From the editor

This is the last issue of American Ethnologist under my editorship. Since July 2015, when Angelique Haugerud passed the editorial baton to me, the journal has received about 1,100 manuscripts, which I have read at least once each (many multiple times). Prospective authors have also sent me dozens of manuscripts for a preliminary opinion as to their suitability for AE. About 12,000 invitations have gone out to potential manuscript reviewers, 4,000 of whom accepted the invitation; most submitted sometimes detailed and almost always useful evaluations of the merits of and problems with the manuscript. Authors of submissions have received these reports along with a detailed cover letter highlighting the main areas that they need to pay attention to, whether or not the manuscript is accepted. Editing AE has been extremely time consuming but ultimately rewarding. It is a project I could not have undertaken had I been younger or precariously employed, as too many anthropologists are today. And, as I am reaching old age, I will never again have the energy needed for such an endeavor. During the first three years of the editorship, a grant from the European Research Council and, in the last year, a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University freed me up from teaching duties and enabled me to devote time to editing. For one semester between the grant and the fellowship, I did teach courses, and this was the hardest period. Few universities today consider editing a journal, however prestigious, a legitimate enterprise worthy of accommodation, and my employer was no exception. I have found considerable satisfaction in helping authors sharpen their arguments and explore the significance of their work for larger questions in anthropology, assisting some to publish their first major article and bringing scholars who are not based in the privileged centers of academia into the conversation. Editing has also been a personally fulfilling experience. I now know about more social and cultural anthropology than I ever thought was possible and can write and talk with confidence about topics I knew nothing about four years ago. Editing the journal has given me the opportunity to communicate with many scholars I would otherwise never have had the pleasure to interact with. I have received a lot of fan mail, even from authors of manuscripts I rejected, who expressed their appreciation for the care and seriousness with which reviewers and I approached the review process. Few authors have turned out to be ill mannered or ill tempered, and I have received surprisingly little hate mail and no explicitly articulated death threat. For many early-career authors, writing for publication is a task shrouded in mystery and the object of considerable guesswork and speculation, much of which turns out to be mistaken. The mysterious aura that surrounds the process has motivated me to conduct workshops on how to best develop an anthropological argument, avoid vacuous statements, and balance ethnography and theory. It also prompted me and AE senior copyeditor Pablo Morales to write “Tell the Story: How to Write for American Ethnologist” (Besnier and Morales 2018), in which we urge authors to capitalize on one of the most attractive features of ethnographic writing, namely storytelling. Judging from the article's download numbers, it has proved tremendously popular, even apparently among mathematicians.1 While editing the journal in the past four years, I have been backed up by five associate editors—Susan Brownell, Jeanette Edwards, Susana Narotzky, Paige West, and Kevin Yelvington—who have offered their advice when I needed it and who seconded me in decisions on manuscripts authored by scholars with whom I had a conflict of interest. I also received invaluable support from the 50-odd members of the editorial board, the most international and diverse of any major anthropology journal currently in existence. I am very grateful for their professionalism and collegiality. I owe a considerable debt to the nearly 1,000 authors who submitted manuscripts. The authors of the 167 articles and forum contributions that appeared in print in volumes 43 to 46 are the ones who have contributed most directly to the quality of the journal, as have the hundreds of authors of book reviews. But the heroes of the review process are the thousands of manuscript reviewers who have contributed their expertise to the journal and have done so anonymously, for no reward or acknowledgment other than an automatically generated email thanking them for their input. AE does not publish a yearly list of reviewers, as some journals do, because it would be far too long and could compromise the anonymity of the double-blind review process. AE has seen a steady rise in its impact factor, continuing a trend begun on my predecessor's watch. A journal's impact factor is the ratio of how many times its articles were cited in a given number of years to the number of articles it published in the same period. According to a very recent version of the Journal Citation Report by Clarivate Analytics, the most notable increase took place in 2018: the two-year impact factor rose from 2.341 to 3.053, and the five-year impact factor from 3.129 to 3.216. These figures pale in comparison to journals in the natural sciences, including journals primarily concerned with archaeology and physical anthropology, but they are commendable for a “slow” subdiscipline like sociocultural anthropology. Of the 90 journals in all subfields of anthropology cataloged in the Journal Citation Report, the journal's rank rose from 14 to 5, and in cultural anthropology AE is now the second most cited journal. Citation counts and other forms of bibliometric data have been subjected to considerable criticism. They can fluctuate unpredictably as the result of many factors, many of which have little to do with intellectual quality. Impact factors are blind to the context in which an article is cited, so both positive and negative citations contribute to them. They can also be manipulated: some journal editors, for example, have been known to encourage authors of accepted manuscripts to cite articles previously published in the same journal or to add a “for further reading” rubric at the end of articles listing topically related articles in the journal, which boost impact factors. These have not been AE’s practices. In fact, only 8.4 percent of AE citations are to AE articles, in contrast to the average self-citation percentage of 11.1 in all anthropology journals. AE’s percentage has been steadily decreasing, in contrast to that of other journals of comparable quality, where it has increased. Despite its limitations, however, bibliometrics commands the attention of university administrators and the technocratic bodies that have long colonized academic lives. We are caught in a vicious circle in which we know that these bibliometric measures should be taken with a large grain of salt, yet they bestow institutional visibility to a journal, encourage readers to read the journal, and increase the number of submissions (and, one hopes, their quality), particularly from junior scholars hoping to forge a career in an increasingly competitive job market. So until we abolish global capitalism, we'd be wise to heed them. What, then, leads an article to be frequently cited? Here we can find clues in detailed figures on AE articles. As faithful readers of the journal know well, AE has in the last decade published shorter, expedited articles on topics relevant to contemporary world events, such as the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri; the UK's 2016 Brexit referendum; the election of a reality-television personality as the US president in 2016; and Europe's refugee crisis since 2015. These AE Forums exemplify a trend toward “engaged” research that, as Sherry Ortner (2019) notes, characterizes the work of many present-day anthropologists who ground their research, perhaps more than ever, in timely critiques of power and inequality. Other journals publish similar pieces but prefer to corral them onto their website, undertaking a faster, more flexible publishing process. AE’s forums all appear in the print edition, but they have not supplanted traditional research articles, which remain the journal's raison d’être. Nor should research on cutting-edge political events like the refugee crisis, or “crisis chasing,” as Heath Cabot (2019) terms it, become the norm in our discipline. Yet, as Cabot argues and Yatun Sastramidjaja (2019) further develops in her analysis of keywords and key words in AE in the last four years, anthropological research can be engaged, relevant to the moment, and of high quality all at once. This is borne out by our forums, which have proved quite popular: of the 20 most cited articles from January 1, 2016, to June 30, 2019, 10 are forum articles (see Table 1). In addition, one AE forum article is now the most downloaded in the AAA's portfolio of journals: Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa's “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States” (Bonilla and Rosa 2015), which has outperformed Horace Miner's (1956) “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.”2 These patterns may be somewhat skewed, since more forums appeared in the first few years of my editorship and older articles tend to be cited more. Yet readers’ particular interest in forum contributions is confirmed by download figures. Again, 10 of the 20 most cited articles published in AE in 2016–19 are articles published as part of a forum (see Table 2). All in all, it seems that capturing and maintaining readers’ interest in a journal like AE depends in part on the “right” balance of traditional research articles and anthropological commentaries on current events. Achieving such balance is a question not only of how many pages are devoted to the forums but also how much time and energy is expended on them: they are complicated to organize, and they place authors, reviewers, editors, and copyeditors under stringent deadlines and tax their goodwill, patience, and intellectual abilities. For this reason, I must thank all the authors who contributed to forums during my editorship. In the last four years, colleagues have often asked me where I see sociocultural anthropology “heading,” as reflected in the work submitted to the journal. I assume that underlying this question is another question: What kinds of issues does one need to work on to get an article accepted in a major journal? I have largely disappointed my interlocutors: it is very difficult to discern any particular trends in the submissions. As Ilana Gershon (2019) remarks in this issue, Sherry Ortner's (1984, 126) description of anthropology as a “a thing of shreds and patches” remains apropos today. But amid the discipline's multiplicity, Gershon identifies a particularly promising trend in works that focus on what she calls “multiple social orders.” The theme itself is not new, being central to the early works on globalization in the 1990s. What is relatively new, however, is that ethnographers are engaging seriously with what it means to live across boundaries, on various scales at once, and between different regimes of power, rather than simply noting that it happens. Rather than simply describing these dynamics as “assemblages” and taking this characterization as a theoretical statement, works in this vein strain to understand the relationships that make up what others might identify as an assemblage. According to what I have read in the last four years, this project is where anthropology might make its greatest contributions in the years to come. Despite its many pleasures, editing AE has not been a bed of roses. As many have pointed out, the world of academic publishing is in crisis. Over the years it has become a huge, much-criticized capitalist venture; many academics have become deeply cynical of journals that help enrich corporate CEOs in the publishing industry. We have yet, however, to come up with a viable funding model to make all journals open access. Publishing a journal is expensive, and some of the problems that one infamous open-access journal has recently encountered only demonstrate the difficulties involved. Few journals, meanwhile, can maintain minimal standards of quality thanks to cost cutting, the outsourcing of production to the proverbial sweatshops of the Global South, and the proliferation of journals on every obscure topic (to say nothing of the predatory journals that daily invite us to join their editorial boards). This crisis affects journal editing, which is plagued with problems that did not exist when it was a pen-and-paper affair, as I have learned in conversations with some of my predecessors. The most serious problem is evident in the figures I provide on manuscript reviewers in the first paragraph of this editorial, namely the unwillingness of so many scholars to review manuscripts. Having to contact 18 scholars in order to persuade four to review an early-career scholar's submission is far from unusual, a situation that in my naïveté I was entirely unprepared for when I took on the editorship.3 This situation has a domino effect on journal editing: because it was so hard to obtain reviews, I found myself looking much more severely at incoming submissions, so the rate of desk rejections increased dramatically during my editorship, thus robbing authors (mostly early-career scholars and scholars on the academic periphery) of the opportunity to receive guidance on how to improve their work. On occasion, I was obliged to return decisions to authors based on only one or two peer reviews. When I have broached the topic with scholars who were willing to discuss the problem, I have received a predictable litany of explanations: “I review for AE all the time!” “There are too many journals!” “I receive five manuscript review invitations a day!” “Why me? Fifteen other people are working on this topic.” “I boycott journals that are not open access.” On the last point, the only major open-access journal left in anthropology is still supported by Wiley, so if one boycotts journals that are part of the capitalist juggernaut, one has to boycott all journals in the discipline. It is indeed the case that, in the audit culture in which we live, most academics are spending an inordinate number of their waking hours attending to mind-numbing administrative tasks, above and beyond their increasingly bureaucratized teaching duties. But, with a few notable exceptions, the least enthusiastic manuscript reviewers are in fact the lucky few who inhabit the hallways of elite institutions, where research is valued and prioritized, and teaching, advising, and administrative duties are relatively light, so overwork and overcommitment do not explain why so many of us refuse to review manuscripts. In a brief article that we wrote for Anthropology News (Grinker and Besnier 2016), I and Richard Grinker, editor of Anthropological Quarterly, reminded our colleagues that the peer review process is a system of generalized reciprocity: we gladly accept the generosity of anonymous scholars who evaluate and comment on our work, so it behooves us to return the favor. As anthropologists who have been weaned on the century-old debate on the Maussian gift, we all know the fundamental importance of the obligation to give, to accept, and to counter-give for society to exist. During my editorship, thinking of manuscript reviewing as reciprocity became particularly pertinent when, to my stupefaction, I would receive submissions from scholars who had systematically turned down all review invitations, or when scholars would complain that I had rejected their graduate student's manuscript, even though these same scholars had done no reviewing in years. 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