About the Journal | Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology

History

The Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (ZfE) was first published in 1869, edited by Adolf Bastian and Robert Hartmann. The older issues not only reflect the ups and downs of German ethnology, but they are also a mirror of international ethnology. In these early days academics such as Franz Boas (19 articles), Bruno Gutmann, Carl Strehlow, Sture Lagercrantz, Leo Frobenius, Carl Meinhof, Günter Wagner, Wilhelm E. Mühlmann, Adolf Bastian, Georg Schweinfurt, Rudolf Virchow, Hermann Baumann, Robert H. Lowie, Felix v. Luschan, Paul Radin or Richard Thurnwald have published here.

The journal is published by two scientific societies: the German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology (GAA or DGSKA in German) and the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory (BGAEU).

For the GAA, Prof. Dr. Gabriele Alex (Tübingen) is the editor, for the BGAEU, Prof. Dr. Alexis von Poser (Berlin) is the editor. The editorial team consists of Cora Bender, Hansjörg Dilger, Heike Drotbohm, Thomas Kirsch, Maurice Mengel, Konstanze N’Guessan, Anna-Lena Wolf and Olaf Zenker.

Contributions can be submitted in German and English.

Focus, Scope and Submissions

The ZfE/JSCA publishes original articles based on an argumentation-based analysis of empirical material and/or make an innovative contribution to theoretical or methodological discussions in the field of Social and Cultural Anthropology. A regular article in the ZfE comprises about 8000 words.

The Zeitschrift für Ethnologie offers three different formats for reviews: Book portraits, reviews and collective reviews. More information can be found here.

Under the heading Shortcuts, shorter interventions (1400-1600 words) are published that make a contribution to controversial contemporary problems and/or theoretical debates in anthropology and may well be provocative in nature. The aim here is therefore not to present a subject comprehensively, but to develop a concise argument that ideally will lead to further discussions in the specialist community or even beyond.

Contributions can be submitted in German and English. More information on submissions can be found under Information for Authors.

Peer Review Statement ZfE/JSCA Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology

The ZfE/JSCA follows a strict peer review process.

Submitted articles will first be reviewed by the editors/the editorial team. At this stage, articles which do not conform to the disciplinary, academic, and formal standards of the journal will be rejected and the authors will be informed about this decision within 4-6 weeks.

Those articles that pass this first review process will proceed to a peer review (double blind), from at least two peer reviewers. To make this peer review process transparent and comprehensible, the reviewers are asked to follow a catalogue of questions and to come up with a suggestion (see below). After receiving the two peer reviews, the editors will evaluate these and discuss the further procedure. In case of a grave dissonance between the two reviews or other issues that require further evaluation, the editors might obtain a third peer review.

Based on these peer reviews the editors will formulate one of the following outcomes: - Acceptance without revision; - Acceptance possible after slight revision; - Acceptance possible after extended revision; - Rejection – and inform the authors about it together with the crucial information form the peer reviews. This peer review process will generally take between 6-8 weeks, if a third peer review is obtained the review process might take up to 12 weeks or sometimes even longer, depending on the availability of the reviewers.