About the Journal

The Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, RAS (Moscow) is launching a new journal “Anthropologies”. As the title suggests, we consider anthropology to be a world science produced and creatively transformed in all corners of the Earth by professional as well as amateur practitioners with a variety of cultural, linguistic and ideological backgrounds. For us, anthropology is not only a dialogue with those whom we study in the field, or between theories and “material”. Equally important, though sometimes less visible, is the dialogue between different anthropologies, anthropological traditions, research collectives.

Although modern scholarship becomes ever more globalized, we believe that certain traditions of thought within national anthropologies or “anthropological schools” persist and ground research methods, subject matters, and ideological inclinations. Positions of “local” or “native” anthropologists are sometimes unequal vis-à-vis those from global centers. Similar tensions arise between anthropologists educated in Western Europe and America and the continuators of other schools, themselves undergoing radical changes. At the same time, collaborations between representatives of these positions are very often intellectually productive and mutually beneficial, as they provide an opportunity to engage with the phenomena under study from different perspectives.
Russian anthropology is a good example to illustrate these intertwining processes. Although the country has one of the oldest ethnographical traditions, nowadays its presence in world anthropology is rather modest. The 20th century witnessed Soviet ethnography’s attempt to lead the “progressive world” under the Marxist banner, but after the collapse of the USSR and the downfall of the Marxist-Leninist paradigm, the discipline finds itself in the search for a new “face” in difficult financial and institutional conditions.

The global collisions described above also take place within the Russian anthropology. The “central” institutions, which have been counting down their history since the times of the Russian Empire, are both points of attraction and repulsion for regional and republican anthropologists, who are not only engaged in survival under the conditions of constantly reforming science, but also involved in the process of building their "own" cultural and national group identity. The variety of anthropologies is by no means confined to those mentioned above. Age, gender and other differences also have effects on our research optics.

We are launching the “Anthropologies” journal in order to capture, analyze and comprehend the modern life of many world and Russian anthropologies. Our mission is to create a platform for dialogue for anthropologists, studying similar realities in different countries, to establish a dialogue between them both on theoretical issues and the complexities and challenges of “academic life”.
With these objectives in mind, we will use two main formats. First, we are planning special issues devoted to certain centers of anthropological science (institutes, departments, museums, etc.). Such issues will consist of publications on the history of the institution, interviews with its leading authors and research articles of its members to demonstrate the scope and fruitfulness of their research. Second, we plan to have thematically or theoretically-focused special issues. In this case, we would like to bring together and encourage a dialogue between Russian researchers (from “centers” as well as from the regions) and foreign scholars. All issues will contain reviews and discussions of the relevant literature by scholars from regions, centers and foreign countries.

We are open to suggestions from our readers regarding the relevance of a particular area and are ready to provide a platform for a guest editor for “assembling” a thematic issue or presenting the scientific center.