Editorial: Ina-Maria Greverus, AJEC and the anthropology of Europe

About a year ago - some of us had just met at the Göttingen congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) and discussed the idea of a Festschrift for her ninetieth birthday - we heard of the sudden death of Ina-Maria Greverus, founder-editor of this journal. In his contribution to the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of AJEC, Ullrich Kockel had recounted how the founders of AJEC had 'set out to bridge the various real and imagined gulfs between disciplines and approaches' and how 'successive editorial teams have, in different ways, tried to continue that original project while negotiating contemporary pressures', noting that '[a]long the way, the founding spirit may sometimes have appeared ousted by the hegemonic criteria of academic respectability' but proved resilient in the face of such pressures (Kockel 2012: 58). With this in mind, the editorial board discussed the idea of a special issue featuring contributions by members of the board past and present as well as others whose paths had crossed with Ina-Maria's, and we decided to issue an 'open-format' call, encouraging a variety of reflexive, reminiscent, or otherwise discursive engagement with Ina-Maria, her work, and her influence - both academic and personal - on so many of us, of her own as well as of younger generations.