China's Green Revolution through an ethnographic analysis of young rice scientists caught between fast-paced academic careers and the slow cycle of agricultural research. 1/2
Text: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025) Green Involution: Mediating Plant Times and Lifetimes in a Chinese Rice Genetics Laboratory
October 25, 2025 at 11:42 AM
culanth.bsky.social
such as role-playing and virtual training, inevitably frame threats as omnipresent and prioritize officer survival. Moreover, in so doing, they stage a form of radical presentism that elides the historical and structural conditions of violence. 2/2
Article details mentioned in the image: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025) Articles Officer Safety Time: Police Scenario Training and Thinking Threat First
October 24, 2025 at 11:29 AM
culanth.bsky.social
This article by Rishabh Raghavan examines how artisanal fishermen in Ennore, Chennai, use acts of refusal, both individual and collective, to cope with and contest the toxic effects of industrial pollution. Read here: journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...
The image mentions the text: Vol. 40 No. 3 (2025) Articles “Do they do our thozhil?”: Toxic Industrialization, Uncertainty, and Refusal in North Chennai
October 24, 2025 at 11:20 AM
culanth.bsky.social
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.
September 25, 2025 at 7:43 PM
culanth.bsky.social
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
September 24, 2025 at 1:28 PM
culanth.bsky.social
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)
September 23, 2025 at 2:26 PM
culanth.bsky.social
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.
September 15, 2025 at 5:00 PM
culanth.bsky.social
Often dismissed as suffering a particular form of PTSD, people who have survived and are continually affected by Mexico City's earthquakes sense the material shifts in the city and its geology. For Elena, who marks the growing cracks in her apartment, the earthquake never ended.
a crack and hole appear on a wall. they have been annotated by pencil with dates.
August 28, 2025 at 9:34 PM
culanth.bsky.social
In 1924, the Argentine state massacred hundreds of Indigenous workers. A century later, memories of colonial violence remain. As Tamar Blickstein describes in our series on settler colonialism, colonial policy rendered Qom and Moqoit people exterminable.
The reducción was founded on a transactional wager, wherein Indigenous life was to be preserved from genocide conditionally. The strike violated an implicit settler contract that proposed concentrated labor as an alternative to extermination. Napalpí workers demanded not just livelihoods, but autonomous movement in their homelands. In abnegating their use-value to the settler state, they negated the original terms of their right to life. Exterminability is a form of racism (Hage 2016). Yet not all racisms are the same, nor are all colonial situations alike. In a settler-colonial case like Napalpí, Indigenous exterminability is foremost about land, even when targeted at striking workers. Labor may be touted as a humane alternative to genocide (as many Latin American histories attest). Yet the design of the reducción worked towards Indigenous exterminability as a predetermined infrastructure. Under a settler wager like this, it takes only the flip of a switch—in this case a strike—to convert the exploited into the exterminated.
August 27, 2025 at 4:47 PM
culanth.bsky.social
Hello from @skort.bsky.social 👋 starting another school year over here. If you're also gearing up for a new term, we're sending curious, critical, compassionate vibes to you on your campus.
Students cross a university quad
August 25, 2025 at 8:35 PM
culanth.bsky.social
Check out the seven articles in our latest journal issue! Each one a guaranteed banger, each one open access. Give them a read here: journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...
Waste Donations: Shopkeeper–Waste Picker Relations in Istanbul and the Limits of Hospitable Giving https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.01 Kevin Yildirim Morally Immunizing Debts: Wage Bank, Gendered Credit Access, and Intimacy in the Soma Coal Basin https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.02 Ferda Nur Demirci Green Involution: Mediating Plant Times and Lifetimes in a Chinese Rice Genetics Laboratory https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.03 Lyle Fearnley Chen Sun Touched by Deep Time: Earthquake Sickness in Mexico City https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.04 Lachlan Summers Officer Safety Time: Police Scenario Training and Thinking Threat First https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.05 Jessica Katzenstein On Exile and Postcolonial Nationhood in Rwanda and Burundi https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.06 Natacha Nsabimana “Do they do our thozhil?”: Toxic Industrialization, Uncertainty, and Refusal in North Chennai https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.07 Rishabh Raghavan
August 22, 2025 at 5:17 PM
culanth.bsky.social
INDIANA JONES AND THE UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION CAPITULATING TO EVERY DEMAND OF A REACTIONARY FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
Screenshot of a headline and many joking tweet responses: Disney Reportedly Planning Full Reboot of the INDIANA JONES Headline: It looks like Indiana Jones might actually be headed for the reboot treatment. According to a recent report from Disinsider, Disney and ... Michael A. Levin @michaelalevin.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE POST TENURE REVIEW Pi @therationalpi.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE RESEARCH ETHICS BOARD Melissa Stewart @lissajostewart.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE LOST NEH GRANTS Ken MacLennan @historiken.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE ANTIQUITIES EXPORT PERMITTING PROCESS Meredith Rose @mrose.ink INDIANA JONES AND THE INTERMINABLE FACULTY MEETING Sarah Fackrell @design-law.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE NEW COURSE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE Maggie Koerth @maggiek.bsky.social INDIANA JONES AND THE CURSORY EXCAVATION TO MAKE WAY FOR A NEW INTERSTATE ON-RAMP
August 18, 2025 at 7:16 PM
culanth.bsky.social
🚨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.
August 15, 2025 at 9:00 PM
culanth.bsky.social
Over the last eight years, I have crisscrossed the United States as an anthropologist, trying to make sense of why the rifts in our national culture run so deep.
@culanth.bsky.social president @anandian.bsky.social in The Guardian
Title of the article in black with author name in orange. To the left a small orange, black and beige drawing of a large house behind three gates.
August 9, 2025 at 9:50 PM
culanth.bsky.social
As syllabi are being put together, don't miss this Teaching Tools series on "Teaching Ecological Distress" compiled by @alicerudge.bsky.social @soasanthro.bsky.social et al.

A toolkit with guided readings & activist/pedagogical tools for teaching ecological distress across contexts.
Screen shot of the series title in orange, and below the series image, depicting "A mixed herd of goats and sheep graze below the high passes in the Dhauladhar range of the Himalaya. The shepherds experience ecological stress mediated through the animals that they care for. Photo by Suraj Gupta shared with permission." Screen shot of some text from the linked intro: "In our classrooms we are increasingly encountering ecological distress, and many of our students seek anthropological thinking as a way of making sense of the everyday challenges of climate change and ecological destruction. As a collective, we see it as our responsibility to encourage critical inquiry about the ways in which ecological distress is a shared planetary problem, and the ways in which it is unevenly distributed, or incommensurable, across bodies, minds, landscapes, and within and between pedagogical spaces. How might old and new anthropological insights shape how we respond to and understand—even help to repair—ecological distress? The entries within this collection aim to encourage students—in and outside the university—to think through these kinds of questions. Our diverse collective of scholars and practitioners are based across the United Kingdom, the United States, Malaysia, India, Australia, Germany, & New Zealand, where the contours of ecological distress take distinct forms."
August 8, 2025 at 5:20 PM
culanth.bsky.social
Recent attempts to shift attention from the seemingly coherent object of infrastructure to attend to a more unruly ecology reveal infrastructure’s entanglement with broader systematic imbalances—of climate, economy & culture.
— @hannahcknox.bsky.social & Itay Noy in our new series "Unbuilding"
Screen shot of the post title, "Balance," in orange, and below the series image, a residential building that seems like its kept up on one vertical half and falling apart on the other.
August 7, 2025 at 9:16 PM
culanth.bsky.social
From our Settler Colonialism series University of Chicago anthropology professor Teresa Montoya:
In Diné Bikéyah as well as Palestine, water continues to be a precious resource to be controlled physically such as through built infrastructures or even legally.
Screen shot of the post title in orange, "Scorched-Earth, Poisoned Water: Settler Violence from Diné Bikéyah to Palestine," and below is the series image, a flag from a Palestine solidarity encampment in Copenhagen, Denmark: a white flag, with three fists in black, white and green emerging from a red tent.
August 6, 2025 at 9:15 PM