Hello,

I am new to this conversation, and to blogging. One significant change, since this blog was last used a year ago, is that the World Council of Anthropological Associations now has its own active website and professional administrators
(http://www.wcaanet.org), and will hopefully have a growing number of visitors, especially if our current initiative to have all the world's anthropological publications represented there comes to fruition. If this blog can be linked to that, it may be able to take off as a vibrant means of communication. The fundamental aim of all this is to link all the world's different anthropological voices in a common conversation about the discipline and the world. And who knows, it may yet happen!

Tom and Gustavo - I'm wholly new to this (i.e., blogging) but think it makes great sense for what we're hoping folks will be pursuing - thanks to you both for pursuing it. (And I definitely, given my technonaif status - not a luddite, just without good e-reflexes, shouldn't be the one to manage it) - Cheers, Don

One proposal: "sister journals"

One proposal that came up at the transnationalizing anthropology meeting at the 2009 AAAs was that of some kind of "sister journal" relationship. In such a case, Journal A (let's say in the USA) would reprint an article from Journal B (let's say in Mexico) and vice versa. Each journal would have decided to trust the peer review process of the other journal. The advantage of this is that at issue is not just translating between different languages: different language traditions also have different styles of anthropological writing and criteria for assessment. So this way readers would learn about what is considered the "top" work in another tradition. Ideally the exchanged articles would be translated: in the example above, the article from Journal A would be translated into Spanish when appearing in Journal B, and the article from Journal B would be translated into English when appearing in Journal A.

This could be done via the online sites for the journals in question, or the print versions, or both. Taking advantage of the online possibilities might make the most sense.

Reactions to this idea and how to flesh it out? I'm just summarizing what I remember from the conversation and so may be forgetting something.