Aspirations to cucumbers

The London-resident Chinese philosopher in Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1762) observes, with bemusement, that new publications are endlessly produced despite the fact that there are thousands of volumes unread and forgotten in every library in the city. "Can there be so many employed in producing a commodity, with which the market is already overstocked?" he wonders.

A similar thought should necessarily trouble any reviewer of a new academic journal at a time when university libraries are reducing the serial titles available to readers. A market-led infinity of titles contrasts with a fiscally imposed constriction. What is commercially attractive to publishers, and flattering to prospective editors, frequently runs directly counter to the interests of the academic community, for a limited supply of quality articles is spread across a progressively wider band of increasingly expensive titles. Hence the libraries' dilemma.

Approaching a journal titled Anthropological Theory evokes these concerns, for do not all mainstream anthropological serials claim to publish works of anthropological theory (as opposed to works of purely empirical, regional or antiquarian interest)? But it becomes clear in the first issue that the stress is not on theory but on anthropology. The redemptive agenda proposed here is to "state more boldly and clearly anthropology's contribution to social theory". Theory is the generic object or collective project; anthropology's role in determining it the specific mission. And, whatever one's feelings about this rebirthing of the discipline, it is a mission that is distinctive enough to dispel one's doubts about the necessity of the journal. This is a platform for an attempted resolution of Anthony Giddens's repeated query about the absence of anthropological theorists. The proposed methodology is broadly Popperian, opposed equally to postmodernism and neo-Providentialisms such as sociobiology.

The start is a little bumpy: Stephen P. Reyna and Richard Wilson's enumeration of the "six-fold system" (ontological, epistemological, theoretical, historical, practical and international) is rather clumsy but the substance of the journal, particularly in parts three and four, is persuasive and creates a distinctive set of engagements. The parts reviewed here are themed to greater or lesser extents: explicitly and too narrowly in the case of David B. Kronenfeld's guest-edited volume on formal analysis and kinship, more broadly and illuminatingly with Charles Tilly's volume on inequality. Scattered across different issues are fine essays by R. Brian Ferguson, Caroline Humphrey and John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan.

Anthropological Theory differs from most other anthropology journals (certainly from the major professional publications) in the dialogical and committed nature of most of its contributions and the relative youth of its editorial board. The importance of the arguments supersedes the genre conventions of the journal essay (so evident in most of the major journals), and the inclusion of responses to articles further intensifies the focus on content rather than form. Adorno once complained that most people only listen to their gramophone rather than to music: if much mainstream publishing has the quality of a gramophone, this sounds much more like music.

The introduction to the first issue explores a horticultural metaphor involving the cultivation of a newly defined series of fields, putting one in mind (assuming that they were fertilised) of Terry Eagleton's observation about the link between "dung and mental distinction". I was also reminded of Goldsmith's Chinese philosopher's meeting with a bookseller who, when asked if he had published anything lately, replied:

"It is not the season; books have their time as well as cucumbers". The manurance of this venture is not in doubt; whether it will grow like a cucumber remains to be seen.

Christopher Pinney is senior lecturer in material culture, University College London.