Comments on: Anglo-American hegemony in contemporary anthropology: Some personal dilemmas

By: Shuangyang Qi

Shuangyang Qi — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:48:52 +0000

This is an excellent article; David’s reflective suggestions are well worth considering and discussing. In fact, beyond the narrower scope of the Anglo-American world, and even beyond the broader regions of Western Europe and North America—and indeed across the entire Eurasian continent—there are an increasing number of emerging anthropological communities and scholarly contributions waiting to be discovered.

By: Greg Feldman

Greg Feldman — Tue, 04 May 2021 21:08:54 +0000

Great piece, David, and there is still much more to be said on this issue.

By: JG

JG — Sat, 01 May 2021 00:24:41 +0000

Thanks for this, David. This post makes very important, valuable, and urgent points. Spanish speakers in Latin America have to deal with this hegemony all the time, and it causes a lot of suffering (I’m being intendedly affective, for affection is political), and of course weird competitions (e.g. if you are willing to say populism, ok you can publish your research abt your country in that super famous American Journal).
However, being aware of the strivings of the privileged is good, although it doesn’t reduce our owns (say owns in terms of anthropologies).
This is puzzling, and certainly reduces the possibilities that anthropology was supposed to be about. In brief and simplifying a complex argument: unless we can deal with English we cannot communicate. Fine. This shall not be a problem in itself. The problem is that academic (hegemonic) communication has its own rules (ultimately a linguistic politics), being its trademark to reduce the ways we communicate (i.e. go plain, reduce the amount of subordinates, go straightforward, and please: quote that Britt of American anthropology for it is obvious you couldn’t say that by your own, or through your own local research).
Thanks again for raising these questions, and for reminding Tony Gramsci’s, who knew perfectly well that the differences between ‘war of maneuver’ and ‘war of position’ were at the centre of any social change, or anthropological transformation for that matter

By: poxipa

poxipa — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 05:40:13 +0000

All true, and the WCAA targets this continuously. But this is about more than the prestige of journals, this is about value recognition and linguistic superiority that cannot be undone (and might get worse) with open access material.

It is also about the ingrained gravity towards the Anglo-American reader as the default audience, adding a burden of needing to have some expertise in US culture and politics in order to write about our region of expertise…

By: Regina F. Bendix

Regina F. Bendix — Sun, 25 Apr 2021 11:48:13 +0000

These are important and well put issues that are difficult to tackle. They go beyond the Anglo-American hegemony, and they also concern the phenomenal labor of translation which concerns not just language but also structure of argumentation.
A few examples:
I am just reviewing a couple books in the admittedly exceedingly huge field of heritage studies, written by non-American authors. Checking the major frames of reference I find, particularly in the theoretical framing, the Anglo-American lineages (and attendant publishers/journals) – including in the endorsements on the back-cover. But I also find mostly men. As many publishers have taken to abbreviate firstnames to initials, this is a bit harder to discern, but with many of one’s own linguistic background, one knows. And confirming Berliner’s assessment: There are numerous excellent heritage scholars of all genders who published in English, from the Baltic, Scandinavia or also South Eastern Europe who do not surface. And I find no references to Romance language publications, even though the heritage field is plowed intensively by colleagues in France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and Italy. We cannot be conversant on an academic level in many languages, and there are no mechanisms that would help us sift through the mass to discern what are insights we want to build on – so what results in addition to the hegemonic logics of distinction that Berliner points to is serendipity: scholars we meet at a conference, essays we chance upon in a journal we have never noticed before and that are written in a language we happen to be able to read.

Or consider this conundrum: together with Ulrich Marzolph and Francisco vaz da Silva, I edit the journal _Narrative Culture_ with a small US university press. In addition to Anglo-American and European submissions we also get many from the Middle East, from South-East Asia and from Asia. Our longest editorial exchanges concern whether we will put the editorial midwifery into some of these pieces where we find ideas and empirical work that corresponds to our mission statement: we know that finding peer reviewers sharing our commitment to being a platform for different traditions of academic training will be tough and we also know that we will have to become invisible co-authors to revise the second or third revision into a publishable piece. Publishable means here: a piece that readership used to the Anglo-American style of doing academic work will actually read. In the eight years since we founded the journal, we have done so very rarely (it gobbles up a lot of time), and of course the journal is far from that anthropological top tier that Berliner writes about. But those authors submitting to us are responding to the pressures within their university systems that endorse the ranking that brings forth such dominations: publish in English, in an international journal. Of course, this midwifery approach has its colonial dimensions as well, as it rests on the (sadly proven) assumption that work that does not at least approximate an “international” i.e. Anglo-American structure of presention generally foregoes a chance at reception (excluded from this rule are those French philosophers whom Anglo-American anthropologists have decided to embrace 🙂 ).

A final observation that might be more hopeful regarding the open source avenue and its democratization of what is geting read: The _Cultural Property_ research group we ran here in Göttingen for a number of years published nearly all of its case studies and article collections with the creative commons license of Göttingen University Press. While the works have hardly been reviewed – despite sending the printed version out to many of the “usual suspects” – we can tell both from academia.edu and from the university press’ own statistics that at least some of them are getting downloaded and read, in as much as they also result in citations or are apparently used in teaching. So while the work may not surface in those venues considered dominant/disciplinarily relevant, it is getting downloaded in places on all continents, and one has received emails from students at universities one had never been in touch with before.

By: Htoo Lwin

Htoo Lwin — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 14:19:01 +0000

Funny to not see Cultural Anth mentioned, which i read as the sickest burn of all – to not even mention the often-obnoxious top dog, and the essay makes fine points. Although it leaves out a couple of important potential ripostes.

So, for instance, AE (which is mentioned) has a review process that really does make articles better – or makes the writers potentially better, at least. To wit, I have a friend with an article currently in review there who got four reviewers, who all made important points, and *then* the editors synthesized many of those points and gave advice on how to deal with the aspects from the reviewers that were at cross purposes. This same friend has an article at Journal of Peasant Studies which, as lovely as that journal is, only had two reviewers and included no editorial guidance. Moreover, and this is probably more important, this friend has an article just accepted at Current which will include six to eight responses from colleagues from around the world (he was asked to submit a list of 15 names, and was encouraged to include significant numbers of non USA and UK -based scholars); he then gets to respond to the responses – all of this is included in every Current article. That kind of engagement is simply not possible at smaller regional journals which do not include that kind of rigor. Of course this friend is compelled by tenure track concerns, but being an arrogant bastard, he isn’t so fussed about that. He wants to be in the conversations, and the top journals is where that happens, even with all the obnoxious baggage that entails.