Editors’ Introduction

This issue consists of three sections: a feature article on mentoring; a specially curated retrospective set of papers on collaborative anthropology past, present, and future; and a set of reviews edited by Ashley Kistler. Nancy Parezo, the guest editor for the retrospective, outlines the core issues and ideas of her selection of papers so I will not reiterate them here.

Before discussing the feature article I want to offer apologies for disruptions in our publication schedule. When my students offer explanations for late papers I politely request that they resist the urge; I too shall resist the urge and simply apologize for our transitional tardiness, pledging to ensure our return to a more predictable schedule. Eric Lassiter, Sam Cook, and the University of Nebraska Press have created a publication platform that highlights the best in collaborative anthropology. My co-editors and I are honored to be building on this foundation and excited about what the future will bring.

The feature article section that starts this issue highlights a fact that we all know but rarely discuss or sufficiently acknowledge: the role of our field site mentors. These are people whom older anthropologies called key informants. Today we might use terms like respondent, participant, collaborator. Yet, as Ashley Kistler so aptly points out, these key people among our research respondents are mentors. Such field associates play roles as important, if not more important, in our intellectual and life development as do our academic mentors.