2024: A Very Good Year for IJBA

Abstract

This analysis of articles published in the International Journal of Business Anthropology during 2024 offers a glimpse of the research methods, contexts, and findings of the journal. Although the methods and content differ somewhat from the journal’s stated methods and focus, the articles provide a rich variety of studies of largely Asian and primarily Chinese anthropology which is now rebounding following the 1952-1979 silencing of anthropology and sociology in China as being a part of “bourgeois pseudo-science” (Malighetti 2019). As this sample of articles shows, anthropology is now alive and well in China, even though there is sometimes a subtext that may be read into articles that are ostensibly about another time and place. But this is real and sophisticated anthropology that is interesting and meaningful. It needs and deserves a broader set of readers and authors from adjacent fields focusing on less affluent consumers in Asia and elsewhere.