"An SCA Primer"
by Bruce Grant, SCA President

With the AAA increasing in size year by year, it can often feel more like a corporation than the scholarly association it was designed to be. In 1983, David Schneider, Clifford Geertz, and a number of others joined to create the Society for Cultural Anthropology as an attempt to put anthropology into broader conversation with the related humanities and social sciences. As genres were blurring, and new experiments were in motion, SCA aimed to capture that mix with a new journal, trimmed in size to have the feel of a proper book or novel, and a series of small-scale initiatives to keep the field human. Today, twenty-five years later, SCA still considers its “brand” to be that same interdisciplinarity and spirit of experiment.

Back in 1983 when the SCA formed, however, the AAA had only 17 sections. Today it has 38. In this light, it seemed to make sense to revisit what the SCA is, what we do, and why we hope you will consider joining us.

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, reprised in a particularly good edited volume, Rereading Cultural Anthropology (Duke 1992), a format that we hope to repeat soon. 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 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 take a look, at http://www.culanth.org.

SCA has long prided itself on having one of the largest contingents of graduate student members of any AAA section. On the basis of this 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.


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. This year’s spring meeting on “Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics,” is being organized by Bill Maurer and Saba Mahmood, and will be held May 9-10, 2008. Talal Asad (CUNY Graduate Ctr) will be delivering this year’s David Schneider Memorial Lecture. It might be an understatement to say that this year’s location, on board the original Queen Mary, permanently docked at Long Beach, California, is the closest most anthropologists may get to a real cruise. We hope you will propose a paper or panel and join us this spring.


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. This year’s Culture@Large session, featuring Isabelle Stengers (Free U Brussels Philosophy of Science), on current work in STS, was one of our best yet. Next year we are developing a series of roundtables to include smaller, twelve-person author-meets-critics sessions, as well as 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.


SCA has an excellent board, including Marisol de la Cadena, Veena Das, Kim and Mike Fortun, Saba Mahmood, Bill Maurer, Stacy Pigg, 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.