Coming Soon: The JAF Summer Issue

The 2023 Summer issue (v. 136, no. 541) of the JAF: A Global Quarterly will be available online and will arrive in mailboxes soon. The issue includes three articles, four obituaries, numerous book reviews, and a featured project essay.

In “Strategic Skepticism: The Politics of Grassroots Participation in an Afro-Andean Nomination to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Representative List,” Rodrigo Chocano offers the concept of “strategic skepticism” to explain a passive form of grassroots engagement with the UNESCO ICH process in which community members minimally participate while still benefiting from the outcomes. In “Repairing Tradition: Vernacular Knowledge, Cognitive Spaces, and Economies of Work in an Agricultural Repair Shop,” John Laudun examines a repair shop in Louisiana in order to “understand repair as a complex socio-technical system” that is the “product of an engagement with not only the object itself but also the environment in which it is found.” Noriko Tsunoda Reider analyzes yukionna, a Japanese female supernatural being in “Snow Woman Yukionna: From Spirit of Snow to Icy Hot Female.” She offers a history of the character across time and different genres along with an analysis of themes of femaleness as they relate to this character and in relationship to other female yōkai.

This issue memorializes some of the tremendous losses we have experienced this year with obituaries for John Michael Vlach (by Simon J. Bronner), Roberta (Bobbi) Louise Singer (by Hanna Griff-Sleven), Roger Welsch (by Gwendolyn K. Meister), and Esther Clinton (by Fernando Orejuela).

The reviews and project sections include thirteen book reviews and a feature on The Ubume Challenge: A Digital Environmental Humanities Project by the project’s creator Sam Risak. We continue to encourage innovative formats for the Featured and Reviewed Projects section.  We welcome traditional reviews of projects, interviews with project participants, essays by producers or consumers of projects, and other formats that bring attention and engage important work in our field.