Editor’s Introduction: Urgent Anthropology: Gender, Ethnic Conflict, Migration, and Anti-Americanism

Abstract

At the end of the Soviet period, anthropologists influenced by Western trends and events within Eurasia began in unprecedented numbers to research and expose to wider audiences’ contemporary concerns under the rubric “Urgent Anthropology.”What is today termed “action anthropology” in the United States became a subset of innovative applied work in Russia that grew in part out of an internal “tradition” of writing classified government reports on causes of ethnic conflict. The more public style of “urgent anthropology,” under the directorship of Valery Tishkov at the then-Institute of Ethnography, became an Academy of Sciences series published in thick orange (subliminally code orange for warning?) pamphlets. Early coverage ranged from the Tajik civil war in Central Asia and separatism in the North Caucasus to mass media in Tatarstan, religious divisions in Ukraine, and religious splits within Islam. In the 1990s, pamphlets included “ethnopolitical situations” in various regions of Russia, and concerns of the “nearabroad” Russians in post-Soviet newly independent states. This issue features more current versions of excellent “urgent” research done on the crucial themes of gender, ethnic conflict, migration, and antiAmericanism.When I selected these articles, I envisioned simply presenting a sample of “hot issues” of our times. On rereading, I realized that the Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia, vol. 58, no. 3, 2019, pp. 117–122. © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1061-1959 (print)/ISSN 1558-092X (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611959.2019.1705745