Society for Cultural Anthropology
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culanth.bsky.social
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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culanth.bsky.social
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.
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
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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
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
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acorsin.bsky.social
Delighted to see this new Theorizing the Contemporary series now published—the second to appear in Spanish, on a wonderfully exciting topic and featuring a brilliant lineup of contributors @culanth.bsky.social

www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...
Vocabulario para la experimentación etnográfica
Este foro sitúa la experimentación como un impulso creciente en antropología que desborda la escritura permeando el análisis, el trabajo de campo...
www.culanth.org
October 23, 2025 at 5:38 PM
culanth.bsky.social
Police reformers have long argued that investing in “improved training” methods and facilities will reduce police violence. Jessica Katzenstein’s ethnography of police training in Maryland shows, however, that reformist methodologies 1/2
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
ICYMI, our latest journal issue is waiting for you! Take a look at the line-up 👇 journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...
September 29, 2025 at 12:13 PM
culanth.bsky.social
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/...
September 26, 2025 at 1:05 PM
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
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
September 25, 2025 at 7:03 PM
culanth.bsky.social
Tomorrow!!
culanth.bsky.social Society for Cultural Anthropology @culanth.bsky.social · Sep 23
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 25, 2025 at 6:16 PM
Reposted by Society for Cultural Anthropology
anthropologyofwork.bsky.social
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
September 23, 2025 at 7:27 PM
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utaustinaaup.bsky.social
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
September 24, 2025 at 1:44 AM
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
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illdottore.bsky.social
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.
September 17, 2025 at 10:33 AM
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chanda.blacksky.app
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September 17, 2025 at 12:45 PM
culanth.bsky.social
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
September 16, 2025 at 8:20 PM
culanth.bsky.social
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
September 16, 2025 at 3:29 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
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lromeranth.bsky.social
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.
September 15, 2025 at 1:25 PM
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dominicboyer.bsky.social
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
September 15, 2025 at 1:02 AM
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anandian.bsky.social
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
September 9, 2025 at 12:52 PM
culanth.bsky.social
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
September 11, 2025 at 4:36 PM