Seeking clarity at a time of confusion, through world anthropologies

A section called "World Anthropologies" within American Anthropologist (AA) itself speaks to an apparent paradox: the difficulty of going beyond the US-centric perspective to see the plural. But this task is more urgent than ever as American anthropology is engaged in soul-searching that demands serious changes to our practice. As Negrón et al. (2024) summarize, these changes include, among others, decolonizing the ways research is done, addressing precarity in the job market, and responding to urgent societal needs, "all while ensuring that anthropology's unique contributions are recognizable." Expanding our horizons beyond the gravity center of the United States addresses the pressing dilemma, that is, gaining clarity at a time of confusion. Anthropologists around the world, more than those in other disciplines, are confronted with and largely willing to acknowledge complexity, ambiguity, and messiness in our work. However, when it comes to our practice, especially at the current moment of existential crises both within the discipline and in the larger society, we seek some kind of clarity to orient ourselves toward meaningful and valuable actions, and conversations with colleagues from different parts of the world. After all, the more we elucidate different but intersecting institutional, intellectual, and political conditions and render these conditions visible and legible, the better we can situate ourselves in the world purposefully. Both a framework and a platform within AA, "World Anthropologies" foregrounds anthropology's complex traditions and multifaceted conditions in which we operate and make connections. The previous associate editors have highlighted this complexity, of "multiple concerns to be folded into one another"; "of changing insider and outsider status; of negotiating otherness and identity politics in relation to multiple contexts, including to one's scholarly location (which is increasingly not one's home) and to the discipline of anthropology itself; and finally of heightened mobilities … in relation to disciplinary training, fieldwork, and ethnographic writing" (Papailias & Gupta, 2021, 962). As incoming associate editors, we continue to unsettle "anthropology" in the singular, to make the journal more attuned to and genuinely committed to diverse and overlapping forms and systems of anthropological knowledge. In doing so, we aim to make this section an influential channel to help our discipline gain some sense of clarity out of confusion. We value a practice-oriented approach to world anthropologies and consider it the core of this section. Since Ribeiro and Escobar (2006) coined the notion of "world anthropologies" in their edited volume with the same title, discussions on this topic have evolved into two threads of reflections: the first on knowledge production in anthropology in various contexts, and the second on interconnectedness between anthropology in different regions at a global level, which sustains a level of disciplinary coherency (Arif, 2016). We value both threads, as these reflections together broaden our perspectives and prompt anthropologists to embrace our discipline as a way of world-making (Papailias & Gupta, 2021). Knowledge production is not merely about the competition of intellectual merit but about how to develop a meaningful relationship with one's academic, social, and political environment. Anthropology is not about merely representing the world, but about actively participating in the world. Seeking clarity does not mean that we look for any unified or totalizing theory or direction in anthropological work. Instead, it demands us to pay close attention to the messiness and confusion in our research and life, taking them seriously as a chance to find new ways of problematization and acquire new perspectives. Seeking clarity does not imply that we assume there is one definitive answer to address our discipline's current crises and potential struggles. Instead, it should be understood as an intellectual and ethical practice to foster a more effective and functional relationship between anthropology and other disciplines, between academic and public knowledge, and between anthropologists and political action worldwide. We further envision "World Anthropologies" as a persistent effort of communication and collaboration in a spirit of openness and humility. What led us to embark on this endeavor was an enthusiasm for collaboration between scholars from different worlds but with overlapping commitments. Our collaboration came as a pleasant surprise even to ourselves, as we had different theoretical orientations, research interests, epistemological lenses, and even political sensibilities. It is our shared sense of dissatisfaction and disillusionment with certain realities of American anthropology, shared confusion about the purpose of anthropological scholarship, combined with the hope for taking our research interlocutors seriously through ethnography, that drove us to transcend differences in research specialization and made our collaboration possible (Xu & Zhan, 2024). Starting from such existential concerns, we see "World Anthropologies" as an ideal platform with both breadth and depth to discuss, debate, and expand the scholarly community's views of what anthropology is and what it is for. We understand collaboration as the central foundation for our editorship, for example, collaboration between the two of us, between authors and editors, between interviewers and interviewees, and between this and the other sections of AA. We also aim to recognize and explore the potential of gaining clarity from the margins. Both of us were trained in the United States as international students and spent years learning to see the world through theories and epistemologies largely developed at the hegemonic centers of knowledge production. But with cumulative experience of speaking to and writing for different audiences beyond the United States, we have become more conscious and critical about the limits of these dominant theories and epistemologies in understanding our home country, various communities we study, as well as the larger world we live in. Currently, we are positioned somewhat at the margins of global anthropological knowledge production, in terms of geographic region, topical specialization, and/or the hierarchical academic system. We are in between worlds. But marginal and ambiguous positions also generate creativity. Moving through academic communities and crossing geographical, cultural, social, and ideological boundaries can help anthropologists better understand our discipline in the plural and together find new reference points and lenses to reorient knowledge production. Anthropological research demands intellectual labor and deep engagement between individual minds, between scholars and research interlocutors in our fieldwork sites. But it is also more than that when we take one step back and examine how we survive within and beyond academic institutions. We acknowledge ethnographers' "intense vulnerability" (Pollard, 2009) in the field, especially for students. We are also sensitive to the fact that multiple and increasingly brutal conditions limit the very survival of scholars and scholarship, such as employment opportunities, training orientations, promotion mechanisms, publication metrics, visibility of and availability of funding for specific topics, and language biases. In the United States, for example, the number of doctoral graduates in anthropology between 1985 and 2014 increased from about 350 to around 530 graduates per year. However, approximately 79% of them do not obtain tenure-track positions in US academia (Speakman et al., 2018). Anthropologists elsewhere also struggle within the system, and one reason is that many countries outside the United States, for example, countries in the Global South, if not always the case, favor English publications and international venues today (Mathews et al., 2024). American anthropology holds itself as a single discipline with heightened internal fissures at the moment (Horowitz, Yaworsky, & Kickham, 2019). However, the American model of four-field anthropology cannot be assumed elsewhere. Rather, the different components of such a four-field model in other regions have quite diverse institutional origins and genealogical affinities with related disciplines. Moreover, the institutionalization of knowledge cannot be assumed as a unilateral process because it occurs in different manners and for different reasons across diverse spatial-temporal contexts. Some trace the institutionalization of anthropology to the study of folklore and ethnology (Vermeulen, 2013, 40–42) in Europe and further emphasize the multiple origins of contemporary Euro-American anthropology in the 18th century. For example, in France, until the 1960s, anthropologists were often trained initially in philosophy. Later, it was at anthropologist Maurice Godelier's suggestion that French research institutions started to employ the term "human and social sciences" in the 1980s (Bowen & Bentaboulet, 2002). In western Andalucía, the institutionalization of social anthropology should be understood as "a struggle for a decolonized discipline" (Roca & Martín-Diaz, 2016). In China, the institutionalization of anthropological knowledge across the country only came together after the 2000s (Zhan, 2024). We thus value reflections on the institutionalization of anthropology across countries, regions, and historical contexts. Indeed, anthropology takes its form within multiple conditions, and whether and how the discipline will survive cannot be assumed. The sense of intellectual crisis has always been present within anthropology and critique has evolved in various directions, for example, on how anthropology has been facing "difficulties in formulating an adequate theory of social change" (Asad, 1979), "approaching the issues at stake in the reality we face" (Motta, 2019), and losing "its ability to criticize based on in-depth knowledge" (Jebens, 2010). There is an urgency to seek clarity regarding the serious work anthropologists should do in response to structural transformations and urgent problems. At a time of globalization of knowledge and education, anthropological knowledge can be mistaken as unified and hegemonic. This condition has led many young students to study anthropology in Western countries. At the global level, the concrete tensions with local publication venues and incentive mechanisms played out in particular ways in different countries or academic systems. (Mathews et al., 2024). However, as neoliberalism has entered a crisis in recent decades (Duménil & Lévy, 2013), anthropologists today face an increasingly contentious and complicated reality. American anthropology, ironically, is an apt example, in the sense that it has become quite provincialized at its institutional level, which makes the discipline difficult to respond to real-world challenges in a wider scope. We are particularly interested in those emergent interventions intended to break institutional boundaries and address difficulties within academia. Estalella and Criado (2019) promote an anthropology done together with others, assembling from scratch a conceptual body, caring for the mundane issues that are very often forgotten and rendered invisible by disciplinary fields. They therefore advocate "a DIY anthropology," anthropological practice rebuilt in ways that blur our disciplinary boundaries. In a similar spirit, we also take anthropology beyond academia in many parts of the world seriously. Of course, the increasingly precarious job market within academia contributes to the diversification of anthropology career paths, but the active engagement of anthropologists in other professions or other spheres has enhanced the relevancy and visibility of anthropology in some parts of the world as an unintended consequence. For example, recently in China, anthropological and ethnographic knowledge, both academic books translated from English and those written in Chinese, have become popular and influential among the general public, as evidenced by remarkable book sales, media attention and outreach opportunities, and a booming nonfiction writing industry inspired by it. In doing so, we also hope to reflect on and emphasize the relationships between concrete institutional bases of anthropological knowledge (i.e., universities, research organizations, NGOs, and media agencies) and larger political and geopolitical processes (Green, 2009). We also aim to understand the institutionalization of anthropological knowledge around the world against or in relation to other social structures and realities that shape our lives. Since 2019, Günel, Varma, and Watanabe have been developing the concept of "patchwork ethnography" to spotlight how ethnographers conduct fieldwork amid intersecting personal and professional responsibilities. They have highlighted the fact that many ethnographers feel the pressure to suspend familial and professional ties to separate "the field" from "home" for prolonged periods. We appreciate the notion of "patchwork ethnography" in particular because it illuminates a basic but overlooked fact that anthropologists are producing knowledge while living their private lives (Günel et al., 2020; Günel & Watanabe, 2024). Seeing world anthropologies through this lens, we interrogate how researchers' personal lives impact the process of knowledge production, showcase the innovations that have stemmed from efforts to "balance multiple commitments, and advocate for writing with rather than against the disruptions that might characterize anthropological research projects" (Günel & Watanabe, 2024, 131–32). Globalization of knowledge transmission does mean that many scholars travel between different but intersecting worlds. Take our own journeys as an example: We received education first in China and then in the United States. Although we now work on opposite sides of the Pacific, both of us still write for and engage with both English-speaking and Chinese-speaking audiences and attune ourselves to different linguistic, intellectual, political, and moral contexts. A sense of in-betweenness became our starting point in this exciting endeavor of coediting "World Anthropologies." It characterizes knowledge production for many anthropologists across the world. It weaves individual scholars' pursuits into the larger disciplinary trajectories. In-betweenness is, of course, not a new topic. Anthropologists have always been traveling across boundaries. Doing fieldwork itself has in-betweenness at its very core. But we hope to highlight the experience of many anthropologists whose experience is more complicated. Anthropologists have reflected on "native anthropologists" and positionalities for many years since the 1990s. Recent critique of US anthropology calls for "continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production" (Rouse, 2023, 356), or essentially, the need to critically and intentionally reflect on the "silent universalist pretensions" of US anthropology (Ribeiro, 2021). "Attending to pluriversal ontologies, diverse regional histories, and context-inspired research approaches requires letting go of totalizing narratives about what the discipline was or should be" (Rouse, 2023, 358). This call for humility and warning against totalizing narratives is especially relevant for exploring the multifaceted in-betweenness. Building upon and expanding from such critique, we would like to take seriously the myriad entanglements between US anthropology and anthropologists based in or originating from other parts of the world. In-betweenness is not just a singular dimension of experience, but rather a relevant, prevalent, and contested condition facing contemporary anthropological knowledge production around the world. Many anthropologists today find themselves situated between multiple contexts and traversing various boundaries, in a more complex manner than ever before. We are navigating through interconnected global and local knowledge systems, mediating across different intellectual traditions, oscillating between diverse linguistic communities, weaving through multiple epistemologies, negotiating different, sometimes contradictory ethical demands, bridging gaps across disciplines, and expanding our horizons beyond the academe and into public engagements and activism. We highlight the necessity of "muddying the waters" (Nagar, 2014), to challenge dominant epistemologies and neat categories, to reflect on the intersecting multiplicity of identities, and to facilitate conversations across different academic communities beyond the hegemonic voices of US anthropology, conversations that are "deeper, not just perfunctory" (Ribeiro, 2021). One entry point to closely examine the multifaceted and fundamental condition of in-betweenness in world anthropologies is to create conversations with individual scholars through featured interviews and/or round-table formats. In such conversations, we expose and embrace the messiness of anthropological knowledge production in different historical, institutional, and linguistic contexts. We explore the challenges and opportunities of individual anthropologists traversing multiple worlds and discuss how they might potentially connect and transform these different worlds. "World Anthropologies" offers a platform to zoom in and tell stories about the intellectual journeys and struggles of individual anthropologists. Many anthropologies positioned in different nexuses of intellectual traditions and political landscapes have unique and relevant stories to tell. These stories are not intended to construct role models or articulate experiences to emulate for early career anthropologists in order to guide their own work. We explicitly caution against amplifying the voices of already prominent figures or reinforcing the popularity of already influential theories in American anthropology. Rather, we hope these pieces can show how anthropologists in different regions work under constraints and produce scholarship that speaks to diverse audiences in and beyond academic circles. Such storytelling not only allows us to trace and contextualize where concrete knowledge comes from but also offers us an entry point to understand the mechanisms of knowledge production in various contexts. Compared to many other disciplines in the social sciences, anthropologists are generally more comfortable weaving fieldwork reflections into published work, for such reflections are considered methodologically valuable and ethically relevant. Compared to fieldwork experience, however, reflections of the contingency of our analytical work and the messiness of our intellectual journeys gain much less attention in academic products. Anthropologists are still cautious, hesitant, or even lack a language to articulate our intellectual detours, struggles, and crises. Many backstage stories are folded into or hidden behind coherent and eloquent arguments. Of course, intellectual detours and backstage stories are personal and may not always be relevant to the scholarly task. But once brought to the forefront, they might well become critical resources to shed light on and clarify how anthropologists can and should connect to others and the world. Telling stories about the confusion, detours, and crises in individual scholars' intellectual inquiry is also an attempt to practice the kind of feminist anthropology we aspire to do. Instead of showcasing assertiveness, which often appears to be the necessary ingredient of good scholarship, we aim to bring more openness and humility through the pieces we curate. Our own collaboration starts from shared frustration (Xu & Zhan, 2024) and can be identified as an expression of "feminist epistemology" (Hong, 2021). Honesty, openness, and even vulnerability (Behar, 1997) can serve as a vantage point to generate new energy, new questions, and new scholarly orientations, especially at the time of our discipline's existential crisis. World anthropologies cannot overlook the existing scheme of the nation-state, which is still the most relevant power system today, dominating social-economic relations and geological conditions. But to recognize the plural nature of anthropology, it is also important to go beyond such a spatial imagination in reflections on knowledge production. Other scales and units of analysis are also relevant for understanding how realities are constructed. One of the major tasks still has to do with colonialism. Contemporary postcolonialism has informed anthropological reflections for a long time and continues to shape how we think about the future of our discipline. After the late 1970s, globalization and the rise of neoliberalism became another key framework that offered anthropologists new references in time (Ganti, 2014), shaping many research projects and contributing to what Ortner (2016) calls "dark anthropology." Although these debates are still relevant and vigorous, it is also important to bring in other references, for example, postsocialist conditions (Zhan, 2024), to understand the development of anthropology in many parts of the world. Ribeiro (2021) cautions against generalizing an American-centric decolonization to anthropologies elsewhere as it resonates differently in different countries and histories. Rouse (2023, 356) asks whether the term decolonizing itself runs the risk of "recentering Western framings of histories and identities." From a "world" perspective, we believe that the value of decolonizing anthropology is less about topical centrality (i.e., whether or not we focus on the topic of coloniality itself––which in the United States is closely tied to its domestic politics today) but rather about appreciating the highly diversified political sensibilities around the world that are cultivated in specific historical contexts and orient us in research and anchor our lives now. Therefore, instead of borrowing an overarching "umbrella term" (Ribeiro, 2021) to explain away concrete issues and grassroots concerns, we embrace plural ways of problematization in world anthropologies. Various schools of thought also go beyond national borders. They are often treated as competing discourses that gain relevance and popularity in time and space. Seeing from the world anthropologies perspective, however, these schools of thought are less about "truth" but rather fluid anthropological engagements that may or may not be relevant and useful to us at present and in the future. We are interested in how different intellectual traditions travel through space and time and why some concepts appear more appealing than others in given conditions. A deeper understanding of such formation of social critics is crucial for anthropologists to position our work in time and space and become conscious about what purposes we direct our intellectual energy for, both as individual expressions and as collective actions. Besides pluralizing analytical lenses, we also put ethics at the center of our section. The 2023 American Anthropological Association (AAA) presidential address emphasizes that "ethics—what we mean by ethics, how we invoke ethics, and how we demonstrate our ethics—should be at the center of our conversation" (Pérez, 2024, 388). We applaud the effort in critiquing the codification of research ethics in university institutions (Pérez, 2024), an important step in going beyond an entrenched US-centrism. Seeing from a world anthropologies perspective, however, we approach ethics as a more diffusive and fundamental condition that anthropologists all around the world are grappling with, as we are situated within intersecting political and academic hierarchies. Some basic but hard questions follow. For example, how do we understand and justify the purpose of our research? How do we relate to our research interlocutors, local collaborators, and other stakeholders at various stages of our work (Harrison, 2016; Rouse, 2023)? How do we make sense of and live with the impact of our scholarship (Fassin, 2017)? Moreover, to bring "the world" into our focus, we need to consciously expand from a Western moral philosophy foundation and ground our discussion in a pluralistic ethical framework (Wong, 2023). This means to take seriously different types of ethics that are imagined and practiced across societies, to explore multiple ways scholars in different academic communities might "care"-fully and responsively engage with the people they study, and to address various possibilities of contradictions and dilemmas in their practice. In the spirit of collaboration, openness, and reflexivity, we invite scholars and practitioners in anthropology and related disciplines globally to work with us. We will curate individual interviews, roundtables with scholars based in a certain region, and forums or special collections on vital topics, in coordination with the journal's other sections. We look forward to exploring existential issues facing the world, such as technology and AI, war and violence, ecological challenges, migration and (im)mobility, emergent social experiments as political actions, and social critique from the Global South, among others. We would like to broaden the discussions on our discipline's enduring strengths and defining features from a "world" perspective, in particular, the practice and ethics of ethnography in relation to other methodologies and other disciplines (Negrón et al., 2024) across different academic communities. We believe that pluralistic world anthropologies can become a venue for meaningful conversations that help address subdisciplinary divisions within anthropology (Horowitz et al., 2019) and build outward connections with other fields. One example is to gather anthropologists from different regions to reflect on cross-societal comparative research popular in behavioral sciences today (Barrett, 2020) but still largely grounded in Western-centric theoretical and epistemological frameworks. These are just a few possibilities as we begin to envision our editorial work. We are excited to hear your ideas and suggestions and humbly hope to make this section more relevant to world anthropologies.