Presentation of Anthropological Inserts

We live today in an era that had not been imagined by science fiction: the communicative experience in a virtual space. Digital technology has revolutionized our ways of transmitting culture, of knowing and above all of communicating and interacting on a daily basis. Science, and with it anthropology, cannot remain on the sidelines of this change which, although it proposes new challenges, also offers to enhance our communication possibilities and scope.

Three years ago we, a group of researchers from CIESAS Occidente (Pablo Mateos, María Eugenia de la O, Alejandra Navarro and Renée de la Torre) were commissioned to come up with a creative proposal for a new journal. After several talks, we agreed that we wanted to create an alternative medium that would allow us to communicate a wide range of what we researchers dedicated to the social and human sciences create, and that frequently, since they do not have a channel to be published, they are not considered academic "products"; not because they lack scientific rigor, but because we do not use media and digital supports for this purpose. Like other sciences, ours make more frequent use of instruments to record facts and sociocultural meanings: although we continue to resort to field diary notes and drawings, we have also incorporated interview recordings, photography, audiovisual sequences, video and even GPS. Just as reality is not fixed but develops in movement, technological advances have advanced to allow us to record expressions, movements, activities, behaviors, feelings, contexts and locations. These records do not find expressive space on paper, nor do a good percentage of our analytical exercises, and therefore do not become published academic products. Hence the idea of a digital journal that takes advantage of the new technological supports to publish different research products. After searching for a convincing name, which would also be original, Andrés Fábregas proposed us to call it Anthropological Insertscos. He convinced us by explaining that the name was a metaphor for inclusion. El Colegio de la Frontera Norte joined this project, which was born in CIESAS Occidente, to strengthen this proposal as an inter-institutional publication.

Anthropological inserts was born with the intention of taking advantage of the new technological capabilities offered by an online magazine. It has been possible thanks to the ingenuity of two designers: Jaime Mohr and Arthur Ventura. The new electronic platforms can be used to publish original material resulting from quality research under alternative languages and genres, creating innovative and more dialogical platforms and forms of interaction. The challenge is not solved by uploading a paper journal to a digital platform, but by imagining and creating new arrangements for writing and disseminating research results in an alternative way and on portable devices.

For this reason Encartes is, above all, an invitation and a provocation to write with multicode languages that allow us to intertwine the word with the image, the image with the sound, the voice with writing. We propose to make a magazine where articles, essays, reviews and interviews maintain the textuality of writing, inserting in it the oral tradition in the live voice of the actors and the new cultures that privilege the image. In this sense, to insert is to include in order to combine codes that enrich the textuality.

Encartar suggests including thematic inserts within a formal journal. Insertar, in our case, proposes to include diverse materials and activities that are the product of academic research but are continually marginalized from our formal production in conventional academic journals. This is our mission: to include textual alternatives, but also new platforms for dialogue, debate, dissemination and interaction.

The magazine includes the following sections: Anthropological themes is a section with a central theme that is coordinated by an academic responsible and conformed by specialists in the subject to be dealt with. With the following section, Coloquios interdisciplinariosThe aim is to stimulate dialogue, discussion and debate by incorporating new forms of interaction that will transform the journal into a forum for exchange between anthropologists, specialists from other disciplines, creators who engage in a dialogue with anthropology and the social sciences, and other interested parties.. Discrepancies is a section designed for open debate with specialists who hold different positions on current issues of public interest, and therefore require more immediate responses from academics. Anthropological realities is a miscellaneous section that includes original articles on various topics. In both sections, audio testimonies, motion graphics and audiovisual recordings can be inserted in a complementary way to the text. Encartes multimedia is designed to publish visual ethnographies, multimedia reports, photo essays, documentaries, poetry, life stories and oral archives. Reseñas críticas is not limited to the review of a book, but also commissions critical reviews of complete works of an author or a current. It invites to review ethnographic videos, anthropological cinema, art and anthropology exhibitions; thesis defenses, anthropological performances, etc. Entrevistas includes traditional and audiovisual formats. Together these sections are designed to open a dialogue with art, performance, new geographic information systems, poetry, ethnographic documentaries, anthropological cinema, photographic essays and oral archives. These diverse practices are in fact part of the activities and scientific projections of our research, which unfortunately have no place in print, but fortunately can be disseminated through digital media in this new journal.

We are aware that the publication of the first issue of Encartes is a first triumph that we wish to celebrate, but we also know that the challenge is just beginning, as we must broaden our horizons of inclusion and openness towards interdisciplinarity. This effort will lead us to look for gaps that allow us to articulate the published material with teaching; to disseminate the journal to provoke and motivate researchers and students to produce and communicate with different textualities, formats and genres; to become an intergenerational bridge between the cultures of the book and those of the image and to maintain the link between sociocultural sciences with a current agenda on the work of anthropology today. In this way we will be able to position local productions in global networks and international communities; to venture into new ways of reading; to continue opening windows of dialogic interaction never before imagined that go beyond the very borders of scientific specialties and to provoke discrepancies in order to exercise freedom of opposition. We trust that the existence of this journal will spread the same enthusiasm that moves us, the Editorial Team, to imagine new ways of creating, producing and disseminating the research results that from now on will be welcome in our journal.

Renée de la Torre Castellanos

Editorial Director