Grappling with Diversification

A year into our editorship, what have we done, and what are we planning, to help support a more inclusive intellectual agenda and start addressing the structural barriers that face scholars of color and institutions in the Global South? This was, after all, key to our pitch as incoming editors. As we anticipated in our first editorial, this is a slow, long term, and often difficult project: there are no quick fixes to institutional inequalities that have been embedded over centuries. Trying to decolonize knowledge from within a sub-disciplinary journal published in English by one of the largest academic publishers on the globe is also a task fraught with contradiction: one which, ultimately, demands more than bland statements about inclusivity, diversity and equality. And as the term “decolonization” has increasingly been co-opted by institutions to signal a whole range of different kinds of commitments, we recognize the need to define more specifically the parameters of our own activities. Decolonization, as Tuck and Yang (2012) have made clear, is, strictly speaking, about the repatriation of land. When the language of decolonization is used to speak of equality, diversity, inclusivity, and social justice, “it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recentres whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future” (2012:3). Anthropology cannot be innocent, and neither can this journal. Where, then, does that leave us? Do we shut down anthropology just as the discipline is renewing conversations about addressing the racist, colonial structures of power that made it possible and thinkable, and that continue to maintain it today? What, practically, can be done in a journal such as this?

Our intention, then, is not to dismantle the whole anthropological enterprise and the sub-disciplines – of which medical anthropology is one – that it has spawned. Disciplinary knowledge has a value in framing the kinds of problems that we, as medical anthropologists, contend with, particularly in a discipline that demands we take seriously epistemologies rooted in places and histories beyond those of the Western philosophical canon. Anthropology, without denying its long-documented role in colonialism (Asad 1973; Hymes 1974), is also well-placed to illuminate a plurality of ways of knowing about the world, and to continue to put under scrutiny the multiple ways that the violence of racialization, and ongoing processes of colonialism and postcolonialism, have on health, disease, and the environment. Ethnographic method remains an important tool with which to center silenced voices and experiences (Mafeje 1998).

Our focus here at Medical Anthropology to foster inclusiveness remains. That is, we wish to ensure we publish the best research in medical anthropology wherever and whoever it comes from, but we also acknowledge that putting such an ethic into practice demands that we face up to difficult questions. When it comes to citational practices, for example, we have already been vocal in encouraging peer reviewers to think beyond scholarship produced from within privileged centers of academia in the Global North when they recommend scholars that our authors should cite. We have also asked authors to consider work produced by scholars working for institutions in or from the places and contexts their articles engage with. But what happens when, as often seems to be the case, authors and reviewers are unaware of the indigenous scholars they might otherwise cite: precisely because the latter, whose knowledge is more routinely devalued by the current system, are less likely to be published in the high-profile academic journals we read? One way, of course, is to seek out peer reviewers working in those less well-resourced institutions, particularly in the Global South. We have been using our expanded editorial board to help us expand our pool of reviewers in this way, and our work on this continues. But it is not a panacea. For one thing, peer review is a form of free academic labor, and so there is an irony in that, in order to be more inclusive, we need to ask our colleagues in the Global South to do more unpaid work, intellectually rewarding as it may be. In addition, as Nathalis Wamba, a Professor of Education, noted in a recent discussion on decolonizing universities, despite being born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the entirety of his own education – like that of his father – was about instilling in him what he calls “Western values” (2020). Knowledge that emerges from institutions in the Global South is not, simply by virtue of its apparent origin, necessarily free of colonial baggage, and therefore nor, as Wamba points out, are those who author it.

We continue to call for more full-length article submissions that address these questions. What evidence can be brought to bear on the impact of colonialism, the loss of land, the continual derogation of indigenous expertise and scholarship, and the effects of colonial extraction and exclusion on health? Colonial capitalism has undoubtedly brought about climate change and environmental destruction, which in turn bring new fears about emerging disease (Wald 2008), migration (Harper and Raman 2008), and direct effects of climate change on health. With these fears come renewed attempts at domination and exclusion – the closing of national borders, and the folding back in of coloniality into conservation (Collins et al 2021) and white supremacist fears about climate change and population increase (Dow and Lamoreaux 2020). In order to promote debate about these (and other) timely issues, we have introduced a new kind of article – “Topical Insights” – for which we invite shorter length submissions of rapid response, notes-from-the-field style articles, to inform readers of research that is of immediate interest. These are in addition to our other form of short-form writing – guest editorials – which we hope will continue to provide directional pieces of writing based on current developments in the field of medical anthropology.

The hegemony of Western intellectual traditions – and the dominance of powerful institutions in determining which ideas become fashionable and which are relegated – can make it hard to assess which scholarship has the greatest merit, especially if authors and reviewers, wherever they have come from or studied, have been inculcated in certain ways of thinking. Do we favor what, from various perspectives, is currently fashionable, and which we know will be widely cited, over that which might be framed as more provincial? And how do we guard against asking our authors to frame their data in epistemological frameworks that appeal to our own Western educations, always demanding the new? How, even, do we begin to disentangle the Western – or the “colonial” – from the so-called “indigenous,” let alone make decisions about the relative merits of each in relation to a specific article? How can indigenous knowledge be respected as knowledge, as opposed to the object of knowledge?

The challenge before us, and other editors of academic journals, is clearly a large one; one that we do not ever contemplate completing. But in sharing these thoughts with all our authors and peer reviewers we invite them also to reflect on the same questions. Peer review is an important place to start (Olusanya et al. 2021; Oti and Ncayiyana 2021). It will take time, but our publication processes will become more inclusive. We also recognize that we do not have all the answers, and that the goal posts are continually shifting. For that reason we will continue to seek the counsel of our editorial board and others, to listen to what they have to say and to adapt our approach as we go. In the meantime, we will take practical steps to make space for philosophies and systems of knowledge beyond those that have dominated academic anthropology. That includes, as we noted above, by self-consciously changing our peer review system and by improving our guidelines to authors and peer-reviewers alike; by taking the trouble to find reviewers beyond the usual suspects and who are not necessarily the first names to pop up on a Google search; and to engage in ongoing, open debate with editorial board members working in institutions in the majority world to educate ourselves in the breadth of scholarly expertise that might be drawn upon. In doing so we hope – slowly, step-by-step – to play our own small part in changing what constitutes the canon in medical anthropology.

We wish to thank the Editorial Board on whose experience we have leaned considerably over the last 12 months for their advice and support, as well as for their hands-on contributions to the publication process. We welcome Dr Adia Benton who joined us shortly after our last editorial went to print. Sadly, we are losing two members who are stepping down after many years of service – Professor Carolyn Smith-Morris, who has taken up a new role as President of the Society for Medical Anthropology, and Dr Daphna Birenbaum Carmeli, who has contributed ten years to the board. Finally, we extend enormous thanks to Dr Victoria Team who has provided us with unceasing support during the very steep learning curve of our first year as editors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Staples

James Staples is co-editor of Medical Anthropology, and a Reader in Social Anthropology at Brunel University London. His current research explores the experiences of people affected by leprosy in India, and includes a more general interest in disability.

Rebecca Marsland

Rebecca Marsland is co-editor of Medical Anthropology, and a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research focuses on honeybee health and One Health.