Animality (and humanity), failure (and compromise), phenomenology (and theorizing), ignorance (and expertise), loving (and letting go). The themes tackled by articles in this issue of AE will raise eyebrows. Some will stretch readers’ collective imagination, and others will enable us to revisit familiar topics in less familiar ways. This issue is one whose range is worth pondering, and I refer here more to theoretical, epistemological, and methodological range than I do to the diverse topics readers will find, eye-catching though they are.
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Prime examples of this range are Paul Nadasdy’s and Eduardo Kohn’s articles, which go out on a limb—situated both in relation to and distinct from science studies and even in relation to that contemporary and expanding interdisciplinary body of scholarship usually referred to as “animal studies.” Kohn (“How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement”) and Nadasdy (“The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human–Animal Sociality”) simply take us out of our comfort zones. Their arguments about animal agency and subjectivity, potentially appealing to many ethnographers and animal lovers at the outset, turn emotionally difficult and cognitively challenging as they unfold and may well elicit both serious praise and substantial critique.
Kohn and Nadasdy are not unusual in this issue of AE. Many of the contributors challenge our desires, expectations, understandings, or emotions. In the articles by Rosario Montoya (“Socialist Scenarios, Power, and State Formation in Sandinista Nicaragua”), Manduhai Buyandelgeriyn (“Dealing with Uncertainty: Shamans and the ‘Unmaking’ of Socialism in Mongolia”), and Catherine Kingfisher (“Discursive Constructions of Homelessness in a Small City in the Canadian Prairies: Notes on Destructuration, Individualization, and the Production of [Raced and Gendered] Unmarked Categories”), I call readers’ attention to the perception and discourse of failure—revolutionary, municipal, and imaginary—and to the difficulties of writing empathetically as well as analytically about failed (or failing) systems, social policies, social enactments, and interpersonal situations. In Heiko Henkel’s “The Location of Islam: Inhabiting Istanbul in a Muslim Way” and Asha Persson’s “Intimate Immensity: Phenomenology of Place and Space in an Australian Yoga Community,” it is phenomenology itself—as an embodied process and an experience of being and theorizing in space—that deserves attention as an analytic paradigm. Of special interest here is the challenge of considering embodiment and the experience of space as theories to think with and not just as objects of study or subjects of the ethnographic gaze.
Kristina Wirtz’s article, “How Diasporic Religious Communities Remember: Learning to Speak the “Tongue of the Oricha” in Cuban Santería,” on religious experts far removed from the region, language, and culture of origin of the religion they practice makes me think of the constructive handling and recasting of ignorance in ways that reach far beyond religion itself. Although I have paired Wirtz’s article with Buyandelgeriyn’s to highlight what they share—a concern with religious experts, historical knowledge, and experience of nonknowledge—Wirtz’s article also implies some positive ways of contemplating lacunae in knowledge. To those of us long committed to the production of knowledge, to pedagogy, and to the transmission of knowledge (not to mention the much-quoted idea that knowledge is power), this amounts to an exploration of a constructive approach to nonknowledge—ignorance, by another name.
Finally, in articles by Jessaca Leinaweaver (“On Moving Children: The Social Implications of Andean Child Circulation”), Lieba Faier (“Filipina Migrants in Rural Japan and Their Professions of Love”), and Elizabeth Roberts (“Extra Embryos: The Ethics of Cryopreservation in Ecuador and Elsewhere”), readers are faced with the subtleties of contemporary kin ethics and the compromises entailed in loving and letting go. To those of us trained in the intricacies of anthropological scholarship on kinship, descent, and alliance, these articles take our old concerns, passions, or an (often) hated subject matter into new terrain—to transnational marriage markets, internationally sanctioned adoption policies, and the latest in genetic technologies. And to those trained by my generation often to sidestep older anthropology of kinship and social organization, these articles take our privileged interests in transnational migration, biopolitics, and neoliberalism and apply them in ways that require a broader comparative analysis—regarding systemic political and economic inequality and its mechanisms of reproduction, household composition, parental investment, the circulation of children, the social relations of fosterage, the assessment of risk and viability, and even the exercise of tragic choices in deciding who lives and who dies.
On a logistical note, I call readers’ attention to a change in the handling of book reviews that we inaugurate with this issue. AE book reviews will now be posted on AnthroSource (http://www.anthrosource.net) along with the articles listed in each table of contents. We institute this change to ensure the preservation of the book reviews and their long-term accessibility. Despite great dedication, imagination, and work on the part of AES Webmaster Aaron Fox and AE Senior Editorial Assistant and Visual Consultant Steve Moon, over the past three to four years, the quarterly uploading and posting of AE’s book reviews on the AES website has rarely worked smoothly, and too many staff hours have been spent trying to fix technical glitches. We realize that the move to include AE’s book reviews on AnthroSource will restrict access for some. We hope, however, that the long-term archiving it provides makes up for this change in access, especially for the authors of the books and the book reviewers themselves.
AE readers should be pleased to know that all book reviews commissioned by this journal over the past few years are currently being archived on AnthroSource and should be available to users of that service by the time AES members and subscribers receive their print copies of this issue. Archived reviews include those commissioned and posted on the AES website from 2004 to 2006. My personal thanks for undertaking this large archiving project go to Steve Moon in the AE editorial office and to Gabe Alvaro at the University of California Press.
AES officers and I decided to make these changes, which entail the expenditure of some additional AES funds, in the interest of the overall scholarly community and its intellectual legacy and only after lengthy consultations. We contemplated other options, including returning to AE’s earlier practice of including the book reviews in its print issues. We concluded, however, that the AES could not afford at this time to incur the far greater costs of doing so. The society will reevaluate its options once AnthroSource reaches its financial potential or when some other steady source of revenue can offset the current escalating costs of producing the print and electronic versions of the journal. Despite fears and doubts on the part of many AAA members and fellow travelers, I remain hopeful that such an era is around the corner.
Lastly, the 2007 volume will be my last as editor of American Ethnologist. My extended term will officially end on June 30, 2007. Don Donham, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Davis, will succeed me on July 1, 2007. He and I are in the midst of working out a smooth transition that will cause no disruption in the publication of AE or the handling of manuscripts, reviews, and book reviews. Manuscript and book review authors can help us by being attentive to the dates of the official transition and proceeding to send manuscripts and other correspondence to the relevant AE editorial office.
In general, please continue to send all manuscripts, books, book reviews, and general correspondence to the editorial office at the University of Iowa until late June 2007. If, however, you are sending materials from outside the United States, you should probably mark June 15, 2007, as your real deadline for sending anything to the Iowa office. Anything that is likely to be received after June 30, 2007, should be sent to Don Donham at the University of California at Davis.
I want to be clear, too, that the official (main) AE editorial office will be staying at the University of Iowa until late June, and not moving with me as I take up a new faculty position in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. One move a year is hard enough for a journal. Two seemed unnecessary. I want to thank my Iowa colleagues for allowing the editorial office to stay at Iowa for the last six months of my extended term. This will enable my wonderful colleagues Michael Chibnik, Laura Graham, and Nanette Barkey of the University of Iowa and Brigittine French of Grinnell College to continue their work with the book reviews without hardship, and it will allow Steve Moon to stay on the job as AE Senior Editorial Assistant and Visual Consultant well into the summer. And, although Staff Associate Editors Linda Forman and Julie Peluso already live outside the state of Iowa, this arrangement to keep the AE editorial office within the University of Iowa bureaucracy through midsummer 2007 will also prevent any disruption to their work, their e-mail addresses, and their access to the existing university infrastructure.
As of January 1, 2007, I will personally be reachable by e-mail at both the University of Iowa (virginia-dominguez@uiowa.edu) and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (vdomingu@uiuc.edu). I will continue to have access to my University of Iowa e-mail address through midsummer.
We hope 2007 is a good year for all—for readers, authors, and reviewers, for AE, for AnthroSource, for the AES and the AAA, for the worldwide community of anthropologists and fellow travelers, and for the many people around the world who dream of peace and justice for all.
VIRGINIA R. DOMINGUEZ
EDITOR
[foreword, religion, expertise, animality, phenomenology, family, public anxieties]
