AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY From the Incoming Public Anthropology Review Editors AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 115, No. 1, pp. 125–131, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. c  2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01540.x Enduring Whims and Public Anthropology David Griffith, Shao-hua Liu, Michael Paolisso, and Angela Stuesse, Public Anthropology Review Editors “You might come here Sunday on a whim.” —Richard Hugo, Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg Anthropology shares with poetry a range of styles that reach from stunning commentary on themes of the times to es- oteric, obscure, and barely accessible reflections on itself. Long before a wing of anthropology turned introspective, poetry stumbled through a phase of talking more about what poetry was than addressing with moving verse a deeply hu- man capacity for appreciating, assessing, portraying, and understanding one’s surroundings and relationships. It was primarily less self-indulgent poets like Elizabeth Bishop and James Wright who were able to develop the staple liter- ary themes of illness, abuse, dysfunctional relationships, and coming of age by enhancing them with imagery from social justice, structural violence, historical knowledge, collective memory, and other subjects familiar to anthropologists. Amid this self-indulgent phase, Richard Hugo told his students about an essay he had published comparing his work as a professor poet to his work at Seattle’s Boeing plant as a service writer, translating mechanics’ needs for engineers. Like Alan Dugan and Philip Levine, Hugo spent time outside of academics, working in a factory, before his poetry earned him enough recognition to attract the attention of the University of Montana’s English department. Among the issues Hugo raised in his essay were the supposed disconnectedness and isolation of the ivory tower and the supposed cutthroat world of business at a company like Boeing. Neither of these stereotypes struck a chord with his experience. He found Boeing a pleasant enough place to work, where thoughtful coworkers purchased dozens of copies of the literary magazine in which his essay appeared, and in the academic community he joined were some people just punching their departments’ time clocks, inching to and from office and class, others working with Missoula to do something about the awful bald mountain peering down on the town, and still others wondering, with lovely verse, what happened to a city you might visit on a whim. Public anthropology occupies different points, with dif- ferent weight, along just these sorts of continua—from the isolated to the engaged anthropologist, from the penetrating expressions of the academy to the impenetrable interior of- fices of defense contractors, from the university to the town. At times, anthropologists writing for the public often seek to maintain a fiction of writing outside of the academy, en- gaging in a kind of journalism designed to detach itself from the theoretical or disciplinary conversations that cannot help but influence what we write. When Alabama’s lawmakers passed their 2011 anti-immigration law, making it illegal for anyone, in any way, to assist an undocumented immigrant, they assumed that they could sever the multiple network ties connecting neighborhoods to schools and work sites, or the temporary connections that made accomplices of clerks at Wal-Mart to recent arrivals buying inexpensive shoes, or the relationships that coursed through the state’s economy so densely that even purchasing a piece of fruit picked by an immigrant could be construed as a crime. Ripping apart the social fabric to such an extent was and is, of course, impossible. In soliciting items for this section on public anthro- pology, we are not asking that anthropologists attempt to cut ties to the academy, crossing some fictional institutional border without their disciplinary documents. Nor do we conflate public anthropology with the collaboration with nonacademics typical of engaged, practicing, or applied an- thropology, however much the four may overlap. We would like to hear about how anthropologists have translated their theoretical work in ways that engage themes of the times and themes that transcend the times, writing about issues as seemingly mundane yet profound as foods and beverages or as disquieting and tragic as human trafficking with the clarity that the public usually expects. Public anthropology is not a field of anthropology but a form of anthropological expression, a mechanism for con- necting people like those working at Boeing, at city hall, or at Wal-Mart to work that, typically, is most often read by other anthropologists. It moves beyond the proliferation of terms (applied, activist, feminist, engaged, critical medical, community archaeology) to lift up the best of each, dealing with social problems and issues of interest to a broader pub- lic or to our nonacademic collaborators yet still relevant to academic discourse and debate. As such, we would like to continue the tradition of the editorial team from which we inherit this section, considering all of those forms of communication that are not typically reviewed elsewhere