digital anthropologist
Despite decades of diplomatic hostility and economic sanctions, the border between Cuba and the United States—one of the most politicised in the world—remains in constant flux. Circulating Culture: Transnational Cuban Networks of Exchange (University Press of Florida, 2023) traces the movement of people, goods, and digital content between Havana and Miami, as well as across Cuba, Panama, Guyana, and Mexico, showing how these circuits shape everyday life for millions of Cubans.
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Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Jennifer Cearns brings into focus often-overlooked groups, exploring what Cuban culture and identity look like in a transnational context. Through a series of vivid vignettes, the book maps an evolving network that cuts across geopolitical boundaries and persists through periods of profound political change—from the Obama era to the post-Fidel and Trump years.
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Focusing on the everyday objects and practices that move across borders, the book shows how new cultural forms emerge from conditions often framed as crisis. In doing so, it highlights the worldmaking practices of marginalised Cuban communities, who have long built their own infrastructures of possibility.
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The book was shortlisted for both the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists First Book Prize (2024) and the Society for Latin American & Caribbean Anthropology Book Prize (2024).
“In this subtle and beautifully crafted ethnography, Cearns invites us to travel through the many Cuban circuits of exchange that give shape to mutating histories of connection within and between Havana and Miami.
The result is an exhilarating and illuminating journey into the changing contours and expansive terrain of contemporary cubanidad.”
— Jeffrey S. Kahn, author of Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire (University of Chicago Press)
"Cearns’ book is ethnographically dense, beautifully written, and full of surprising analytical insights."
— Steffen Köhn, author of Island in the Net: Digital Culture in Post-Castro Cuba (Princeton University Press)
Contraband Cultures examines the narratives, practices, and imaginaries surrounding smuggling and informal circulation across Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as their diasporas. Challenging dominant Global North portrayals of these activities as chaotic, lawless, or exotic, the volume reframes them through the lenses of kinship, political struggle, economic exchange, and resistance to capitalist state power.
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Bringing together contributions from scholars across the social sciences and humanities, the book uses a range of methods and theoretical approaches to explore smuggling as a window onto personhood, material life, and relations to the state. Combining historical analysis with contemporary ethnography, it traces the emergence and transformation of these practices from the colonial period to the present, situating them within the broader histories of capitalism and empire in the region.
"A story of contraband that recasts the stereotypical template of Latin American narcos by re-embedding economic circulations within their social context. Cearns and Beach synthesise deeply ethnographic examinations of contraband, focusing on the underrepresented and invisible communities that stitch global trade and financial systems together."
– Caroline Schuster, author of Social collateral: Women and microfinance in Paraguay's smuggling economy (University of California Press)