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Lukas Ley Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany ley@eth.mpg.de

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Nicolai Ssorin-Chaikov Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia nssorinchaikov@hse.ru

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This issue marks the first time that Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale is published by Berghahn Books. It is also the first time the journal is being published in an innovative ’subscribe-to-open’ model, an approach that has the potential to transform scholarly publishing. After a motion proposing the move to Open Access was approved at the EASA conference in Lisbon 2020, the membership voted overwhelmingly to end SA/AS's fifteen year contract with Wiley and move to Berghahn. The move has involved a great deal of careful preparation, and the journal editors would like to thank all those libraries who are continuing to support the journal, as well as the EASA members who are making this transition possible. We trust and hope your libraries will continue to support this sustainable Open Access model. We look forward to SA/AS making the most of the many opportunities this innovation offers. We thank Berghahn Books for its enthusiastic support of this journal during the technical transition and onward.

This issue marks the first time that Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale is published by Berghahn Books. It is also the first time the journal is being published in an innovative ’subscribe-to-open’ model, an approach that has the potential to transform scholarly publishing. After a motion proposing the move to Open Access was approved at the EASA conference in Lisbon 2020, the membership voted overwhelmingly to end SA/AS's fifteen year contract with Wiley and move to Berghahn. The move has involved a great deal of careful preparation, and the journal editors would like to thank all those libraries who are continuing to support the journal, as well as the EASA members who are making this transition possible. We trust and hope your libraries will continue to support this sustainable Open Access model. We look forward to SA/AS making the most of the many opportunities this innovation offers. We thank Berghahn Books for its enthusiastic support of this journal during the technical transition and onward.

We open this issue with three original articles which are followed by a special section guest-edited by João Pina-Cabral. In our opinion, the cluster of articles and the special section nicely illustrate this issue's theme of change by contrasting two research temporalities: those of academic novelty and retrospective reflection on ethnographic experience. In her paper, which was awarded the 2020 prize for best graduate paper by the EASA Anthropology of Food Network, Floramante S.J. Ponce explores how relocation due to a Chinese hydropower project affects the eating practices and experience of food of Lao villagers. Ponce argues that it is not dam construction that causes starvation and poverty but situates the intervention in a series of factors that converged to transform villagers’ experiences of food and food shortage. The second original article by Mark Anthony Arceno also speaks to food production by zeroing in on the co-directive role of vines in the place-making strategies of French winemakers. In ‘Vignerons and the Vines: Mediators of Place-based Identity in Alsace, France’, Arceno shows that winegrowers and the vines they foster are ‘key participants’ in the winegrowing process and ‘mediators of place-based identity’. Theodoros Rakopoulos, in his paper entitled ‘Of Fascists and Dreamers: Conspiracy Theory and Anthropology’, argues that ethnography of conspiracy theory is ‘ethnography on and with’ such theorists. Rakopoulos therefore calls for a reassessment of the critical nature of anthropology as a discipline ‘taking seriously’ the views of the subjects that it explores. He draws on fieldwork material from Greece to turn anthropological attention to professional authors in this field and their wide array of concerns, as well as associations and dissociations from fascist ideas.

While these original articles contribute new perspectives to their particular fields, this issue's special section, entitled ‘A Debate on Ethnographic Determination’ and guest-edited by João Pina-Cabral, deliberately slows down this temporality of novelty by collating retrospective reflections of anthropologists who look back over their long research careers and revisit the conditions of possibility of their ethnographic engagements. A scholar of the following generation, Ashley Lebner, then discusses these varied retrospectives. Now, this isn't the contrast between ‘the new’ and ‘history’, let alone ‘the timeless’. It is, rather, a juxtaposition of two ways of making ethnography relevant. Pina-Cabral defines this relevance as the ‘intensity of the attention dedicated to the chosen ethnographic case’ (introduction to this special section). It follows from aporia between challenges to ethnographic interpretation (doubt) and the energy to disambiguate this doubt (determination). Pina-Cabral's intervention is resolutely Kantian and Derridean. As his own contribution to this special section elaborates, field aporia in a form of doubt is ethnography's fundamental limit. At the same time, it is constitutive of the ethnographer's attempts ‘at correlating the parts, to measure the structure of relations, to fit things into arguments’ is categorically imperative precisely due to doubt's ‘metaphysical pluralism’. His paper takes its cue from one of his own ethnographic encounters during fieldwork in 1979 Alto Minho, Portugal. Pina-Cabral gives a temporal reading of this encounter as its ethnographic doubt means its ‘first moment is always already a second moment’. In his article, Stephan Palmié revisits Wittgenstein's ‘hinge proposition’ on which doubt can turn but which can never fall into doubt itself. Palmié examines his continuous (since the 1980s) ethnographic encounters with Afro-Cuban ritual in Miami, and Evans-Pritchard's conceptualisation of Azande witchcraft, to ask if doubt is what is being explained or what explains. This long-term perspective enables him to show how hinge propositions and ‘doors’ that open ethnographic gaze trade places, as well as how the former is being ‘re-hinged’ through doubts in our previous convictions. In turn, Anne-Christine Taylor looks at the flip side of this: what, she asks, do the subjects of an inquiry engage in when they consent to ‘an ethnographic relation’ – that is, to being explored? What are the experimental and novel ways in which the ‘ethnographed’ shape and translate forms of reflexivity that are offered to them by the ethnographic encounter? Drawing on her own work among Achuar as well as other Amazonianist ethnography that gave rise to the concept of perspectivism, Taylor concludes by situating ethnography as a stage in this continuous process of translation. The issue of translation is central to Ashley Lebner's piece, which plays the discussant's role in this forum-like special section. In this discussion, she takes her cue from the impassable door in ‘The Trial’ by Kafka, as well as from what she calls Brazil's ‘most untranslatable novel’ (João Guimarães Rosa's 1956 Grande Sertão: Veredas). She argues that untranslatability, impass-ability and impossibility need to be understood as ‘facts of life’ by these novels’ characters and not as something that necessarily requires an ethnographic resolution. What requires attention are their transformative effects, and in fact we as anthropologists need to be ‘determined to transform with the untranslatable truths of others’.

This issue further contains a follow-up on the special section entitled ‘Utopian Confluences’ published last year. Eldar Bråten offers a polemical response to the special section guest-edited by Ruy Blanes and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen (2021), which we publish in tandem with a reply from Blanes and Bertelsen. Bråten finds it difficult ‘to discern substantial arguments in texts that overflow with evocative and metaphoric prose’. Blanes and Bertelsen explicate their argument by suggesting the reasons for the ‘prose’ and their analytical approach to utopia. The latter in its current forms, they submit, requires both academic and activist openness to the new forms of utopian practices and imaginaries. What this polemic is indicative of is that the two modalities of research temporalities with which we started this editorial are both durational. New ethnographic and retrospective reflections converge in the ongoing academic debates.

Contributor Notes

Lukas Ley ORCID: 0000-0001-8423-0011 ley@eth.mpg.de

Nicolai Ssorin-Chaikov ORCID: 0000-0001-7521-6912 nssorinchaikov@hse.ru

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