Editor's Note

What follows is an open issue, which threatens to be an increasingly rare genre in academic journals: a collection of essays that pursue very different conceptual agendas and social ends and whose voices present a challenge to an imagined—or desired—unity. Special issues, whether planned or accidental, are increasingly the truck and trade of a market whose survival depends on texts not merely being picked up, perused, lent an ear listening for the diverse strains of thought that characterize a global academy, but also being immediately thematizable and deployable as a whole—say as a course textbook. The custom now is to describe these thematic issues as "special" even as we strive to distance ourselves from the connotations of superiority embedded in this term. Indeed, one of the functions of an editor's note is to signal a subtending composition to an open issue and to assert a problematic animating a collection of essays whose only previous commonality is their acceptance for publication in this journal and the decision to place them in the same issue. And one of the pleasures of writing such an editor's note is discovering that such a distinct, recurring, and unifying quality in a set of essays often does—or can be said to—exist!

But this issue is open in another sense. The large majority of the contributions not only are concerned with the circulation of cultural forms and commodities that begin and end outside a Northern circumference, but also are written by scholars whose intellectual and institutional residence lies primarily outside this Northern circumference. The aspiration of Public Culture is not simply to bring the intellectually vibrant interests of scholars working outside the United States and Western Europe to the attention of the North—to open the North to the rich thought outside its borders—but to provide a resource for these scholars to speak to one another through its transit. Of course, the vision of a device that allows people and things to pass through freely, a bottle uncorked and welcoming to any message, is a regulatory ideal. In the actual world, extraordinarily complex questions of discourse immediately present themselves, not the least of which is the funding sources for staffing and publishing a journal. The location of the editorial staff presents further discursive ramifications: Which concepts and theories seem legitimate? What genres and conventions of writing and transcription seem dated or cutting edge? And which modes of argument seem sensible? For these reasons, and others, Public Culture has begun working with members of its international editorial collective to develop a strategy for engaging the conditions of producing, circulating, and funding scholarly research, given the unequal global distribution of resources. No doubt these, and other conversations occurring without regard to Public Culture or any Northern journal, author, or academic, will disturb the notion of open access and specially marked packages, in the sense that these terms will no longer occupy their usual or expected places.

Public Culture is sorry to note the passing of Bernard S. Cohn (1928-2003), friend, patron, and scholarly inspiration of the journal. Barney Cohn received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1954 and by 1960 was the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. In 1964, he joined the anthropology and history departments at the University of Chicago where he helped establish contemporary approaches to the anthropology of history and the history of anthropology as it emerged in the colonial worlds of South Asia. The spirit and substance of Barney's work left an indelible mark not only on generations of colleagues and students but also on the foundational principles of this journal and others like it, dedicated to the task of thinking culture in its global conditions.