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 Günel 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.