This paper reports on the Anthropology Southern Africa Association (ASnA) and journal, and its relationship to anthropological knowledge making in the region and globally. I have been a member of ASnA since I was a postgraduate student, and subsequently have been Editor of the Anthropology Southern Africa Journal (2016 to 2020), and member of the Executive Council (2016 – 2023). In the paper I draw on both this positionality within ASnA, and on published work I have done on the organisation and the journal, to think through the role of ASnA in South and Southern African anthropology, and its role in fostering relationships with a wider global anthropological conversations and debates. The paper is framed around two core questions – one, what is the impact of the historical position of anthropological knowledge-making on how anthropology in imagined and enacted in the present in Southern Africa, and in how it is possible for this knowledge-making to circulate globally; and two, what roles might a professional anthropological association play in enabling its members to navigate such contemporary global and local knowledge politics.