Interview with Ullrich Kockel
Prof. Ullrich Kockel (or Ulli as most of us know him) was the editor of AJEC for over a decade. With the new leadership of the journal in place now, we took the opportunity to discuss his impressions. As the note of appreciation published in a recent AJEC issue (volume 28, issue 1, June 2019) mentions, Ulli’s work has been instrumental for the success of the journal and he has gained the appreciation of both long-term and newer colleagues. Here we invite Ulli to reflect on his experience editing AJEC.
How did you become AJEC’s editor?
During the 2006 EASA congress in Bristol, Helena Wulff, on behalf of the editorial collective that had been running AJEC for some years, asked me if I would be interested. Having been an keen observer of AJEC ever since its inception, I didn’t think twice about accepting. The 2007 issue was already well in hand, prepared by editorial board member Alexei Elfimov, so I had an easy start.
What were your starting aims for your editorial work? Have these changed over time?
Regular readers will know that the journal has had quite an interesting history, and the transition to its present incarnation as one of Berghahn’s suite of anthropology journals was a tricky stage to navigate. My key aim was to run the journal as far as possible true to the spirit of its founders, and this was expressed in the mission statement we drafted with the board. I wanted to maintain the tradition of having thematic foci, but also broaden the remit by accepting open submissions, and this has largely worked well.
The introduction of double-blind peer review came as a bit of a culture shock to some colleagues. On a more practical level of planning, I considered it prudent to have two issues in hand, and I’ve managed that almost without interruption, although there was one “hairy” semester when we were down to zero by a chain of unforeseeable mishaps; in the end there was a creative solution that pragmatically resolved a second challenge – we had accumulated a backlog of “general” papers, which we could clear by introducing occasional “unthemed” issues.
How has your understanding of AJEC’s mission evolved over time?
My understanding hasn’t changed that much, but the mission might have – expressing that change is for the new editorial team. The founding ethos of the journal has remained valid and is perhaps even more timely now than 30 years ago. Both the recent issue “in memoriam Ina-Maria Greverus” and the obituary for Christian Giordano highlight that. However, times have changed (trite as that may sound), and the field has, too. To my mind, much of what passes for ethno-/anthropology nowadays veers towards either the narcissistic or the virtual, while at the same time the ontological certainties of old have been dissolving. All this makes an editor’s job much more challenging than it used to be, and that will necessarily impact on any journal’s mission.
Moreover, peer review – which used to be an effective if not entirely fool-proof safeguard against what Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont called “intellectual imposters” – has lost much of its value as the usually unpaid reviewers are becoming increasingly disinclined to serve in this role as pressures of the “day job” mount, and many of those who still do serve are less constructive than editors and authors might wish, often appearing ever more cynical, even vitriolic, and thus ethically untenable. It may be worth considering alternative modes of quality assurance.
What are your proudest moments as an editor?
There were a few great moments, but from a very personal perspective, it was definitely when Ina-Maria Greverus, who had taken the change in the format and management of AJEC rather badly, realised that her vision for the journal was alive and well under the new “regime”. Winning back my mentor as a contributor to the AJEC@21-themed issue meant a lot to me, because by rejoining the team she endorsed what I was trying to do as in keeping with her founding intuition.
Has the increasing digitisation/bureaucratisation of editorial work overall changed your work over time?
It could and should have. Some years ago we made a brave attempt to use a new online submission system, but we didn’t follow it through at the time, and ended up sticking with old-fashioned record-keeping, using spreadsheets to track submissions and reviews, which even with greatest diligence is prone to errors. On the editorial front itself, I used to have my battles about punctuation, because automated grammar checkers get things wrong quite a lot, and usually do not recognise the value of clarifying devices like the ‘Oxford comma’. Digitisation hasn’t really helped. Bureaucratisation of just about every aspect of academic life hasn’t either. When asked questions like this, I always feel glad that I’m at this stage of my career.
What recommendations would you offer prospective authors based on your experience? Are any of these different in the case of early career researchers?
I would be slow to issue recommendations if they are taken as “sound advice on how to succeed”. All I can offer is a perspective with the benefit of hindsight. An obvious comment would be: Match your essay to the journal’s mission and vision. This goes not just for ECRs who are usually wise enough to do so anyway, but also for senior scholars. You wouldn’t believe the number of the latter who have tried to place essays in AJEC dealing with medieval cultural history, specialist topics in philology or folklore, and so on – all worthy topics, but outwith the remit of the journal.
Another point, related to what I said earlier, is to engage with peer reviews, but stand your ground – especially as an ECR. There is an increasing number of individuals out there who take delight in slashing perfectly good work for whatever reason they might have; don’t be put off by someone’s evident self-indulgence. You are entitled to disagree. As editor, I have always considered authors’ responses very carefully, and been prepared to take a chance if those responses were convincing.
What recommendations would you offer reviewers? How has the review experience changed over the last 10 years?
As I said earlier, there is clear, growing evidence of a qualitative decline – academics are increasingly pressed for time and no longer able to give as generously as in the past to what euphemistically is called “services to the profession”, for which there used to be allowances that are disappearing as managerialist workload models are taking over. It has become steadily harder during my tenure as AJEC editor to recruit reviewers who would deliver constructive reviews in a timely fashion. This is, of course, also due to the proliferation of predatory journals and the resulting growth in demand for reviewers.
My advice to potential reviewers would be: Don’t take on a review to get a line in your CV unless you know enough about the subject to say something constructive – and resist temptation to slash a piece of work just because you can, which will not just waste everyone’s time but may cause a great deal of hurt. I should also say that, in my experience, junior scholars take peer reviewing far more seriously than many senior colleagues, to a point where they often overdo feedback, spending too much time and energy on minor details. While appreciated by the authors, and generally helpful, affording a manuscript this level of attention doesn’t do the diligent reviewer much good in the long term when they need to be more careful with their time, to juggle all the various, often conflicting, demands of the “day job”. Economists have the concept of a “marginal rate of return”, which does capture the dilemma nicely: for each activity, the additional benefit of added input diminishes, until it reaches zero or even becomes negative. Be generous, but careful with your time and energy.
How has European anthropology evolved over the last 10 years? What are the key trends that you think might define the next 10 years?
That’s a big question and needs more than a relatively short blog to address. “Europe” is not only just as much Terra incognita as it was when I published the Companion to the Anthropology of Europe with Máiréad Nic Craith and Jonas Frykmanin 2012, but has further receded into what I described as “the mist of discourse” in my book Re-visioning Europe. Of course it is, and does remain, necessary to critique the premise of Europe, but there has been a growing tendency, as far as I can see, to take this critique to an extreme stage at which any Europe is categorically denied ontological status other than as an oppressive mindset that has underpinned everything we might find wrong in the world. It was quite expectable that there would be a reaction against this onslaught, which draws on a discourse of indigeneity. A key challenge for many years to come will be to differentiate populist agitation from empirically-founded critical analysis, especially with lexical constraints often making the respective arguments appear eerily similar. We do need to face the challenge, but do so critically, with the greatest care.
What would you wish to see change in the publishing world in the future?
In an ideal world, it would be great to see more open access publishing supported by a credible, reliable system of quality assurance. Better models may be available than the hegemonic double-blind peer review, and more collegiate formats may be better suited to 21st century academia, especially if we wish to salvage its core values from neoliberalist instrumentalisation. How all that might work for commercial publishing – and indeed for academia – is a question for another day.
What are you going to do with all your free time?
It’s too early to say what I will do, but I strongly suspect I won’t be bored 😉