The Society for Cultural Anthropology

The Society for Cultural Anthropology, or SCA, was created in 1983. Though many founding members of SCA were members of other AAA sections, as remains the case today, early proponents of SCA observed the pressure on the existing, older publication venues in a widely expanding community of cultural anthropologists, as well as the need for the AAA to respond to the increasingly interdisciplinary character of work in the humanities and social sciences. Thus SCA, AAA's interdisciplinary program for scholarly dialogue in the cultural wing, began. Our goal is to advance work that is disciplinarily expansive, theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded, and openly experimental.

SCA has grown over time, to a current total of approximately 1500 of the AAA's 11,000 members. SCA has the largest contingent of graduate student members after the National Association of Student Anthropologists. Though growing, SCA holds on to its early experimental mission by running small biannual meetings in untraditional locaitons, charging low rates for conference attendance and journal subscriptions to encourage broad participation, and foregrounding the profiles of our student members.

The flagship project of the SCA is its journal, Cultural Anthropology. Inaugurated by George Marcus in 1986, it set experimental writing as its operative mode, and opted for a small-sized format so that the journal experience would be akin to holding a novel. Under the subsequent stewardship of Fred Myers, Dan Segal, Ann Anagnost, and now, more recently, edited jointly by Kim and Mike Fortun, the journal continues to produce what we consider to be some of the best work in our field while extending the conversation even further. A recent special issue on “the Coke Complex,” addressing the cultural politics of strike actions against Coca-Cola around the world, as well as online tracking of recent 2007 events in Pakistan reflect some of the ways the journal is aiming to be in regular touch with events followed by all our members.

Another way in which SCA sees itself as building bridges across and beyond academia is through the formation of a new Public Advisory Board. Upcoming rubrics on “Emergent Indigeneities” (responsive to AAA support for the recently approved UN Declaration) and an “Ethnography in Translation” section, where SCA looks to present the best foreign language works in English (rather than the other way around) are all the more reason, we hope, to see Cultural Anthropology as thriving, and worth subscribing to. If you have not visited the renovated website recently, please click on "Journal" above, or visit at http://www.culanth.org.

On the basis of the SCA's large student contingent and primary readership, we created the Cultural Horizons Prize, awarded annually to the best essay each year appearing in Cultural Anthropology. Decided by a jury of doctoral students from around the country, the prize looks to recognize work emblematic of what our members see as the direction in which anthropology should be headed. Our most recent winner was Shao Jing from Nanjing University, whose article on AIDS in rural China captured the best of new writing on contemporary biopolitics.

New in 2009, SCA has also inaugurated the Gregory Bateson Book Prize. One of anthropology’s most distinguished experimental thinkers, Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) and his diverse body of work have long been emblematic of what the SCA was founded to promote: rich ethnographic analysis that engages the most current thinking across the arts and sciences. Welcoming a wide range of styles and argument, the Bateson Prize looks to reward work that is theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded, and in the spirit of the tradition for which the SCA has been known—interdisciplinary, experimental, and innovative. All books with a copyright date of 2008 will be considered in the first year of the competition, with the prize being awarded at the AAA meetings in Philadelphia.

Every other year, SCA comes to life in person through Spring Meetings that look to do a number of things. Organizers present an opening roster of workshops, films, and plenary speakers around a theme; while the larger number of volunteered panels looks to bring in new student and faculty work, with travel stipends extended to both students and independent scholars to create a broad mix of conversations. The conferences are intentionally kept small, housed in older, comfortable hotels, and including some 80 speakers in 20 panels spread out over two days at a relatively relaxed pace. The idea is for these meetings to be relatively more focused than traditional conventions, owing to size, and more accessible owing to the low registration costs. There is no membership requirement to attend.

At the AAA proper, SCA has one signature event each fall with its “Culture at Large” session, where anthropology meets its interlocutors from outside the discipline. In this author-meets-critics style format, we have recently hosted Michael Hardt (Duke Literature) on sovereignty and empire; Gerald Torres (UT Austin Law) on critical race theory; John Guillory (NYU English) on ethnographic writing; Susan Buck-Morss (Cornell Government) on postsocialist political theory; and George Lipsitz (UC Santa Barbara Black Studies) on race, New Orleans, and the logic of response to Hurricane Katrina. 2007’s Culture@Large session, featuring Isabelle Stengers (Free U Brussels Philosophy of Science), on current work in STS, was one of our best yet.

This Fall 2008, we are inaugurating a series of roundtables to include smaller, eight-person graduate student mentoring workshops on set themes, as well as professionalization panels for graduate students and junior faculty on developing both articles and books.

In the same spirit, SCA departs from most other sections in the handling of its AAA paper and panel submissions, by not accepting proposals for invited sessions in advance of the general AAA deadline. This gives us a chance to welcome the best of what comes in, where theory, ethnography, and experiment come together in the most productive ways.

You can find out more about SCA events any time by joining the SCA Listserver for free. The server is moderated to keep email flow at a necesarry minimum, but is recommended for conference and workshop announcements, as well as calls for papers for upcoming SCA and AAA panels in progress.

SCA has an excellent board, including Marisol de la Cadena, Kim and Mike Fortun, Jean Langford, Saba Mahmood, Bill Maurer, Mary Murrell, Peter Redfield, Danilyn Rutherford, and Brad Weiss. If you have not yet met them, and find the chance to do so, please say hello, and let us know about your work. The goal is for all who belong to SCA to see themselves as members as well as subscribers.

--Bruce Grant, SCA President
November 2008