Society for Cultural Anthropology
@culanth
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Challenging the boundaries of the discipline since 1983. Account managed by a volunteer team of Contributing Editors. Tweets this week by the Social Media Team.
Joined April 2010
Check out the cover and contents for our latest journal issue! All seven articles are available open access here:
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The posting: "Scholars from diverse backgrounds are encouraged to apply.".The department:
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SO HE WENT TO THESE ISLANDS & INVENTED THIS WHOLE NEW METHOD FOR ANTHROPOLOGY WHERE YOU GOTTA BE IN ONE PLACE FOR A WHOLE YEAR & 'GRASP THE NATIVE'S POINT OF VIEW' & THAT'S COOL BUT THE MAIN REASON HE WAS STUCK THERE A WHOLE YEAR WAS WWI & HE WAS ACTUALLY REALLY RACIST IN HIS NO-
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Good morning. All research is political. Have a great day everyone! ☀️.
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Academics who are not politically engaged through their work are tacitly endorsing the status quo.
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anthropologists 👀.
I love sentimental people. You see meaning everywhere? Everything matters? You're absolutely right. It does. And we should cry about it.
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The terrible, unethical work in That Paper can't overshadow the important research scholars are doing on sex and sexuality. Let's spotlight them instead–please add good works in #SexualityStudies to this thread!. 🧵.
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My Neck, My Back, My Posture Gets Payback: An Auto-Ethnography of Aging and Desk Work in an Era of Telecommuting.
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We are heartbroken to hear of the passing of @davidgraeber and our hearts go out to his family and loved ones. This is an enormous loss to anthropology and the world.
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Obligatory end of year question: what was the best anthropology book or article you read this year? We want to hear about your reads! Thought-provoking, engaging, well-written, or timely.
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"Radical Ethnography is not just about re-search, it is about re-building—acting to redress/mitigate the harm done. This is especially important when dealing with colonized populations", writes Rosalina Diaz.
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@QRJCardiff Here's some qualitative research for you: this article is universally reviled as terrible work that could be weaponised to delegitimise whole fields of study and methods of research. It is especially negligent while queer and trans people worldwide are under sustained attack.
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Yes.
Can fungus provide a political vision?
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Remember how the #SpotifyWrapped story format was invented by a 21-year old Black design intern named Jewel Ham who presented the idea on her last day & then never really got credit for it? We remember. Anyway, we love year-end lists at SCA. What were you favorites this year?.
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What might a speculative anthropology look like? Check out this collection of essays on the intersection between speculative fiction and anthropology.
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We stand in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation and against Israeli colonization. Here, we have curated CA articles about Palestine/Israel over the last 30+ years:
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RIP Laurent Berlant, a social theorist and cultural critic who gave so much to the way we think about and understand the world. They will be missed.
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From our Teaching Tools section the 'Syllabus Archive: Black Anthropology' brings together a range of syllabi concerned with race and anthropology, with a particular focus on Blackness.
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“Transgender and gender diverse identities have long existed, and we are committed to upholding the value and dignity of transgender people.” .
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Good morning to everyone with *write syllabus* still on their to-do list. May we suggest Teaching Ethnographic Research Methods by Erin Gould (@erin_gould4) from our Syllabus Archive. Read it here: .
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Anthropology should definitely be used to make policy. It should be used along with sociology, and climate science, and critical race theory, and biology, and health science, and all the disciplines that work on issues that involve the same people/things affected by policy.
@culanth Anthropology should not be used to make policy. Just bc you’re an expert in your field doesn’t mean anything when making policy which takes into account multiple facets.
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A new post by @ZalUIbaorimi, entitled "Jawn Theory". "Jawn Theory calls on itself: it disrupts and haunts itself through analytics of Black gender and sexuality. The charge is to haunt more often, more frequently.".
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🚨Submission Alert - June 15, 2023🚨. If your work problematizes the link between the ethnographer’s identity & their work, the category of “native” in anthropology, the epistemological relevance of Others, & related themes, consider submitting a piece.
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Sections of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) - which includes @culanth board - condemn Israel’s ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinian people, most visible in its unprecedented bombardment of Gaza since October 7, 2023. Full statement:.
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Planning your courses for fall? Our #SyllabusArchive project is a resource for those who are working on designing a new class, updating a previously created class, or updating their course materials!. Here’s a thread on recent contributions 🧵:.
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Mark ur calendars: this 2/5 event features Keguro Macharia (@keguro_), Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (@ZIJackson), & Rinaldo Walcott (@blacklikewho) in conversation with Christina Sharpe (@hystericalblkns) to consider the possibilities and limits of Black freedom:
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Suppose it's about time we reveal that the Society for Cultural Anthropology is actually just nine graduate students in a tweed jacket 🫣.
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Just published! Ten more essays on Palestine and what Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza demands of us all — read Anthropology in a Time of Genocide now, here:
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"Good question, Zoe—but I'd put it differently. As Gramsci wrote, cultural hegemony. "
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Grad programs be like "the PhD is fully funded"
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Our yearly Public Service Announcement on the dangers of underage anthropology. #anthrotwitter
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You know, writer’s not even my job.And it is NOT researcher, which is a common misconception. ‘Cause, actually, my job…it’s just email.
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📢The Society for Cultural Anthropology is now recruiting Contributing Editors for all teams!!!📢.We invite you to join a team of graduate students & early career scholars for a 2-year cycle of writing, editing, collaborating on the digital content of 1/3.
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This new Curated Collection from the editors of the Cultural Anthropology journal shares their statement & collects past CulAnth articles under the topic "War on Palestine," incl. those that pre-date the journal's move to open access—now free for 3 months.
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Hi #AnthroTwitter!.Wash your hands, don't travel, practice #SelfIsolating or #SelfQuarantine and, like a good anthropologist, question the logic of neoliberal individualistic pandemic prevention while challenging the meaning of #SocialDistancing in an inherently relational world!
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"The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safer for human differences" - Ruth Benedict.
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"Ethnographies encapsulate a slow information flow that begins with cultivating trust & relationships. Furthermore, ethnographies also shed light on the fact that limiting one’s scope of inquiry allows room to better understand things in their context. ".
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What is a Classroom For? Teaching the Anthropology of Palestine."I tell my students these stories because I want them to understand what it feels like to be in a place they have never been allowed to imagine before.".–Maura Finkelstein in Teaching Tools.
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"An anthropology essay isn’t “public anthropology” simply because it doesn’t have jargon or because it’s Open Access. Essays don’t read themselves. People need to know that the essays exist."
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Given anthropology’s conflicted past, how do you teach its history to new anthropologists? Rather than moving directly back or forward, the "Syllabus Collective" of @BrandeisU imagines a "decanonized" anthropology, using the form of a spiral.
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The Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) is proud to award the eleventh annual Gregory Bateson Prize to Radhika Govindrajan for Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas.
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"An anthropology essay isn’t “public anthropology” simply because it doesn’t have jargon or because it’s Open Access. Essays don’t read themselves. People need to know that the essays exist; they need to see how its ideas relate to necessary discussions."
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Without trying to shoehorn "anthropological perspectives" into today, or discourage anyone from taking the streets, Faye Ginsburg and Sarah Franklin's edited collection “Reproductive Politics in the Age of Trump and Brexit" offers an ethnographic lens onto how the US got here 🧵.
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Today is actress Amy Adams' birthday. When we think of her, we think of her role as a linguist in The Arrival. What are your favorite film representations of anthropology?
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We regret to inform you that it is September 😱.
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Drumroll please! 🥁. SCA is excited to announce Savannah Shange (@savannahshange), Miyarrka Media, and Alan Klima have been awarded the 2020 Gregory Bateson Book Prizes! .
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Parents please check your kids' Halloween candy. just found "The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1" inside of a peanut butter cup.
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"Radical Ethnography is not just about re-search, it is about re-building—acting to redress/mitigate the harm done.". New from our #TeachingTools on the teaching of radical ethnography by Rosalina Diaz:
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We are pleased to announce the 2025 SCA Biennial theme is: Restorative Relations: An Unconference. We are (re)considering the infrastructure needed for intellectual work, and pushing against the productivism that exerts on the academic vocation. 🧵.
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🕰️It's about time! We recently published a reading list on the anthropology of temporality ⏰
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Congratulations to our next editorial collective!. Alberto Corsín Jiménez - @acorsin.Julia Elyachar - @JElyachar.Joanne Nucho - @JoanneNucho.AbdouMaliq Simone - @XazaarAdjame .Manuel Tironi - @ManuelTironi.Ather Zia - @aziakashmir .and Matilde Córdoba Azcárate!.
SCA is happy to announce the selection of the next editorial collective for CA. In response to the challenges and conditions of the moment, this is a seven-member collective of scholars diversely positioned, globally located, and multiply oriented.
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“…co-authorship calls for an approach that focuses on solidarity, commitment, and cooperation rather than competition.”.
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Our latest collection is here!! It serves as a counter-archive, seeking to recover traces of embodied, ephemeral encampments as Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues and expands in the West Bank and devastates Lebanon.
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What might teaching anthropology look like if we recognized the extent to which the discipline was and is shaped by Black life and Black thought? Check out our syllabus archive of courses on race and anthropology:
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“There is no life without occupation. There is no culture without checkpoints. And yet Palestinians, like all people, are not defined entirely by their oppression & subjugation: their lives are more than the violence they live with.” .- @Dr_mauraf (2019).
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How do you engage with sounds in your research and writing? .In "Our Ethnographic Ear: Using sound as an ethnographic tool and product” Jessica Chandras writes about her audio data & provides sounds clips from urban cities in India. via @FootnotesAnthro .
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Unpopular opinions: anthropology edition. Let's hear it!. Are there things you wish you could say in/about our discipline, but fear professional consequences?
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There is nothing natural about natural disasters.
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Exciting new Teaching Tools! Guarasci, Moore and Vaughn's Reading List for a Progressive Environmental Anthropology "promotes critical intersectionality within environmental anthropology, articulating a political stance from which to rethink environments.”
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In November, "Trouillot Remixed" will be coming out from @DukePress. It was edited by @yarimarbonilla, @GregBeckett9, and @mayanthileilani, and you can read their introduction here!.
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🚨⚠️New content alert!⚠️ 🚨. Our new series "Geological Anthropology" suggests that thinking through our planetary predicament requires not only considering Geos alongside Anthropos, but rethinking what the geological and the human entail simultanously -.
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@afleisch_anthro *laughs anxiously as she scrolls through a draft of her consent form and thinks to herself, "oh dear goddess, I will actually need to talk to people I don't know real soon"*.
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Check out this new Member Voices piece released today written by Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma, & Chika Watanabe:. "Patchwork ethnography offers a new way to acknowledge & accommodate how researchers’ lives in their full complexity shape knowledge production".
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If you're on #AnthroTwitter, you've probably heard of the search for the Worst Anthro Job Ads. But if you haven't, check out this new piece in @AmAnthroJournal detailing last year's contest and how ads should be written with more care & consideration. 👇.
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From the archives: . “Cultivating Patchwork Ethnography Sensibilities – How do we decenter the model of uninterrupted, long-term fieldwork through patchwork ethnographic sensibilities, without completely denying the former?”.
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Dear Prospective Graduate Student, Anthropology Needs You More Than You Need Anthropology. | @shalini_shankar's contribution to our ongoing conversation on academic futures #hautalk:
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To add to your reading list: The Journal of Palestine Studies (@PalStudies) has an ongoing collection of ungated articles about the twenty years of Israeli war, siege, and blockade on Gaza:
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Check out our new Theorizing the Contemporary series on specualtive anthropologies, where authors use speculative fiction to "gravitate toward new localities and means of presence: ecological, technological, Afro-futuristic." .
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Saying that some disciplines are political while you yourself are somehow doing real science is, itself, a political move. Y/N? Discuss.
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"In anthropology, whiteness still has no identity. It remains the undisturbed center of authority and epistemological production, around which anthropologists of color arrange themselves."
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Where I come from, after submission PhD students usually have the urge to burn their thesis.
Sweden has the odd PhD tradition of Lutherishly nailing your thesis to a wall a few weeks before your defense, so here is my PhD student Vidya Somashekarappa nailing her thesis into the designated thesis nailing wall (officially required btw).
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🚨New Issue Alert🚨. It features articles on exegetical agency in Kenya, datafication of Syrian refugees, Eritrean migrants’ transit experiences, tiered labor systems in Mexico, “effective cynicism” in Ulaanbaatar, & technoscientific agriculture in India.
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Hard to believe Margaret Mead died in 1978. She could've watched Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke.
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How do we actually *do* fieldwork? . Even in graduate school curricula, this topic can seem glossed over and shrouded in mystery. If you missed this post in our Syllabus Archive, you are missing OUT, #AnthroTwitter!.(This post curated by @erin_gould4).
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Remember this brilliant manifesto that called for new approaches to how we understand and practice ethnography?
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"If US academic anthropology only relies on fifteen programs for the majority of its faculty positions in PhD‐granting programs, we should consider how this homogenizes the discipline intellectually. ".@nick_kawa et al. argue in @AmAnthroJournal.Thoughts?.
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"To what extent does contemporary anthropology rely on the invisibilized labor of grad students and precarious scholars?" In this post, @afleisch_anthro, @rest_in_prada and the @culanth social media team think labor, collaboration, and public anthropology.
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Out now! 📖 A new series on 🖼️ graphic ethnography 🖍️edited by Dimitrios Theodossopoulos. Check out sixteen multimodal contributions to a graphic-ethnographic practice:
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WE DID IT! 🥳🥳. Cultural Anthropology's OACIP (Open Access Community Investment Program) pledge drive came to a close on July 31st, and we are delighted to announce that it was a resounding success!. In total, 46 institutions pledged their support! .
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"If we are doing our jobs, if we are really teaching, then the work we are doing is not just conveying information and assigning grades. When we are really teaching, we are imagining a world otherwise, alongside our students. —@Dr_mauraf.
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While #anthrotwitter isn't always rosy, we have to ask: what's happening in @AmericanAnthro's Communities listserv? As anthropologists, we can examine peoples' practices and explore their broader meanings; pls add ethnographic data to this thread so we can understand these people.
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The @AFeministAnthro has given the 2018 Senior Book Prize in Feminist Anthropology to Marisol de la Cadena, for her book, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015, Duke University Press)! Join us in congratulating Marisol!.
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This qualitative researcher begs to differ. I am become death….
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"Anarchists. appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence . But what if they didn't?" .
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when the job ad asks for a CV, cover letter, research statement, teaching statement, diversity statement, three letters of recommendation, two writing samples, three syllabi, teaching evals, and transcripts.
it was the most annoying of times, it was most irritating of times, it was the age of annoyance, it was the age of ugh.
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"If as many as 80 percent of doctoral students in cultural anthropology are not getting tenure-track jobs, then why are PhD programs in the United States almost exclusively training them for a professional life that few will realize?".
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How to unionize.
What 1 skill would you suggest an incoming PhD student develop?. #PhDChat #PhDVoice #AcademicTwitter.
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The US Congress giving people $600 during a pandemic winter is like a conference travel grant for. well, $600. It's not enough.
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"Anthropology is most enchanting when we begin to realize that our own individuality is predicated on leaky constructions of inside/outside".
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Perhaps folks already know, but we wanted to call attention to what’s happening at Montepelier Foundation (@JMMontpelier), and its reneging on a promise to share governance of President James Madison’s estate with the Montpelier Descendants Committee (@JMMdescendants). 🧵 1/9.
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Our new issue features six new articles from Brazil, Peru, and Trinidad to Myanmar, Zambia, and Egypt - as well as an inaugural guest commentary on NAGPRA by members of the Choctaw Nation. Check them all out here!
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The new issue of Cultural Anthropology is live!. Six diverse new articles & a new Colloquy on teaching & ultimately rewriting anthropology from the academic margins of traditionally underresourced, underserved institutions #AnthroTwitter #AcademicTwitter.
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