Dear EASA member,
I hope that you have had a wonderful summer. Despite the nice weather and the holiday atmosphere surrounding us, it has been a couple of busy months at EASA and the executive committee has been quite active. Those involved in the scientific committee of our biennial meeting in Tallinn (from 31 July until 3 August 2014) are collaborating closely with the local organizing committee in Estonia. The conference has as theme ‘Collaboration, Intimacy & Revolution’ and the call for panels will be launched in due course. The meeting will give us all an opportunity to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the association, a moment of reflection to look both back and forward. As already announced in the previous newsletter, the executive committee went ahead with the creation of an ad hoc open access task force, with input from across Europe and beyond. A second task force, on ‘young career anthropologists’, is in the making. If you are interested in actively contributing to these task forces or if you feel there are other pressing issues that need EASA’s attention, do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

Our journal, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, is thriving as never before and is strategically promoting its contents on various social network channels. EASA further fine-tuned its web portal and our active presence on Facebook and Twitter as a strategic diffusion point of anthropology-related news and information is generating lots of interest from colleagues worldwide. I am also very happy to announce that we have a new EASA book series editor, in the person of Eeva Berglund. We are now collaborating with Berghahn, our book publisher, to rethink the series’ promotional strategy. Several of EASA’s thematic networks have held their meetings, with financial support of the association, while more are announced before the end of the year.

As your president, I continued representing the interests of EASA, and of European anthropology in general, at various international fora, including the Initiative for Science in Europe (ISE), the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) and the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). In Brussels, talks are underway to revive the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (EASH), in which EASA hopes to continue playing a leading role. The upcoming launch of Horizon 2020, the new EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, will require much of our attention.

What’s up next? The executive is currently preparing EASA’s Annual General Meeting. The AGM will be held on Friday 4 October in Brussels, Belgium, and is open to all members. The meeting will start at 1.30 and be finished by 5 PM, making it easy for colleagues from neighbouring countries to come and join us for the day, or simply stay on for the weekend and discover the many hidden gems of Europe’s capital. The agenda is available online. Colleague Nigel Rapport, from the University of St. Andrews, will deliver a keynote entitled ‘Towards a cosmopolitan anthropology of human capacity and individual substance’. We’re also very much looking forward to the first webinar entitled ‘La langue et le savoir anthropologique/language and anthropological knowledge/língua e conhecimento antropológico’. This virtual multilingual seminar, in collaboration with AAA, ABA and CASCA, will take place in October.

Over the last couple of months, I have been fortunate to meet anthropologists across Europe, particularly in Italy, Austria, Slovenia, the UK and Belgium. Many EASA members were actively involved in the recent World Congress of the International Union of International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) in Manchester. These multiple exchanges made me realize, once again, that there are many challenges ahead of us. However, a recent encounter with colleagues from Argentina also taught me to put our challenges in a global perspective and to be thankful for the fact that EASA plays an increasingly important role in the European landscape of anthropology in particular and the social sciences and humanities in general.

All the best,
Noel B. Salazar, your president