Shortly after being confirmed as the new co-editor of AJEC, I attended the annual meeting of the East Asian Anthropological Association. With an institutional base in Singapore, there are not many anthropology meetings within easy reach, but EAAA meets most autumns; and the meeting of 2023, held in Hong Kong, was the third meeting I had attended since 2018. This year's meeting started with an open forum, as the existing leadership announced its desire to recruit junior colleagues and set a fresh and vibrant agenda for the coming years. Many hands were raised; and as voices accented from across the globe spoke of the isolation of Asian perspectives on anthropology, and of the marginality of East Asia to the global discipline, I was reminded strongly of the many marginalities so often voiced by anthropologists of Europe.

I raised my hand, too. There was so much frustration being voiced, that I wanted to offer courage to the many students in the audience. I wanted to speak of the efforts undertaken for thirty years and more to bring Europe in ‘from the margins’ of anthropological inquiry. In the coursework I took at Indiana University towards my PhD, Michael Herzfeld's (1987) Through the Looking Glass was foundational reading, right alongside Pierre Bourdieu and Franz Boas. When I attended my first AAA meeting in 1999, the members of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (SAE) were still glowing with a certain sense of achievement in the society's 1986 foundation as they socialised over wine. Joëlle Bahloul guided me, Kathleen Costello, and Julie Fairbanks through the maze of already famous names.

The anthropology of Europe was not really new in the 1990s, but as John Cole wrote in 1977, the discipline had only come ‘part-way home’ in that ethnographic fieldwork was undertaken in Europe but the dominant theoretical frameworks still seemed to be mostly formulated ‘elsewhere’. Herzfeld encouraged us to be critical of the Eurocentrism within anthropology, but the sense of marginality for European ethnographers lingered on.

The discussion underway among East Asianists came, then, as a shock! Are Asia and Europe both marginal to the production of anthropology?

What I shared with the assembled group that day was a rapid patching together of an institutional history of European anthropological associations, which brought ‘Europe’ out of an acute period of disciplinary obscurity in a relatively short period of time. The European Association for Social Anthropologists (EASA) was formed just after SAE in 1989. Yet other associations coalesced around Eastern Europe, what David Kideckel referred to as an ‘utter other’ in anthropology (1997) – even less thinkable than Western Europe, and therefore all the more important to think with – on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1990s and early 2000s. InASEA envisioned Southeast Europe; Soyuz took on ‘cultural studies’ in ‘postsocialist’ spaces. Other national and regional associations of anthropology from within Europe joined the World Council of Anthropological Associations. In thirty years, multiple journals were created, resurrected, transformed – not least AJEC itself – so that anthropology in Europe and the anthropology of Europe can both now be considered vibrant contributors to Anglophone, international, and world anthropology. (Whether these are one thing or three is still an open question).

All of these institutions have worked to create and expand the spaces in which ‘other anthropologies’ can be known, and indeed, in which ‘Europe’ itself can be known anthropologically. There are many heroes behind this institution-building; to name them would be a veritable who's who in anthropology. Much of this process has involved re-opening conversations with ethnologists and folklorists that had closed sometime in the mid-twentieth century; but, equally, new conversations with culturologists opened in the 1990s. Michael Herzfeld called attention to the attraction that ‘anthropology’ held for many post-Soviet scholars (2001); Chris Hann oversaw the publication of several volumes on the ‘people sciences’ practiced across socialist societies that informed the intellectual genealogies of the many anthropologists joining the European and international networks during the 1990s and early 2000s (Hann, Sárkány and Skalník 2005; Mihăilescu, Iliev and Naumović 2008; Bošković and Hann 2013).

With these examples of institutional change; of the many careers and personal lives that I know (and the many more that I don't know) to have gone into building and rebuilding intellectual communities around the valuation of Europe as an object of ethnographic inquiry, I made bold to counter the claims of ‘Europe's’ monopoly on anthropology.

‘Europe’, I concluded in my comments (which were not so long as these here) ‘is hardly Asia's enemy in contemporary anthropology’. I was surprised but glad to have spoken out: over the next few days, several colleagues confided that they had long wondered if they should publish about their experiences and reflections on things related to ‘Europe’. Well, why ever not?

Europe's cultural identities are multiple, changing, and multi-faceted. They deserve many commentators. What is ‘European’, and what is ‘Other’, matters deeply to individuals, communities, and institutions across the globe; as anthropologists, we should ask why and how this is so. Following what we know to be true of identity, Europe cannot be circumscribed only by ‘Europeans’ claiming cultural content; ‘Europe’ is also created in efforts to exclude and self-exclude. We should also ask about the consequences of positing continental, if not civilisational, identities. How can we possibly do this in an organised and cumulative fashion, that allows us to reach sound and empirically-based consensuses, if not through communicative technologies, like journals? Like AJEC?

I think a great many of us have idiosyncratic pathways to the anthropological study of European cultures. We should honour these. I certainly came to the anthropology of Europe by accident. Indeed, I came to anthropology by accident. Like most Americans, (but also my co-editor; see Bošković 2022), I did not know that such a field of study existed until I was a university student; there, I had a friend with a more self-consciously cosmopolitan background. He had read Frazer's The Golden Bough, at the recommendation of a high school teacher when he had questions about the origins of religion, and half-way through our first year, when I told him that I was enjoying my world music class more than physics, my friend asked me if I had ever thought about anthropology. ‘No’. But I looked into it and decided to take James Fernandez's class on storytelling and oral narratives. As for Europe, I had the foolishness to ask Andrew Apter, after a class on the African diaspora, ‘why are all the Europeans discussed as imperialists, as if they were the same from the 1600s to the 1900s, despite national differences and historical change?’ Instead of having me write the normal undergraduate final exam, Apter tasked me with the written paper that was required of graduate students taking the same class. ‘See what you can find out’, he said.

I was just an undergraduate when I started asking what Europe was, and I might never have gone any further in anthropology. I might have pursued what parents like to call ‘a real job’, but the question persisted, and became more urgent, as I bopped around with various classes that touched on European cultures, histories, language, and literatures – all strung together as a Chicago-style ‘concentration’ in anthropology. What is interesting in hindsight is that none of my professors seemed surprised that I would ask questions about the apparent absence of anthropological accounts of Europe and Europeans. I think now, fledgling Europeanists had more supporters than we realised.

Or, I might have joined the Peace Corps, but was cautioned against it. ‘It's never quite recovered to what it was’, I was told. When I asked, ‘but how can I do ethnography?’, I was steered towards graduate school, and found my way to Indiana University. It was there that I became a committed ‘anthropologist’. Still, it is always ethnography – the combination of empirical research and writing – that I understand as forming the heart of ‘anthropology’. Anthropologists remain ‘myth tellers’ (Richardson 1975). We should still be, as Claude Lévi-Strauss argued for us, the most humanistic of the scientists, the most scientific of the humanists. Writing is central to our craft; just as our bodies, senses, and selves are the instruments of our research. We use all of these to ‘live in-between as interpreters’ (Royce 2013: 2).

As ethnographers, we anthropologists still have much to learn in how we practise our craft. Ongoing explorations in film; multi-media; social media; public-, action-, and collaborative-anthropology are critical for bridging the gaps between the academy and various publics. But a role remains for journals too. They are the most Romantic of our current academic genres, extended epistolary missions reaching forward from one desk to another, reminding the reader of shared thoughts, of shared roots and common readings; of halcyon student days and sun-warmed seminar rooms; of the excesses and despairs of fieldwork; but also provoking new thoughts and proffering further leads in the difficult quest of research and knowledge. Because they are so fundamentally old-fashioned, journals can afford to be honest: the role of journals is to inspire us; bring the sharpest of insights, the brightest of visions, and the most humanistic of aspirations to our fellow practitioners. We should be glad that we have read any given article or issue because of what we have learned by reading it; research is difficult, but it should not be drudgery.

Over the past decade, AJEC has become such a journal, as the editors, with their restless spirits and roaming careers, have worked to bring out and make known the vibrancy of ethnographic perspectives on European cultures, and of debates about the shape of past and future ‘anthropology’ from European perspectives. The imagined community of AJEC is an expandingly cosmopolitan one.

I am deeply glad that Sasha and the Board thought that stretching editorship to Singapore, to the edges of East and Southeast Asia, was not too far.