Anthropologies and Americas

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST FROM THE EDITOR Anthropologies and Americas Tom Boellstorff Editor-in-Chief ANTHROPOLOGY, “AMERICA,” AND THE WORLD A lthough not always an explicit topic of discussion, the “America” of American Anthropologist is productively pol- ysemous. One could imagine an alternate universe in which we spoke (rather awkwardly) of the United States Anthropolo- gist and its parent organization, the “Anthropological Asso- ciation of the United States.” Certainly, the United States has been the dominant referent of “American” with regard to the American Anthropological Association. After all, the AAA was formed as a “national organization” and has always been centered in the United States in terms of membership and administrative structure (AAA n.d.). With regard to AA, editorial staff and board members have overwhelmingly been based on the United States. English has always been the language of the journal, and most authors published in AA are located in the United States. Despite this (in many ways intentional) centering of AA on the United States, the journal (like the AAA more broadly) has always been shaped by strong cosmopolitan countercurrents. Many early “American” anthropologists were immigrants—not least, Franz Boas. Anthropologists from outside the United States have long participated in the work of the AAA and contributed to the pages of AA. Above all, from its very first issue, AA presented research on the lives of people outside the United States, past and present. This strong transnational emphasis appeared alongside an at- tention to American Indians and other minoritized groups. Both of these emphases destabilized dominant, triumphalist narratives of the United States, voicing the stories, experi- ences, and lifeworlds of those sidelined or ignored in those narratives. In the contemporary period, leaders in the AAA and those involved with American Anthropologist have worked to further transnationalize the association and the jour- nal. When I became editor-in-chief, one of my first acts was to eliminate the fee for non-AAA members to submit manuscripts to American Anthropologist. This fee, listed on the website at the time as $100 but set internally at $50, pro- vided a minimal amount of income. However, it certainly acted to exclude those without the institutional or personal resources to pay for AAA membership, including both schol- ars outside the United States and scholars in the United States not at major research institutions. This policy shift is likely one reason why the number of submissions (and published research articles) from outside the United States has risen under my editorship. I also internationalized the editorial board (about one-third of its members are now from out- side the United States); one of many benefits of this is that it makes it easier to get recommendations for high-quality reviewers from outside the United States. Another idea I have explored is a “world anthropologies” occasional series in which authors craft pieces focusing on anthropological work in a non-English language. The article might be pub- lished both in English and the language in question, helping AA readers gain a greater appreciation for anthropological research outside the United States. In addition to these innovations, in 2009 I implemented the first non-English abstracts policy in the history of AA. Under this policy, authors have had the option to include abstracts in one or two languages other than English, so long as they do all the translations themselves. We have now secured AAA funding to translate abstracts into Spanish even if an author cannot do so. As a result, with the support of the AAA and the Committee on World Anthropologies, I have altered the policy on non-English abstracts. Now, all abstracts of research articles published in AA will appear in both English and Spanish. Authors will still have the option of providing one or two additional abstracts in other languages should they wish to do so. This means that all research articles will now have two abstracts, and some will have three or even four abstracts. Because we limit abstracts in AA to 200 words, this will not be excessive or distracting. Instead, these short abstracts in multiple languages will help build research communities on a global scale. By always having abstracts in Spanish, we gesture toward a more expansive notion of “American anthropology” that takes all of the Americas as its referent, acknowledging the importance of Latin America in the hemisphere. I am excited by this reframing of “America” in less nationalist (indeed, parochial) terms. Like all of the steps I and others have taken to inter- nationalize American Anthropologist, the inclusion of Spanish abstracts for all research articles is imperfect, part of a larger journey. Spanish is, of course, a colonial language in its own right, dominating over a range of indigenous languages of c 2012 by the American Anthropological AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 114, No. 2, pp. 181–183, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01416.x