Reflections on Four Years as Editor of City & Society

I began as editor of City & Society with Volume XIV, Number 1, of 2002. The first article in that issue had previously accepted for publication by Jack Kugelmass. My first editorial responsibility, therefore, was to put that article together with a series of other articles originating in a SUNTA-sponsored interlocutor session with Charles Keil at the 2001 American Anthropological Association meetings. In many ways this sort of arrangement can be helpful for a new editor, since all the content for a single number of the journal is in hand. Matters were different for Volume XIV, Number 2, which brought together a series of individually submitted articles. Even under these circumstances, however, it was possible to organize the issue in a way that permitted different articles to resonate with each other in unanticipated ways. In this case, two articles focused on Los Angeles, but from very different points of view. One of the Los Angeles articles, however, dealt with immigration issues, which spoke to the remaining articles which, each in their own ways, addressed struggles to cope with the imported and the indigenous. The opportunity to orchestrate the often serendipitous materials into issues that somehow hung together was not always possible, but when it happened, it turned editorial labor into a creative, aesthetic endeavor. Volume XV, Number 1, of 2003, allowed me for the first time to work with a guest editor, Anne Lewinson, as we prepared papers from another 2001 SUNTA-sponsored session to produce an issue on metropolitanism as an African way of life. Volume XV, Number 2, again offered a collection of articles with no single shared theme. Nevertheless, one article about karaoke bar hostesses in China resonated with another article about exotic dancers in the United States; one article about ethnic enclave economies in Chicago resonated with another