American Academic Journal Editing in the Great Bourgeois Cultural Revolution of Late 20th‐century Postmodernity: The Case of Cultural Anthropology

Note: The following are excerpts from a statement about Cultural Anthropology prepared for a weeklong meeting with Soviet editors of literary magazines in Moscow, 8-12 October 1990. I had been invited by Ralph Cohen, editor of New Literary History, to be a somewhat offbeat fellow traveler with a small group of editors of American literary/cultural studies journals on an exchange visit to discuss with Soviet counterparts the relative situations of our journals given the current political and intellectual climate in our two countries. I had not been present during the visit last year of Soviet editors to the Humanities Center, University of California, Irvine. We were hosted by the Gorky Institute of the Moscow Academy of Science. Each day we were shuttled back and forth between Peredelkino, where we were lodged, a writers' retreat 20 miles west of Moscow, and the Writers' Union building in the embassy district of Moscow, one of the few remaining mansions of the Russian nobility, and in this case, the mansion that inspired the house of Rostp6v in Tolstoi's War and Peace. Between the relative splendor of the cottages amid the birch stands of Peredelkino and the converted ballroom in which our meetings were held, we had ample experience of the unrelievedly drab architectural monuments-mainly apartment warrens-of successive regimes of the Soviet variety of the welfare state, and of endless shortages of everything except free speech, not yet occupied with the somber past or a hopeful future, but angrily and anxiously with a chaotic present. In our group besides myself, Ralph Cohen and his wife, were Stephen Greenblatt of Representations, W. J. T. Mitchell of Critical Inquiry, Richard Turner, art historian and director of the Humanities Institute, New York University, and Deborah McDowell, on the board of Callaloo (Jonathan Culler and Catherine Stimpson were not able to attend). I would like to report that our conversations, across the barrier of simultaneous translation, were rich in content and suggestion. However, I must admit that the puzzles remained intractable, at least on our side. To some degree we were talking to the wrong people; journals like our own are only now emerging among groups that are not in control of the institutions that have organized the arts, humanities, and sciences in the Soviet Union. Literary journals with several employees and more than 30,000 subscribers are the ones still officially recognized and participating in exchanges such as ours. Thus, in the face of the culturally incommensurable, we recited our "mantras"trying to make them see, first this way then that. Direct questions about language and politics were eloquently put by Steve Greenblatt and Tom Mitchell, again and again, each seconding the other, but to no avail. Later and circumstantially, we received glimmerings of the struggles between old and newer factions in the research institutes, but what was most clarified were our own doxas: the supremely American context of our globalizing