Totem: The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology

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From the Co-Editors

This year, as in previous years, the goal of Totem, The University of Western Ontario’s Journal of Anthropology, has been to highlight the diverse aspects of anthropology as a discipline that studies humankind through archaeological, biological, ethnological, and linguistic research. We believe that our 20th volume reflects the diversity of anthropological research undertaken by undergraduate and graduate students from Western and from across Canada.

This year, we were very proud to announce the journal's transition to a completely paper-less online system. Although we remain focused on providing a platform for Western students to share their research, this online system also provided a means for anthropology students across the country and around the world to quickly and easily submit research papers for publication in Totem. This system even allowed Western graduate students who were away on fieldwork, and even a few non-Western grads, to participate in the peer review and editing process.

We are grateful to last year's editors, Julianna Beaudoin and Flannery Surette, for working extremely hard last year to get Totem published online and to provide open access to our fabulous journal. This jump-started the transition to a completely online system, from initial submission all the way to final publication. We are also very grateful to Totem’s experienced advisor, Dr. Douglass St. Christian, who saw us safely through the ethical and legal sides of editing submissions that have not necessarily been through full ethics review and doing so in a changing online environment with BEPress and the Western Libraries.

We received a very large number of submissions this year and we would first and foremost like to thank all of those students who submitted work. We would also like to thank all of our peer reviewers who tirelessly helped us to edit all of the submitted works and aided in the selection of the papers that you will find in this year's 20th published volume!

In particular, we are pleased to announce the first Totem Editors’ Choice Award, and would like to honour our first recipient Kelly Baker, whose article on queer identity and community in rural Nova Scotia provides valuable inroads to the study of queerness and its complex interaction with class, visibilty politics, and rural v. urban place. Congratulations, Kelly!

We are very proud and excited about this year's volume and we hope that you enjoy the diversity of anthropological research that is represented in these works.

Jenn Morgan & Andrew Wade
Department of Anthropology
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
June 2012