North American ethnography is filled with opportunity for meaningful dialogues and reflections spurred by engagement with our co-locutors and colleagues, theoretical debates, and methodological innovations. We welcome both collaborative dialogues and single-authored engagements with your Home/Field(s), broadly conceived. What are the ways we collaborate within and beyond our field sites? How do these interlocutions articulate what is critical to North American ethnography? Give us a line into your dialogues, a seat at your debates, in 2500 words or less.
What Happened in Georgia? On Suburbs and Other Anthropological Blind Spots
On January 6, 2021, as a mob of white Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, voters in Georgia inaugurated a new era by delivering a key victory for Biden and the Democratic Party. While confirming the status of Georgia as a new battleground state, the elections also revealed that this battle is increasingly being fought in the suburbs, particularly in once-Republican, majority-white communities now home to growing numbers of Black, Asian, and Latinx residents. What have we done, as anthropologists, to understand these places and their growing social and political polarization? Here, Elisa Lanari takes a look at the insurgent publics and resurgent white politics of suburban Atlanta by reflecting on ongoing transformations in her fieldsite of Sandy Springs, Georgia.
Anthropologists Call on the Biden Administration to Cease the Separation of Im/migrant Families and the Detention of Children
We urge the Biden administration to cease separating im/migrant families through the misuse of public health policy Title 42 and to ease the myriad restrictions constraining individuals’ right to seek asylum, including the detention of children in all forms. In this statement and call to action, we draw on our expertise as anthropologists to historicize family separation and to argue for immediate action to defend the human rights of im/migrants and refugees.
A Steadily Creeping Dispossession: The Spread of Non-Native Plants and Non-Events in an Appalachian Valley
Interview by Dominic Piacentini
Dispossession can be a creeping process. In addition to more flagrantly recognizable modes of dispossession (i.e. the forced and coerced removal of people from their land), the culmination of minor events can cause certain places and ways of being to become so unlivable that they are ultimately avoided.
Reimagining Native North America at the Field Museum: An Interview with Alaka Wali
Interview by Ana Croegaert
“In the past few decades some museums of ‘natural history’ have revisited their collections and reexamined their curatorial practices in efforts to shift away from grand narratives grounded in museums’ roles in imperial formations to foster spaces wherein artifacts can be engaged as dynamic and agentive, and as having the capacity to generate dialogue, disagreement, and affect among museumgoers.”