After the words “America” and “United States,” President Donald Trump mentioned sovereignty more than any other topic in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017. Trump linked sovereignty to global prosperity,... More
Has hope become a word that betrays you? In an escalating “war on words” (van Eekelen et al. 2004, 1), has hope bulldozed over our dreams? During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, “hope” became yet another vacuous political slogan... More
This collection gathers five articles previously published in Cultural Anthropology, by Hayder Al-Mohammad, Kenneth George, Naveeda Khan, Arzoo Osanloo, and Carolyn Rouse and Janet Hoskins. The collection also includes interviews... More
Recent trends in social theory have placed great importance on affect for both analytic and political reasons, but the term is somewhat vague and ambiguous. For example, it has been described as felt bodily intensity that is:... More
Infrastructures are the systems that enable circulation of goods, knowledge, meaning, people, and power. In Splintering Urbanism (2001), Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin argue that we can see the role of public... More
In a 2001 themed issue of Cultural Anthropology, "Anthropology and/in/of Science," editor Daniel Segal noted a scarcity of ethnographically grounded accounts of the practices of scientists. In this collection we aim to... More
What is the work that stories do? Our Curated Collection on literature, writing, and anthropology seeks to address this question by creating a space in which fiction and anthropology converge, collide, and collapse into one another.... More
Digital technology has been celebrated in recent years for its capacity to foment political change, as evidenced by the role of social media networks in the Arab Spring, and spur development, as indicated by the popularity of information... More
In the preface to the inaugural issue of Subaltern Studies, published in 1982, Indian historian Ranajit Guha called for more academic work on subaltern themes and critiques of elitism. Almost 30 years later, his call has been answered in... More
What roles might the concept of ritual play in the study of contemporary society and culture? As one of the founding concepts of our discipline, ritual has long been a cornerstone of anthropological thought: from the works of Émile Durkheim through... More
This virtual issue of Cultural Anthropology engages longstanding anthropological themes such as politics, religion, and consumption through the prism of youth. By selecting articles that are meant to generate discussions of broad... More
Cultural Anthropology is excited to present six essays that it has published in recent years as part of its third virtual issue for 2010 on the theme of Cosmopolitanism. From belly-dancing in contemporary Istanbul to blood donation... More
We encounter water no matter where we live and work. It trickles across forest floors and consolidates in rivers. It collects behind dams, runs under cities, and is diverted into irrigation systems. It is pumped from wells and travels in plastic... More
In response to the increasing encounters between global commodities and local markets, the recent economic crisis that has affected millions globally, the collapse of major financial institutions, and the escalating volatility of the... More
In response to the often-deafening debates concerning the marriage equality movement in the US, clandestine polygamous marriages in Italy, transnational adoptions, and expanding global access to medicalized reproduction, this Curated Collection... More
From terrorism to swine flu to the current economic crisis, issues of security, broadly defined and experienced, seem to be taking center stage in our contemporary moment. In light of this, Cultural Anthropology has decided to focus a... More
Precarity is an emerging abandonment that pushes us away from a livable life. In a growing body of scholarship centered on social marginalization, the concept of precarity has come to name “the politically induced condition in which certain... More
