SCA Section News from the Anthropology Newsletter of the AAA
March 2010

Society for Cultural Anthropology
Jean M. Langford, Contributing Editor

Today’s SCA
Danilyn Rutherford, Incoming President

Twenty-seven years have passed since David Schneider, Clifford Geertz, and others created the SCA as a way to broaden the conversation between anthropology and the related humanities and social sciences. The SCA’s founders sought to capture the unruly, experimental spirit of the day with the launching of a new journal and a series of small-scale initiatives designed to give the society a human face. Like its pocket-sized journal, the SCA was made for travel. Today’s SCA continues to cross borders, taking anthropology into new terrain within academia and beyond.

The SCA’s flagship remains its award-winning journal, Cultural Anthropology, inaugurated by George Marcus in 1986. Under the stewardship of Fred Myers, Dan Segal, Ann Anagnost, Kim and Mike Fortun, and now, as of January 2010, Anne Allison and Charles Piot, the journal showcases essays that bring together theory and ethnography in daring ways. The journal now offers an expanded website with supplemental materials on each issue. The print version now features a book review section in which anthropologists and other scholars respond to each other’s work. A Public Advisory Board explores ways for the journal to speak to contemporary policy debates. One outcome has been the sponsoring of roundtables at the AAA on security; gender and sexuality; and the ethics of ethnography. Another has been the web publication of virtual issues on themes including democracy, elections, and voting; cities and urbanism; and China and Tibet.

Today’s SCA also takes anthropology into new terrain through its signature event at the AAA: the “Culture at Large” session. In this author-meets-critics style format, we have recently hosted Michael Warner (English, Yale U) on sex and secularity. Previous guests have included Isabelle Stengers (Philosophy of Science, Free U Brussels), Michael Hardt (Literature, Duke U), Gerald Torres (Law, UT Austin), Susan Buck-Morss (Government, Cornell) and George Lipsitz (Black Studies, UC Santa Barbara).

Another way that the SCA promotes anthropological border-crossing is by rewarding imaginative, expansive work. The SCA prides itself on having the largest contingent of graduate student members of any AAA section. To take advantage of this strength, the SCA created the Cultural Horizons Prize, which goes to the best essay appearing in Cultural Anthropology in the previous year. Decided by a jury of doctoral students, the prize recognizes work that members consider emblematic of where the discipline should be headed. Omri Elisha won this year’s prize for his article on evangelical activists in Tennessee. In 2009, the SCA inaugurated the Bateson Book Prize, which is decided by an interdisciplinary jury. The first annual prize went to Barry Saunders (U North Carolina, Chapel Hill) for CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting (Duke U).

Finally, there is the SCA Spring Meeting, held every other year, which features workshops, films, and plenary speakers around a theme, along with a larger number of volunteered panels. The SCA extends travel stipends to students and independent scholars to create a broad mix of participants. The conferences are intentionally small, housed in older, comfortable hotels, and unfold over two days at a relaxed pace. The 2010 spring meeting on “NatureCulture” organized by Marisol de la Cadena and Brad Weiss will be held May 7-8, 2010 in Santa Fe. Donna Haraway (History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz), in dialogue with John Law (Sociology, Lancaster U), will deliver the David Schneider Memorial Lecture. Plenary speakers include Debbora Battaglia (Mt Holyoke C), Judith Farquhar (U Chicago), Stefan Helmreich (MIT), Deborah Bird Rose (Macquarie U, Sydney), and Sarah Whatmore (Geography, Oxford U).

Today’s SCA has an excellent board, including Anne Allison and Charles Piot (incoming journal editors), Michelle Stewart (student member), Jean Langford, Peter Redfield, and Brad Weiss. We are pleased to welcome three new elected board members, Cori Hayden, Kath Weston, and Brian Larkin. If you happen to meet us, feel free say hello and tell us about your work. We want those who belong to SCA to see themselves as members as well as subscribers. If you have not our website recently, take a look at http://www.culanth.org.

Contributions to this column should be sent to Jean M. Langford, Department of Anthropology, HHH 395, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455; fax 612/625-3095; langf001@umn.edu The SCA website is found at www.aaanet.org/sca/index.htm For a direct link to the website for Cultural Anthropology go to www.cultanth.org

SCA Spring Conference

Plan to attend the SCA Spring Conference May 6-8, 2010 at La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, NM on the theme “Natureculture: Entangled Relations of Multiplicity.” The Conference invites papers, films, photo essays, and multimedia installations that track, propose, or otherwise reveal and interrogate paradigmatic, disciplinary and ethico-political ruptures effected through the analytics of naturecultures. We are as interested in topics ‘traditional’ to anthropology (magic, ritual, kinship, to name a few) as we are in thematic newcomers (animals, climate, oceans, air, GMOS) and, of course, those fields—such as race, the state, the environment, art, health and bodies, neo-liberalism, sexuality, globalization--that have occupied our discipline in the last generation. Multi-disciplinary presentations as well as contributions by other than anthropologists will also be considered. Submissions can be made on the SCA website until December 15.