In an editorial to the first ever issue of Ethnos published in January 1936, the then editors pointed out, a little nervously, that if the journal was not to die out from ‘inanition’ by the end of the year it would require financial support. Their fears were unnecessary. Some 83 years later, in 2019, Ethnos is thriving, with more readers, more issues per year, and more articles than at any time in its history. It is therefore an opportune moment to take stock and assess where Ethnos has been recently and where it is heading. Much has happened since you last heard from us, back in 2011, when we announced that Ethnos had become part of Taylor & Francis’s digital archive.
In the eight years since then, Ethnos has gone through a sustained period of expansion. Ethnos now appears not four but five times a year in a new and larger format. The increased space and number of issues mean that Ethnos today annually publishes twice as many articles (around 50) as we did in 2011 and with a steadily increasing research impact. As an example, the impact factor of over 1.8 that Ethnos achieved last year on the Thompson ISI put Ethnos seventh amongst all journals of social and cultural anthropology, making it the most prominent journal of social and cultural anthropology with European roots.
And there is more good news: roughly, a year ago Noa Vaisman took over as the Ethnos book reviews editor. Since then, Noa has been commissioning book reviews of some of the many exciting monographs and anthologies that appear in anthropology. Starting with this issue, we are delighted to announce that the Ethnos book review section is back in a new and vital format. The review section – featuring regular book reviews and the occasional review essay called Bookmarks – will be a permanent fixture of every Ethnos issue going forward.
All of this would not have been possible without your help, whether you are a regular reader, a submitting author, or a willing reviewer. It is hard to believe, but this year we (Mark and Nils) celebrate fifteen years as co-editors-in-chief of Ethnos. We want to take the opportunity to thank you all for making Ethnos what it is by reading the journal, by submitting your manuscripts to it, and by agreeing to review for us in spite of multiple other commitments. We also want to extend a special thank you to our advisory and editorial board members for all of your help and input, and to Lotte Meinert and Marie Bjerre Odgaard for their work with the book reviews.
Fifteen years is perhaps as good a vantage point as any from which to look back on the past and gaze a little into the future. The articles and theme issues featured in recent years traverse a very broad research field. Some add new twists to classical anthropological concerns such as ritual, martyrdom, mediums, Christianity, brokerage, and kinship. Others engage critically with the latest thinking on new topics, such as the Anthropocene, the carbon economy, festivals, or regimes of care. There have been theme issues on current political upheavals, such as the Arab Spring, new media, and global warming, while upcoming issues will engage topics such as the welfare state, the military, multispecies ethnography, biometrics, and logistics, to name but a few.
One thing is clear, judging from the wealth of themes: Ethnos and the discipline of anthropology that it seeks to represent are as vibrant as ever – the recent book symposium entitled After Ethnos in a sister journal notwithstanding.
It is always risky to speculate on the future direction of the journal, but some trends are discernible, among them multi-species ethnography, climate and the environment, uncertainly, vulnerability, and even the apocalypse. What is striking about many of these is how they resonate with much older themes within anthropology. Take animals, for example, they are scarcely a new interest. We already have the horse culture complex of Clark Wissler (1914), and animals as vehicles for thought in totemism. The journal has already published individual articles on animals ranging in size from whales to quolls (small, feisty, carnivorous marsupials native to Australia, for those of you who have never met one). Prediction, attempting to discern what is unfolding in front of us, evokes past scholarship on divination and prophecy. It is anthropology’s storehouse of ethnography that makes the discipline so well placed to bring a grounded, historically informed and insightful perspective to bear on many pressing and emergent issues.
We see it as our main editorial responsibility to continue to promote the in-depth, intimate, and innovative ethnography that has always been the hallmark of Ethnos. At a time when long-term fieldwork is under pressure from institutional realities and challenged by a changing world and new frames of analysis, Ethnos will continue to be a custodian of this ethnographic legacy in the belief that novel insight comes only when respect for the details and the complex is not being outrun by theoretical speculation. Attending to ethnographic detail and complexity (rather than merely asserting it) does not mean being atheoretical or missing the big picture. On the contrary, ethnographic details are nothing if not also inflections of theoretical reflection and bigger relations. Indeed, anthropological respect for the details has always been and remains vital in the face of sweeping claims about the end of truth, politics, the environment, the Holocene, and hope, regardless of their political provenance and intentions.
One thing is what we publish in Ethnos. Another is who we publish. In this regard, our commitment to diversity is equally strong. Ethnos receives submissions from across the world but with a clear concentration to the USA, UK, Western Europe, and Australia. We see a similar geographical distribution in countries and regions citing the journal. Although we want to maintain this strong base, we also want to see the journal build on the interest and readership that already exists in countries in Africa, Asia and South America. An historical curiosity here: Ethnos actually borrowed its name from a short-lived Mexican journal in the 1920s. In pursuit of this continuing ambition to widen the focus and appeal of the journal we will be starting a series of occasional pieces that reflect on the current state of affairs in national and regional anthropologies outside of the Euro-North American axis based on conversations between local practitioners
All in all, the last eight years have seen the journal go from strength to strength. With your support we will do all we can to maintain its positive development. These are fascinating and challenging times for anthropology and Ethnos intends to continue making its own unique contribution.