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Looking Back: 2019 Year in Review	

	

In our first ever letter from the editors we wish to return briefly to what we have published 

during the past year and to look ahead to what is to come. As a journal that exclusively 

publishes book reviews, we have the privilege of staying abreast of the newest publications in 

the field. In taking stock of those topics that attracted the most attention from reviewers, as 

well as situating these trends within current academic discussions in the US and beyond, we 

review some of the major themes that emerged this year. This review will further highlight a 

disciplinary divide that we hope we can begin to address in the coming year through 

engagement in a common discussion – more on this below.  

 

Before turning to the reviews published in 2019, let us shortly lay out the aims of the 

Anthropology Book Forum, and the reason why we think this journal contributes to 

anthropological scholarship and research. The aim of the Forum at large is to facilitate a 

smooth and quick venue for book reviews written for a wide audience. The flexibility offered 

by the journal as to which titles are available for review and the rapid editorial process is 

meant to allow titles to be reviewed while still new – as a tool for researchers to navigate the 

most recently published work and to offer participants a chance to comment on, critique and 

debate developments in our field(s). It is also, we hope, a way to reach a more general reading 

audience outside of the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology.  

 

The Past Year 

 

This year we have seen considerable attention to public anthropology, activist anthropology, 

disciplinary ethics and the politics and practices of reaching broader publics. In addition, 2019 

has been a year with continuous attention to migration, borders, and conflict. It is therefore 

not surprising that we’ve received several reviews on the topic of migration and borders – this 

is in line with a larger trend in the discipline of sociocultural anthropology with much work 

being done on the topic. A consequence of migration and immigration is, of course, questions 



	

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of identity and belonging, another topic that has been brought up in more than one of our 

reviews. These questions of belonging and identity are continuously important and deserving 

of attention, especially in a time when many countries around the world are experiencing an 

upswing of right-wing political parties and immigration restrictive policies (US, Sweden, 

Denmark, the UK, and India for example) – how do people ‘become’ in such an environment?  

 

As the field of medical anthropology continues to grow, we are beginning to see 

comprehensive overviews, such as The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology. 

In addition, there has been attention to new audio-visual methodologies, such as in Robert 

Lemelson’s and Annie Tucker’s Afflictions: Steps Toward A Visual Psychological 

Anthropology.  

 

The interest in heritage studies has maintained a steady momentum throughout 2019, and 

there are multiple interesting titles on the horizon. During the past year we have published 

three reviews on the topic of heritage, including World Heritage on the Ground: Ethnographic 

Perspectives by Christoph Brumann and David Berliner and Cuban Cultural Heritage: A 

Rebel Past for a Revolutionary Nation by Pablo Alonso González. Further, this year has also 

seen much academic interest on the topic of infrastructure, such as in The Promise of 

Infrastructure edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, as well as the 

anthropology of development, urban anthropology, and the anthropology of time.    

 

We’ve also seen some new developments in archaeology, such as Andrew Reinhard’s 

Archaeogaming as well as interdisciplinary approaches, such as Manzanilla’s (eds.) 

Multiethnicity and Migration at Teopancazco: Investigations of a Teotihuacan Neighborhood 

Center. We’ve only published three reviews of archaeology titles this year however, and we’d 

like to say a few words about the field’s representation in the Journal.  

 

Outreach and Call for Reviewers 

 

As a point of departure, let’s begin with Anthropology Book Forum’s Focus and Scope: 

 

Anthropology Book Forum publishes reviews of both books and films of relevance and 

interest to a general anthropological audience, including sociocultural, linguistic, 



	

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biological and linguistic anthropology as well as archaeology and closely cognate 

disciplines. 

 

In this statement we find the term “sociocultural” as well as “archaeology,” and we wish to 

hold onto the pair for a little while. When browsing the most recently published works, it is 

evident that most of the literature published yearly under the broad category of ‘anthropology’ 

are the ones we mostly offer our reviewers. However, even though, by number, the titles in 

either archaeology or social anthropology are fairly equal, we mostly receive reviews of 

sociocultural titles and are seeing less engagement from archaeologists. And hence the 

question, why are archaeological titles not attracting reviewers? Or perhaps alternately, why 

aren’t archaeologists and archaeology students interested in publishing reviews in the 

Journal? 

 

Possibly we, the editorial team, have not managed to reach the archaeological scholarly 

community as effective as the sociocultural one. When writing to individual scholars, 

however, we find that this ‘trend’ has prevailed, with sociocultural anthropologists taking 

more interest in publishing reviews with us than archaeologists. This is in no way an attempt 

to criticize; on the contrary, we ask archaeologists reading this to have a look at our great 

variety of titles for review, to engage with debates that cross both fields, and to assist us in 

publishing reviews on work important for the field of archaeology. In addition, we hope to 

bring insights from both fields into common discussions that cut across the four fields of 

anthropology.  

 

The editorial team is well aware of the ongoing debate about the lack of engagement between 

archaeology and sociocultural anthropology even though there is much to be learnt from one 

another and despite the four-field structure of anthropology departments in the United States. 

The idea behind starting this journal in the first place was to create a forum for dialogue, and 

what could be more important than assisting and facilitating a forum of common knowledge 

production and communication across fields and disciplinary boundaries! As discussions 

continue about the value of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary conversations and 

collaborations, we hope that these segregatory trends will not stem the flow of discourse and 

limit this journal to the socio-cultural field alone. That said, we will be pursuing 

archaeologists this year with the ultimate aim of publishing more reviews of archaeological 

titles in 2020. 



	

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The Year to Come  

 

In the year to come, we are hoping to grow the journal in several ways in order to publish 

more, offer new formats for book reviews and engage a wider audience.  

 

We will experiment a bit with our format in 2020, opening up the Journal to allow for other 

styles and forms of reviews. We will also offer interested reviewers not only the titles listed on 

our website for review, but also the option to find titles of their own liking (relevant to 

anthropology). This, we hope, will expand the overall diversity of book reviews we publish.  

 

Beginning in January 2020, we offer the possibility to review books in two new ways, in 

review article format or as a video review: 

 

Review articles: Review 2-3 titles at once and keep them in a dialogue throughout the review. 

This format of review will be a bit longer than our original type, asking reviewers to hold a 

length of 1750-2000 words. The purpose of review articles is to allow for a more in-depth 

discussion, comparison, and debate of a particular theme or idea and trace its development 

within the discipline.  

 

Video-review: Reviewing one title, but instead of submitting the review in writing the 

reviewer will record a video of themselves reading the review out loud (a transcript will still 

be required).  

 

Finally, before we go, we wish to thank our readers and contributors for their engagement and 

to also extend an invitation to those not yet familiar with the Journal to use it as a resource as 

well as a platform for engagement. It is with great excitement and anticipation that we look 

forward to the coming year and to a more dynamic, inclusive and expanded Anthropology 

Book Forum.  

 

Best wishes from your editors,  

Rasmus Rodineliussen and Emilia Groupp 

 



	

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Be sure to check out our new Facebook page for news and updates: 

https://www.facebook.com/Anthropology-Book-Forum-117305059654437/ 

 

Books available for review: http://journals.sfu.ca/abf/index.php/abf/objectsForReview 

 

Book reviews: http://www.anthropology-news.org/?post_type=book-review 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

©	2019	Rasmus	Rodineliussen	and	Emilia	Groupp		


