Almost three years have gone by since I took over the editorship of American Ethnologist, and I want to thank authors, manuscript reviewers, book reviewers, readers, and production specialists both at AAA and at the University of California Press for their support, patience, ideas, rigor, discipline, and dedication during that time. I have introduced visual, procedural, and production changes at AE with the help and support of the Executive Board of the American Ethnological Society and my lifeline, the associate editors of AE, whose advice I seek with some frequency. As AnthroSource alters our scholarly community’s reading and sleuthing practices over the next few years, more changes will no doubt be needed, and I hope to have the wisdom in the immediate future to continue to make adjustments to serve us all better.  read more »

(Mis)Recognition: Seeing, Not Seeing, and Mis-Seeing
Stigma, liminality, and chronic pain: Mind–body borderlands
Jean E. Jackson
In this article, I employ the concept of “liminality” to answer the question, why is pain, something invisible and experienced by everyone, so often stigmatizing in its chronic form? Various authors’ work on liminality argues that “betwixt and between,” ambiguous beings are seen by those around them to threaten prevailing definitions of the social order. I show that certain features of chronic pain result in the perception of sufferers as transgressing the categorical divisions between mind and body and as confounding the codes of morality surrounding sickness and health, turning them into liminal creatures whose uncertain ontological status provokes stigmatizing reactions in others.  read more »

Table of Contents
Coming Soon