Peer-reviewing: New Challenges for Academic Publication

Every published issue comes with a feeling of accomplishment and pride. Publication is also a time to reflect on the successes and challenges of putting out an open-access and bilingual academic journal, from the first stage of receiving a manuscript to pre-publication proofreading. Without question our editorial team has noticed radical changes since the pandemic. A critical change is the new difficulties in finding peer reviewers to evaluate the submissions. All articles submitted to Anthropologica, including those for special features, undergo an anonymous peer review process. These days we must often ask more than eight to ten potential reviewers just to find two willing to take on the task. This is a trend particularly acute since the pandemic. We are not the only editorial team to have noticed this. A conversation with other academic journal editors at the American Anthropological Association meeting in Seattle in 2022 confirmed that many journals are also facing the same issue. The difficulty in finding reviewers comes at a time when the process and value of peer reviewing are seriously questioned. Take, for example, the controversy surrounding an academic journal’s publication of a manuscript about masturbating to comics of young boys as a form of valuable ethnographic methodology. One wonders how anonymous reviewers could have let that go, not to mention the editorial team that agreed to publish the piece despite ethical concerns. Others such as Docot (2022) reflect on the sometimes abusive and harmful process involved in the academic peer review process, which often disproportionally targets more vulnerable and/or BIPOC scholars. We have given these issues thought and made changes in light of them, aware that much work remains to better the peer review process. Influenced by the work of some journals such as PoLAR : Political and Legal Anthropology, the Anthropologica team changed its evaluation guidelines and process in 2021 with the goal of encouraging peer reviewers to write with a mindset that is fair and generous—generous in collegiality and substance. Additionally, our desire to increase multimodal submissions in Anthropologica also encourages us to reflect on the process of evaluating media projects, which, because of their format, are not as easily modified in response to reviewers’ feedback. Many questions remain. We hope to continue the conversation about novel ways to approach the process of peer reviewing, which remains an important criterion for tenure, among other things, and to find solutions to the many challenges of academic peer review. We also hope to find a way to acknowledge the time and involvement of fabulous reviewers. We are excited to celebrate and share with you the thematic issue “Contemporary Spiritualities on a Global Scale : Ethnographic Perspectives” with guest editors Géraldine Mossière and Marie-Nathalie LeBlanc. The eight manuscripts included in this thematic issue contribute to deconstructing ethnocentric discourses on the notion of spirituality. From asceticism and conversion (de Guise ; Boucher) to New Age narratives (Farahmand, Piraud and Rouiller ; Parmigiani ; Dansac ; Obadia), and the experience of “vivre ensemble” for women practicing Sufism in Montreal (Mekki-Berrada, Rousseau and Ben Driss), the manuscripts demonstrate that spirituality takes various shapes and that it is fluid and complex. The concept of spirituality has been (and still is) appropriated and used to diminish the complexity of certain beliefs and practices. Yet, while reflecting on their own communities, LeBlanc and Gareau show that Indigenous spirituality / religion represents situated knowledges and socio-political relations, challenging the possessiveness of settler colonial narratives. The authors further suggest that Indigenous spirituality / religion allows for the creation of collective and co-constitutive nations / peoples. Along with this thematic issue, we are …