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From the Associate Editorsof American Anthropologist

A G U S T´ I N F U E N T E SB A R B A R A R O S E J O H N S T O N

M I C H A E L S I L V E R S T E I NC A R L A M . S I N O P O L I

B A R B A R A Y N G V E S S O N

From the Associate Editor for BiologicalAnthropology

A G U S T ´ I N F U E N T E SUniversity of Notre Dame

As an anthropologist who specializes in questions that cir-

cle around evolutionary and biocultural facets of human-

ity, I am a biological anthropologist. I truly love anthro-

pology in the broadest possible sense, even to the point

of reading across subdisciplinary and other archaic divides

on purpose and for fun. I am honored to be asked to

be an associate editor for American Anthropologist. Ameri-

can Anthropologist is the flagship journal of our discipline

and main organization: it should be publishing the best

articles in anthropology. As Associate Editor for Biologi-

cal Anthropology, I want to facilitate the increase in sub-

missions from that broad cluster of practitioners who call

themselves “biological anthropologists.” Simultaneously, Iwant to assist in showing the large number of anthropol-

ogists who are not inclined toward questions involving

biological intersections that there is a great and underuti-

lized space of overlap and engagement for them in top-

ics and perspectives traditionally associated with biological

anthropology.

WHY DO I THINK THIS WAY?

I completed a B.A. in zoology and anthropology and an

M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Cali-

fornia, Berkeley (UCB). Despite the ridiculous level of in-

fighting in that department, I—as did so many of my

graduate cohort—benefited enormously from the amazing

minds, intellectual diversity, and critical intersectionality

that emerged from the faculty, students, and overall envi-

ronment at Berkeley in the 1980s and 1990s. Theexperience

seared into my mind the indelible desire for a contextual,

critical, and informed anthropology that is intellectually

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST , Vol. 110, Issue 2, pp. 171–174, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. C 2008 by the American Anthropological Association.

All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00022.x

stimulating and that has real-world relevance. Following

graduation and after teaching a year and half at UCB, I

taught six years at a midtier state school (Central Washing-ton University); since then, I have taught at a major pri-

vate university (University of Notre Dame). Experiencing,

practicing, and teaching anthropology at diverse institu-

tions across thousands of students and a varied assortment

of faculty colleagues only served to reinforce my love of a

truly generous and integrative anthropology.

My current work includes projects examining the evo-

lution of cooperation and social complexity in human and

primate societies; interrelations between physiologies, be-

havior, and ecologies in humans and primates; and the

human–nonhuman animal interface. I am also engaged

in open-ended research examining emergent complexi-

ties in evolutionary theory and philosophy of science.All of these research interests, by default, require me to

read and think across multiple arbitrary boundaries of

knowledge.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT AMERICAN

ANTHROPOLOGIST ?

You should care about American Anthropologist because

there is a problem in talking, reading, and engaging

across traditional divides in anthropology, which weak-

ens us all. American Anthropologist goes to every member

of the American Anthropological Association. It is crit-

ical that biological anthropologists start submitting, ata higher rate, manuscripts that demonstrate the depth

and breadth of current research, theory, and practice in

our (broad) area. Having anthropologists outside your

own arena of interest reading your work can result

in enhanced cross-fertilization within the discipline, on

the whole enabling improved research and theoretical



172 American Anthropologist • Vol. 110, No. 2 • June 2008

advancement for biological anthropology as well as other

anthropologies.

Please seriously consider two things: (1) submitting

high-quality bioanthropological manuscripts to Ameri-

can Anthropologist and (2) reading articles in American

Anthropologist even when they are not clearly of your

“subfield.”

Feel free to contact me with any and all com-

ments or questions on this topic at [email protected].

From the Associate Editor for PracticingAnthropology

B A R B A R A R O S E J O H N S T O N

Center for Political Ecology

I am delighted and honored to be asked to serve as the

Practicing Anthropology Associate Editor for American An-

thropologist, and appreciate this opportunity to introduce

myself and this new dimension of the AA Editorial Board.

I am the senior research fellow at the Center for Po-litical Ecology (Santa Cruz, California), an independent

action–research collective where, since 1991, I have con-

ducted human rights and environment research at the

request of affected communities and with the support of

private foundations. I am also an adjunct professor at

Michigan State University, and I have taught anthropology

and environmental studies at a number of universities and

colleges in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.

In the 1980s, I worked as an archaeologist in the U.S. Vir-

gin Islands, developing a preliminary database of prehis-

toric sites on 110 islands and cays while also conducting

research in support of my cultural ecology M.A. (San Jose

State University 1981) and political ecology Ph.D. (Univer-

sity of Massachusetts, Amherst 1987). In the 1990s, I helped

develop a cooperative agreement between the U.S. Envi-

ronmental Protection Agency and the Society for Applied

Anthropology to provide social science expertise to com-

munities, agencies, and institutions involved in environ-

mental health, impact assessment, planning, policy, and

problem-solving processes that include source water pro-

tection, environmental risk and hazards management, sus-

tainable development, and ecological restoration efforts. As

the Environmental Anthropology Project Director, I drafted

research proposals and scope of work contracts, and I su-

pervised the work and work products of 30-plus interns,

fellows, and technical consultants working in collabora-

tive and participatory projects with communities, organi-

zations, and tribal governments across the nation. During

this time, I also served on the AAA Committee for Human

Rights (CfHR) and conducted research through the CfHR

and the Center for Political Ecology on the human and en-

vironmental impacts and consequential damages of nuclearweapons testing, human radiation experimentation, invol-

untary resettlement, and large-dam development. In recent

years, I have advised the World Commission on Dams on

reparations and the right to remedy, served as an advisor

and expert witness for the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims

Tribunal, and advised dam-affected communities and their

advocates in Guatemala.

The point of this personal detail? In my career, I have

found incredible power in the four-field nature of our dis-

cipline and its central tenant of holistic research, and I

have applied this four-field approach within the classroom,

in my publications, and in my consultative relationships.

For me, practicing anthropology is not a fifth field but,rather, a common dimension of all anthropological work.

As a term and a subject area, practicing anthropology refers

to that broad array of research, methods, and outcomes

conducted inside and outside of academia with an explicit

problematized focus, often in collaborative and participa-

tory contexts, with the goal of further understanding the

human experience and with the aim of seeking some sort

of meaningful resolution or remedial outcome. I encourage

your submissions on the praxis, theoretical insights, and

social impacts of doing anthropology, and I look forward

to working with you. Write to me at [email protected].

From the Associate Editor for LinguisticAnthropology

M I C H A E L S I LV E R S T E I N

University of Chicago

In agreeing to serve in what could easily be a thankless

position, my pleasure is anticipatory: working with AA

Editor-in-Chief Tom Boellstorff and the very distinguished

other AA Associate Editors to flag and promote the best

work for our association’s “flagship journal.” I have de-

voted a considerable fraction of my own professional ef-

forts over the years to that silent partnership of assistance to



Fuentes et al. • From the Associate Editors 173

others’ writing and publication projects, which I consider

the essence of good “editorship”; indeed, I am perhaps more

gratified by my shadow CV of acknowledgments in publi-

cations by students and colleagues than by my own publi-

cation record. I would hope that I can transfer that kind of

collaborative encouragement to my editorial role at Ameri-

can Anthropologist.To my view, there has been a great turnaround in the

relations between the area of my charge, linguistic anthro-

pology, and the other areas of our collective anthropo-

logical purview. Starting almost a half-century ago, great

figures central to midcentury anthropology, such as John

Gumperz and Dell Hymes, attracted to our disciplinary

conversation concern for the social life of language-in-use

as a kind of program and paradigm for reintegration of

language into studies of culture; with a political economy

edge, it has become a “practice anthropology” of discourse.

The conversation has since been strengthened and deep-

ened in broader, semiotic, dialectical, and, indeed, political

economic turns. A hundred years ago, among the origi-nal Boasian “four fields,” anthropological linguistics had

already long been concerned with the grammatical, lexi-

cal, and historical-classificatory analysis of the languages

used by the peoples whom anthropologists at that time

studied, a “philology of the oppressed” in the colonial and

imperial order as we might see it, shading off into folk-

loristics, ethno- and prehistory, and issues of language-

culture-“race” (i.e., ethnic and ethnonational identity).

These perduring anthropological issues remain part of our

charge, only recentered by the conceptual and theoretical

framings of our present-day disciplinary conversations, of

which there are so many interesting and fruitful areas to

explore.So I very much want to emphasize that American An-

thropologist should be a publication venue for linguistic an-

thropologists to reflect the ever-increasing reintegration of

thinking about anthropological problems of interest to stu-

dents of other specialties through the focus of language

and discourse. Of course, there are now numerous jour-

nals across the range of the social sciences of language—

anthropological linguistics, linguistic anthropology, so-

ciolinguistics, and sociology of language—dedicated to

discipline-specific findings and debate. But along with

these, I want to assert the importance of publication in this

journal as a way of keeping before the writer–readership the

centrality of language in sociocultural life and in the his-tory (and prehistory) of social formations. I want to serve as

an editorial advocate for individual essays and reports, for

organized clusters of articles, and for other creative publica-

tion types in these pages that are inclusively dedicated to all

anthropology. Contact me at [email protected]

with your ideas, please!

From the Associate Editor for Archaeology

C A R L A M . S I N O P O L I

University of Michigan

I am delighted to join the AA Editorial Board as AA Asso-

ciate Editor for Archaeology and to have this opportunity

to introduce myself. I also would like to use this occasion to

invite archaeologists of all theoretical persuasions and re-

search specializations to consider contributing to American

Anthropologist.

Within the broad scope of contemporary anthropologi-

cal archaeology, my research focuses geographically on Asia

(particularly South Asia) and intellectually on a range of

questions related to the study of what archaeologists often

refer to as “complex societies”: from emergent territorial

polities to historic empires. Much of my fieldwork and writ-

ing has focused on questions of political economy and the

study of craft production and craft producers in the 14th

through 16th century South Indian Vijayanagara Empire,

where I also explored the intersections of textual and mate-

rial sources in the study of the human past. More recently

my research has shifted further into South India’s past to

the study of emergent social and political inequalities in

the first millennium B.C.E. Here, I continue my interests

in craft and political economy and am increasingly drawn

to broader questions concerning material culture and itsconstitutive role in human experience. I was trained in a

broad “four-field” anthropology department and now teach

in that same department. Both of these experiences have

affirmed in me a profound commitment to a holistic ap-

proach to anthropology and to the value of bringing broad

comparative perspective to bear in my own research and

teaching.

So why should archaeologists publish in American An-

thropologist ? Recently, I was invited to meet with an in-

terdisciplinary graduate student class on museums to dis-

cuss how contemporary archaeologists approach the study

of material culture. In a wide-ranging discussion with

scholars from multiple social sciences and humanities, we

touched on such topics as the nature of archaeological re-

search, the breadth of contemporary analytical and the-

oretical approaches, and the ethical and practical strate-

gies and obligations of conducting research among and

communicating with diverse local communities, from de-

scendent communities to national governments. At the end

of an intense three-hour discussion, the most common re-

action was “Wow, I had no idea that archaeology touched

on so many issues” (with the unspoken addendum, “that

are also of interest to me”). Although this group included



174 American Anthropologist • Vol. 110, No. 2 • June 2008

many nonanthropologists, I expect that this experience is

similar to ones that many of us have had with our an-

thropology colleagues and students. My point is that many

of the issues we address as archaeologists speak directly to

larger discussions across our discipline, and that anthropol-

ogy as a whole is richer when we speak and listen to each

other and when we pay serious attention to those placeswhere our various subdisciplinary approaches intersect, as

well as to those where they do not.

Thus, I would like to invite you to consider submitting

articles to the journal that speak to the richness and breadth

of contemporary archaeological research. Along with ex-

panding the visibility of archaeology in the journal overall,

I also hope that we can expand the representation of differ-

ent kinds of archaeologies, both as they are practiced within

the United States, where the majority of AAA members re-

side, and as they are practiced around the world by scholars

from a broad range of intellectual traditions.I look forward to this opportunity to work with the

editorial board and with you. Please feel free to contact me

with any and all questions and suggestions at sinopoli@

umich.edu.

From the Associate Editor for SocioculturalAnthropology

B A R B A R A Y N G V E S S O NHampshire College

I am honored to be invited to serve as the AA Associate

Editor for Sociocultural Anthropology. I am professor of

anthropology and dean of the School of Social Science at

Hampshire College, where I have also served for the past

five years as director of the Culture, Brain, and Develop-

ment Program, an initiative that promotes interdisciplinary

research and teaching at the intersection of anthropology,

developmental psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, phi-

losophy, and related fields. My involvement with this pro-

gram grew out of collaborative teaching and research with a

developmental psychologist and a very productive teachingcollaboration over many years with a biocultural anthro-

pologist. These experiences are relevant to my new role as

Associate Editor for Sociocultural Anthropology of American

Anthropologist, by which I hope to encourage sociocultural

anthropologists to increase their submissions, both as a way

of showcasing the range of research and theory in this key

subfield and as a way of strengthening a journal that has

a unique capability to bring the subfields of anthropology

into conversation at a time when seemingly more distant

disciplines are working across disciplinary boundaries in

highly productive ways.

A brief history: I completed a B.A. in religion and phi-

losophy at Barnard and a Ph.D. in anthropology at Uni-versity of California at Berkeley. As a student at Berkeley

in the late 1960s, I experienced first hand the powerfulwave of criticism directed at the discipline from within and

its move toward a more informed, politically relevant, and

critical anthropology. Part of this critique involved a turn

toward doing anthropology “at home,” and my own re-

search in the 1970s and 1980s focused on the use of lower

courts by low-income residents of a New England town to

create community and identity by marginalizing ethnic mi-

norities. My current work includes projects examining the

production of a global market in adoptable children, the

tensions and conjunctions between adoption policy and

immigration policy in the United States and Sweden, and,

more generally, technologies of knowledge production in

ethnography and law. I have carried out fieldwork in Swe-den, India, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, as well as in

the United States. In the American Anthropological Asso-

ciation, I was president of the Association of Political and

Legal Anthropologists from 2000 to 2003. I have also been

active in the Law and Society Association, where I served

on the board of trustees, as secretary, and as book review

editor of the Law and Society Review.

I look forward to working with AA Editor-in-Chief Tom

Boellstorff, the other associate editors, and members of the

editorial board in this exciting new venture, and encourage

all of you to take part as well by submitting your strongest

sociocultural manuscripts to American Anthropologist. Please

contact me at [email protected] with your com-ments and suggestions.

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