American Ethnologist is a quarterly journal concerned with social and cultural anthropology in the broadest sense of the term. The journal’s articles combine ethnographic specificity with original theoretical thinking, conveying the relevance of the ethnographic imagination to the contemporary world.

As a flagship journal for social and cultural anthropology, American Ethnologist aims to disseminate work that roams across a wide variety of theoretical approaches, methods, and points of view. The editor encourages the submission of manuscripts that reflect the discipline’s intellectual and geographic diversity.

American Ethnologist is published on behalf of the American Ethnological Society, a section of the American Anthropological Association, by Wiley-Blackwell, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA.

Latest Issue, 51.1

Articles


FORUM: What Good Is Anthropology? Celebrating 50 Years of American Ethnologist

Applied anthropology, injustice, and the ethics of intervention

Lenore Manderson

Anthropology’s comparative value(s)

Rena Lederman

Anthropology as spiritual discipline

T. M. Luhrmann

Seeing our world in 16:9 aspect ratio: An Indigenous film journey

Charles Menzies (hagwil hayetsk)

Anthropology is good

Tim Ingold

Anthropology at sea: Displacement as ethnographic praxis

Jatin Dua

Toward anthropologies of the metaverse

Tom Boellstorff

Anthropology and complicated people

Alexander Edmonds

To write or not to write?: Toward a hesitant anthropology

Sophie Chao

Ethnography and ethical life

Michael Lambek

Becoming malleable: How orienting to disability, communication, and the senses further commits anthropology to its moral project

Michele Friedner Matthew Wolf-Meyer

A queer footnote: The anthropology of containment

Benjamin Hegarty

The smugness of privilege

Don Kulick

Why do I write anthropology? Why do you?: A manifesto for prioritizing passion and poetry as we scale up for social justice

Alma Gottlieb

A decolonial birth for anthropology

Bhrigupati Singh

What good is anthropology?: Care work in a “useless” discipline

Nolwazi Mkhwanazi

Privileged observers and colonial continuities: Institutional economies of expert knowledge in anthropology and international development

Maia Green

Translating the social in complex technology development

Melissa Cefkin

Patchwork ethnography

Gökçe Günel Chika Watanabe

Anthropology’s good beyond the discipline

Lara Deeb Jessica Winegar

Four challenges from anthropology’s current meta

Alex Golub

The maturing of anthropology

Daniel Miller

A view from another side, or, not just another quit-lit essay

Lori A. Allen

Anthropology unbound: A vision for a flourishing, inclusive, and accessible future

Saira A. Mehmood

Ethnography vs. zombie methodologies: What anthropology can teach psychology about nonreproducibility

Greg Downey

Editorial

Editors’ note: Celebrating 50 years of American Ethnologist

by Susanna Trnka Jesse Hession Grayman L. L. Wynn