From the editors

We are pleased to present our first issue as the new editors of American Ethnologist. We take the editorial helm with enthusiasm because we believe in building communities of connection among anthropologists and because journals offer a unique way to do this. Academic journals provide a lasting record of disciplinary ways of thinking, working, and asking questions. A journal records a conversation, one that takes place slowly, between careful writers and thoughtful but distant readers. But behind what you see printed in this journal lies the dynamic work of many anthropologists engaging attentively with each other. Every article that appears in American Ethnologist begins with an ethnographer who has an insight to share and an idea about how to formulate it. An offering. Peer reviewers respond with questions—sometimes hard, even unwelcome questions, it is true—about evidence, theory, and relevance, but they also extend, in the same spirit of generosity, suggestions. Peer review is a gift in return; it is an act affirming connection. In our role as editors, we coordinate these exchanges. Every author and reviewer is, to us, someone who strives to make sense of the contemporary world using anthropology's tools. We are in this together. A team works diligently behind the scenes to produce the high-quality work you see in American Ethnologist. We are building on the long-term work of previous AE editors, especially that of our recent predecessors Angelique Haugerud (2011–15) and Niko Besnier (2015–19). Under their leadership, American Ethnologist, ranked as one of the topmost journals in sociocultural anthropology, has expanded its international visibility. As we settle into the job and discover layers of complexity in publishing a journal of this size and scope, our respect for their wide set of skills and fantastic energies increases in turn. AE editors coordinate the actions of over a dozen people working on various tasks, from finding peer reviewers to readying manuscripts for production. Each year the journal requires the assistance of about 1,000 peer reviewers. We are grateful for all the assistance we receive, not only from these reviewers (anonymous to the authors but well known and well appreciated by us), but also from our permanent crew. Here we would like to acknowledge the stellar efforts of this crew: Julie Neithercutt (editorial office manager), Holly Carver (copyeditor for book reviews), Sheila Oakley (proofreader), Kathleen Inglis (editorial assistant), and Cheyanne Connell (editorial assistant). Carole McGranahan, a councillor of the American Ethnological Society (AES), coordinates social media outreach as well as a team of graduate student editorial interns. Gabrielle Manley tends the AES website (https://americanethnologist.org), which includes the latest information about this journal. Our senior copyeditor, Pablo Morales, takes much care in sculpting each accepted manuscript line by line. For those who have been authors in recent years, you know through experience about Pablo's keen precision and ear for language. For those who have been readers, part of the pleasure you experience in reading the articles is the magic of Pablo and his craft. With this issue of the journal, we also introduce a new Editorial Board, consisting of 48 scholars from 12 countries who together represent a range of research specialties. Every week, our Editorial Board members help us locate suitable reviewers from around the world, working to extend our reach and tap their networks. We are also pleased to announce that Brigittine French and Walter Little have taken over the book review sections after Eric Gable's excellent and long tenure (2012–19). We thank each reviewer who has ignored the oft-repeated career advice to decline requests to write book reviews, instead taking the time to read books and write about them for the rest of us. The reviews have always been a beloved feature for readers of American Ethnologist. The first issue of American Ethnologist was published in February 1974, under the editorship of Victoria Reifler Bricker, in the days before the American Anthropological Association had fully developed its current system of subsections. The journal was created specifically to publish “the subdisciplines of ethnology and social anthropology” and to “serve as a record of ethnology as a dynamic branch of anthropology.” It described itself as “a quarterly journal concerned with ‘ethnology’ in the broadest sense of the term,” marking the perceived need for a journal specific to sociocultural anthropology as a distinct subdiscipline of anthropology writ large. Bricker (1974, iii) wrote that the journal “welcomes methodological and theoretical contributions, comparative studies, papers on culture change, and diachronic studies which relate ethnography to ethnohistory. The journal is not,” she noted, “concerned with publication of purely descriptive studies.” From today's vantage point, we see how this carefully chosen wording staked out the perceived space of social anthropology. Fast-forward 25 years. Now we seek manuscripts that “creatively demonstrate the connections between ethnographic specificity and theoretical originality, as well as the ongoing relevance of the ethnographic imagination to the contemporary world.” American Ethnologist still responds to the changing contexts of knowledge production in anthropology, reflecting anthropologists’ evolving sense of what we have to say, why and how we say it, and to whom. When we took this position, we were well aware that the journal is connected to a legacy whose roots go back to 1842 (one year before the UK's first anthropological society), when the AES was born (see https://americanethnologist.org/about/history). This legacy, embedded as it is in the colonial foundations of the discipline, challenges us to create space for what anthropology is becoming. We see AE as a hub for the ongoing, necessarily messy conversation about what, in 1972, Dell Hymes (1972) called “the reinvention of anthropology.” Anthropologists around the world are busy reinventing anthropological purposes, questions, engagements, methodologies, and modes of expression, even as we also continue to explore long-standing themes and enduring disciplinary questions. Our editorial practice aims to adapt to the concerns and modalities of today's field, including openness to novel objects of study and modes of expression. Such innovations pose some challenges for established forms and expectations of peer review. When we innovate our conceptualizations of our objects of study, we also unsettle the received categories enshrined in subdisciplines, key words, and research areas, thus requiring care in selecting appropriate reviewers. As editors, we work to foster a forum that displays the dynamism or the discipline. American Ethnologist will continue to showcase works that describe social worlds in clear and vivid detail, inviting readers who are not already specialists into the discussion. When writing for more specialized journals, authors can usually skip over some contextualizing moves, but we often tell AE authors to write for an audience who might know very little of the place or topic under discussion. Ways of describing a “context” can itself become a mode of analysis, especially when the conditions of life may differ significantly from what readers think they know about that location or if they differ from readers’ own places of research. The craft of ethnography is, after all, a project of contextualization, requiring an eye for the contextual mediation of social life. Because AE publishes works that speak to a general anthropology audience, writing for the journal requires what our copyeditor Pablo Morales calls “communicative generosity.” In practice, this means that submissions should not only skillfully analyze a social phenomenon but also articulate what's at stake by illuminating core issues that transcend an ethnographic location. Strong articles for AE do more than analyze an ethnographic case; they trouble or advance conceptual approaches, opening doors for fellow anthropologists. In this issue, Dace Dzenovska explores post-Soviet transitions, this time in terms of the emptying out of the Latvian landscape. After decades of planning for continual population growth and taxes, towns now imagine a future in which more and more buildings will be abandoned. Her work not only speaks to post-Soviet conditions but to places where an increasing number of people and places are abandoned by capital and the state. Joanna Davidson’s article considers a puzzle she noticed in rural Guinea-Bissau. There she found that nearly a third of the households are occupied by women whose husbands have died, and yet the Jola language does not have a term for “widow,” and people do not seem to recognize these women's difficult situations. As she sifts through the series of explanations she proposed over many years of fieldwork, her article exemplifies ethnography as a quest for insight. Pondering the limits of knowability in both anthropological and local cultural models of sociality, she shows how we might attend to emergent social transformations. Megan Crowley-Matoka’s research confronts us with systemic biomedical treatment failure in the United States through her examination of a new diagnostic category: “failed back surgery syndrome.” Back pain is often mysterious, eluding easy testing and simple remedies, leading some patients to undergo round after round of often complicated and risky back surgery in a desperate and expensive attempt to alleviate their daily pain. Why? Crowley-Makota peels back the layers of meaning and circumstance that account for this phenomenon. As doctors in the US struggle to help their patients cope with chronic pain while eschewing pain medication, serial surgery procedures become vested with moral values about productive bodies. Hayal Akarsu goes to an Istanbul neighborhood to discover what happens when police try to enlist citizen trust through community policing. She finds that, paradoxically, the very actions meant to reform heavy-handed, authoritarian policing can instead expand the acceptability of policing in everyday life as citizens become more willing to serve as informal extensions of state surveillance. Her analysis of how people come to internalize a quasi-vigilante role for themselves in the name of being “responsible citizens” might help us rethink how authoritarianism, vigilante justice, and populism intersect. Fırat Bozçalı takes us into Turkish courtrooms, where he shows us how Kurdish lawyers and those accused of smuggling oil work together to stymie the national government. In recent years, officials in Ankara have employed a clever means to combat smuggling. After dealers have paid tariffs on a tank of oil, state officials add a small amount of chemical marker. Dealers with oil that lacks this marker can be charged with smuggling. Yet, Kurdish networks have created a counterstrategy, using technological and legal means to challenge the state's scientific claims, to argue that the oil is neither legal nor illegal, creating a critical third space of uncertainty, what he calls “probabalistic borderwork.” In sum, we are delighted to welcome you to our first issue and to share a collection of exemplary articles whose authors enter deeply into a social world and share insights that can travel to other realms. This work resonates with the ideals that we have just described and represents the kinds of questions and approaches that we hope the journal will tackle in the volumes to come.

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