The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (CEA) has had a highly successful fourth year. It has continued to publish peer-reviewed, open-access introductions to basic concepts of anthropology. All of its entries can be found here: www.anthroencyclopedia.com. Over the past year, CEA entries have attracted more than 174 000 readers, pushing the total readership to over 340 000 people.
CEA readers come from all around the world and over a third of them are based outside of high-income countries (many of them in India), where high quality anthropological literature is often expensive and generally difficult to access.
In 2021 the CEA published 20 new entries. These include introductions to the anthropology of Buddhism, cannibalism, depression, freedom of speech, the mind, Sharia and even taxes. The high quality of entries has allowed the CEA to be included in library guides of Yale University, SciencesPo Paris, Leiden University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong among others. CEA entries have also been cited in top journals such as Current Anthropology. Their accessible tone means that they have been picked up by the BBC Radio4 show “Thinking Allowed”, as well as by numerous introductory student syllabi at the University of Oslo, the University of Bologna, and the University of South Florida for example.
Publishing peer-reviewed academic texts during the COVID-19 pandemic has not been easy. The past two years have been marked by personal difficulties and tragedies on the sides of many of our authors and reviewers. Our production team also had to work under difficult circumstances, often whilst self-isolating at home. However, we do believe that building an online resource that can easily be accessed from home has been all the more useful for our readers during these trying times. We look forward to year five and will do our best to make anthropology more accessible to thousands of readers over the years to come.