Think Pieces in Analytics

Abstract

Experimenting with the many potentials of anthropological analysis—that shifting interface between the empirical and the conceptual, the space and perhaps the time between ethnography and theory—is at the heart of our journal’s intellectual mission. Our aim is to publish articles that display a spirit of analytical exploration by dealing in fresh ways with their empirical materials and showing in the action of their analytical treatment new paths for anthropological thinking to pursue. Alongside full-length research articles, in this issue we inaugurate Think Pieces in Analytics, a forum devoted to slightly shorter and more speculative texts, in which particular aspects of the scope, process, or aims of anthropological analysis are explored for their own sake. Mirroring the ambiguous and shifting character of both the concept and the practice of analysis, we give free rein to contributors to broach matters of methodology, theoretical approach, research ethics and politics, interdisciplinary interface, and institutional infrastructure, as long as their bearing on questions of analytical practice in anthropology is identified.