EDITORIAL

“My people – the human beings – built the Chinese Wall, the Chrysler Building, the Sistine Chapel: things made by creatures like me, using ability and imagination. I don’t have that ability and my imagination makes up different dreams. However, I also have that potential. The link with a local identity is as imaginary as the one that goes through Humanity”¹

Now in 2016, the Anuario de Antropología Social y Cultural en Uruguay (Uruguayan Social and Cultural Anthropology Yearbook )ceases to exist to become a new publication. It’s marked by transformation requirements, by new game rules that let us to not only overcome it’s long history (2000-2015), but also start with renewed energies a stage more in line with universal academic canons.

We have being well evaluated and once we were accepted to the SCielo Uruguay portal, we only could share all the changes asked from us. The first one was to change into a biannual publication aimed to be active on line from what was our printed classic yearbook. On line with that radical change we also had to find a new name to exist or be reborn to a new world, without completely discarding what had being the inspiration and the raison d’être of a long record.

With subtle identification differences, we now give birth to Revista Uruguaya de Antropología y Etnografía (Uruguayan Anthropology and Ethnography Magazine). As the name suggests, the publication turns towards the center of the Anthropological
Sciences, taking into account an internal potential diversity while keeping and highlighting an ethnographic observation vocation, analisys and writing on objects, relationships, peoples, cities, identities, and cultural phenomena in general.

They tell us that being on the SCielo portal puts us within reach of the whole world! Ok, but it was real hard to give up a way of presenting our work so gratifying to us, and which, in a probably less codified but very efficient version came to enjoy a cosmopolitan existence by being “lifted to ” and able to be “downed from” the Unesco-Montevideo web page.

But nowadays we have to join the general new rules, common to all academic publications under uniform criteria. Somehow an independent existence with own rules would had being an unproductive narcisist whim.

We thank the opportunity of belonging to a global community as the one SCielo Uruguay gave us and hope to clear the high bar set and to keep our impulse to achieve excellence levels.

To compose the new Uruguayan Anthropology and Ethnography Magazine this time we had to convert the contents as to have two biannual numbers in this first publication. These will be numbered 1 and 2 to cover the 2016 January/June and July/December periods. The aim is to join both on-line numbers each year to print them as one: that is, the idea is to have a single-volume paper versión per year.

Now we’re occupied, pre-occupied in finishing the on line versión, starting with number 1. We will keep in the new magazine, the aesthetic highlight we used since the beginning, a distinctive cover design including a contemporary Uruguayan artist work. The association of anthropologic content and local plastic artists’ works takes us to human creativeness, which we want to keep paying homage to. In both 2016 numbers we get the works of artista Claudia Anslmi and we will select a single artista each year for both biannual editions.

We continue the practice of summon works related to specific subjects: on edition N° 2 we’ll summon for next year, that is 2017. We’ll set final dates for the reception of proposals so as to be able to send them for evaluation, selection and editing of the unpublished material received for the different áreas.

Right now we are ready to perfect our work according to the scientific magazines’ canons and agendas. It’s not any more “individual efforts” but an important group of collaborations that make it posible and we value the renovated interest shown by those who send us their works and the evaluators’proffesional job being done.

To end this brief notice on the substitition of the Uruguayan Social and Cultural Anthropology by the Uruguayan Anthropology and Ethnography Magazine we must recognize that we are doing our best but always will be something to improve. We not only pretend to care for the discipline’s innovations but for all the constant communication rush, the increasing number of specialized publications, so we cannot restrict ourselves only to the local academic life and knowledge advances. At this moment our summons go farther than the country’s small size and we receive contributions from neighbour- and far away- places.

Faithful to the teachings of Anthropology’s great ancestors, we don’t fence in against exchange, on the contrary, the links with colleagues from other countries, with other academic backgrounds, broaden the web alliances, intangible but real, as everything related to connections!

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According to our summons for the 2016 All terrain Anthropology and Ethnography, we try to separate the contributions received and evaluated into two editions. We want to emphasize that contributions came from authors of different countries and institutions, and we also provide space for those presented by young investigators with advanced grade and post-grade education.

The material received by the Magazine is separated according to the established sections: 1. Editorial, 2. Studies and Essays, 3. Investigation Advances, 4. Dossier, 5.Open space and Reviews.

Studies and Essays Section. Two ethnographic articles describe and show characteristics of localized socio-cultural phenomena and a more anthropologic article showing recurring trends in the current Argentine society.

Martin Gamboa presents two very close places outside of Salto capital city, up north in Uruguay, with a concentration of stories being told, to which special atributes are linked. They’ve become cult objects as many testimonies attract attention and crowds hoping to see sacred demostrations or at least, something from out of this world. The discussions turns to distinguish between beliefs and “proximate” practices that can be interpreted as “mistic tourism” and “religious tourism”, both of which are very uncommon in Uruguay, a country with no dominance of religious practices but crossed by beliefs from different origins.

César Iván Bondar describes current practices regarding the treatment and reverence paid by people from northern Argentina up to Paraguay when a very young baby , called angelito or little angel, dies.

Rubens Bayardo shows a growing tendency in Argentina to raise interpretations and plan even actions from the political side under the “culture” argument, as proof enough for their demands. This shorthands perspectives from a culturalist imaginary, hiding logic and possibilities of treatment closer to the empiric reality.

Investigation Advances Section. It proposes contributions from other positions, as announcements of lines of work in process, result proposals or needing further time to analize and complete. Advances show a neat vocation for fieldwork, important records to know and develop anthropologic subjects at local and regional level.

Eduardo Álvarez Pedrosián started an ethnographic survey on the west neighborhoods in Montevideo close to the exceptional geographic icon, the Cerro hill and colonial time buildings like the Fortaleza or military fort, nowadays surrounded by poverty, marginality and labour union resistance.

Fernanda Mora, livng abroad keeps belonging and citizenship alive, showing advances from her doctoral thesis. The Uruguayan diáspora, spread around several countries and adding up to hundreds of thousand people, actually represents a human capital that should have more chances to manifest itself, to make contributions on local matters. How to be without being? It’s a dilemma for many Uruguayans.

Dossier Section. This year it includes contributions or at least the record of academic visitors with well known trajectories that impacted on the local university community.

Octavio Velho, investigator with the Rio de Janeiro National Museum and author of several books, gave a conference on the Brazilian intelectual environment in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, stamped by political events and an academic production that has been introducing the diversity notion as a colonial conquest.

Javier Taks makes a brief but bright biographical sketch on the personality of anthropologist and geographer David Harvey who presented a conference in Montevideo on the increasing urbanization on the contemporary world and its economic, political and cultural consequences.

Sonnia Romero Gorski gives an account on the passage in Montevideo of Pierre Rosanvallon and the intense theorethical exchanges he passed on a conference at the Social Science College as well as an academic exchange at the Humanities and Education Sciences College.

These thinkers, authors of great force leave us with the conviction that it’s necessary to increase the exchanges, get a first hand knowledge from top of the line experts.

Open Space and Reviews

Nicolás Guigou presided over the XI Mercosur Anthropologic Meeting, a crowded event held in Montevideo by the end of 2015, and he contributes the assurance on the dinamic and growing presence of Anthropologic Sciences in the region.

Several books were also presented at that event, including one published in France but its author, Ariela Epstein made the investigation in Montevideo. The other book is on a very actual subject on discussion, do we or don’t we have indians in Uruguay? Uruguayan anthropologist José Bassini, teacher at the Manaos University says yes, and Darío Arce Asenjo makes comments on the subject.

Also from France came Clara Bermann, of the Nanterre University, to present the results of her investigation on the candombe world, it’s social and musical environment where actors live, organize and enjoy this intangible patrimony. Clara Bermann’s empathy with her afro-uruguayan community contacts come alive in her story.

Our thanks to:

The contributions made by all the authors, specially the contributions made disisterestedly by evaluators. The yearbook as an object-book gets more value due to the traditional and profesional diagrams done by Javier Fraga and the presentation of artista Claudia Anselmi.

2016 Magazine production team: Sonnia Romero (editor), Gerardo Ribero Fernández, Darío Arce Asenjo (assistant editors), J. Fraga (diagramming); translations: Nora Magarinhos (spanish-portuguese), Juan Carlos Perusso (spanish-english); artistic management: Macarena Montañez (pozodeagua televisión)

Sonnia Romero Gorski

Editor

Anthropology Institute – Humanities and Education Science College
Montevideo, June 2016

Formal aspects to highlight

I. This publication is under Creative Commons licence (cc-by) that protects contents to free access (electronic version) as well as comercial Distribution (paper versión).

II. The Uruguayan Anthropologic and Ethnographic Magazine only publishes original material and has five sections that make up its index

1. Editorial, 2. Studies and Essays, 3. Investigation Advances, 4. Dossier, 5. Open space and Reviews.

III. Arbitrations and Quality Controls

Articles on Section 2 are subject to “double blind”² arbitration. The whole content already has academic guarantee: it comes from investigations already evaluated with institutional backing, book presentations or post degree thesis. The whole publication has production and academic activities duely evaluated.

All the material passes the editor and assistant editors review plus the backing of the Editorial Board. The final product pushes us to keep looking for contributions, on line with an opening referring subjects from abroad that provide new points of view and keeping us updated.

IV. Subject of the summon for 2017 will be known with the publication of number 2, por the July/December period.