A Radicle Revival
A few days ago the Quest sat down with Emilio Elias-Marchevsky ‘25 to discuss the revival of a project previously thought dead. Back in 2016, Reed’s Anthropology department started publishing undergraduate anthropological writing in a journal called The Radicle, but unfortunately, because of a myriad of issues (mostly COVID-19 related), the project went on a hiatus in 2021. Over the past year or so Elias-Marchevsky and company have been working hard on bringing it back, and while the main ethos of the project is still intact, the main infrastructure has experienced sizable reorganization.
One of the biggest structural changes comes from the review process. In the previous iteration of The Radicle, staff members had acted as a review board, but moving forward the team has established an entirely new peer review system. As Elias-Marchevsky noted “It’s not that common that undergraduate journals do peer review,” which has posed a few challenges in construction of the journal. Since this is relatively uncharted territory for an undergraduate publication, the team has placed considerable care in structuring the project. Elias-Marchevsky put great emphasis on “creat[ing] a really good wealth of information on how to do things…making sure that as we’re setting things up, we’re doing it very intentionally, so that there’s a structure and that we’re consistent with the kinds of things that we put out.”
This begs the question, what kinds of content does The Radicle plan on putting out? Previously, the journal had focused mostly on anthropological theory and ethnography written in essay format, and while that style of submission is still more than welcomed, the team looks to radically (like the name!) expand the scope, with Elias-Marchevsky saying, “I think that having a theory journal might slip [a bit too much] into the realm of trying to be a science when anthropology is a force of narrative making. I want people to know that The Radicle is a unique opportunity for us to write a narrative that people we care about get to listen to so that it is not forgotten…pragmatically, it’ll bring together people from across the disciplines.”
When asked who should think about submitting work to the journal, Elias-Marchevsky said “I think that the kind of people that should apply are those who…,” he then contemplated a bit before continuing, “Everybody, because everybody experiences the world through these mediators [of culture]. They might not necessarily think of it the same way, but we all definitely [think about it]. So anybody that wants to highlight their [or] other people’s experience, in this kind of critical work, should think about The Radicle as a place to publish, and it can be anything from ethnography to recipes, music, music review, or critical critique, right? It’s things that look at the way that people do things, which is like, quite possibly the most vague sentence, but it is what we’re doing.”
The Quest responded “Isn’t that what anthropology is? The study of people?”
Emilio Elias-Marchevsky continued “Yeah, absolutely… if anthropology is just looking at the way people do things, then we all do that all the time. How can we forge an anthropology that both recognizes that and utilizes it?”
When talking on the theme of the first issue, ‘What is culture?’ Elias-Marchevsky explained it as an attempt to try and establish a “fundamental kind of philosophy for The Radicle, which is breaking apart from the idea of culture in an evolutionary or static sense, that culture is the set of rules that apply to everybody, uniformly. We are trying to understand and highlight the things that people are doing and why they think that they’re important. Hopefully, this would point towards some of the bigger questions of anthropology in a way that is also digestible.” If you, dear reader, feel the desire to submit something to The Radicle, the journal is accepting any format that can be condensed to either a PDF or a mp4. However, multimedia pieces will only be available on the website. The deadline for this semester’s issue is April 10, but people should feel free to submit things beyond that date. While this issue will not be headed to physical print, future issues will have both physical and online copies. For more information, The Radicle’s website can be found in the bio of their Instagram @reedradicle. If you’d like to read old editions of The Radicle (which I suggest you do, they are very good) they can be found on radicleproject.org.