Editor’s Note

Abstract

For more than a decade, Peter Henry Fry was the general editor of Virtual Brazilian Anthropology -Vibrant, and Carmen Silvia de Moraes Rial the co-editor. Peter Fry supervised the most recent issue, with the dossier "Ritual and Performance" carefully edited by Maria Laura Cavalcanti and Renata de Sá Gonçalves, which presents a photo taken by Mário de Andrade and in the Déjà Lu section an English translation of a text he wrote. They are each historic testimonies whose presence are the fruits of Peter's effort, zeal and capacity for intellectual dialog.During this decade, beginning as a brilliant idea and plan, Vibrant distinguished itself as a highly regarded journal among anthropology publications in Brazil. Under the direction of Peter and Carmen, an editorial staff was composed that to a large degree has remained continuous until today. Punctual bi-annual publication has been maintained ever since and Vibrant is indexed in ten data bases, in particular SciELO, which is essential for obtaining financing from Brazil's Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). An editorial board was organized with researchers who have a significant presence and production in Brazilian anthropology. Above all, Vibrant has promoted Brazilian anthropology internationally, and has had a significant number of consultations and downloads of the texts published in the various issues, in particular after it began publishing the dossiers.From 2004 until 2015 there was a significant expansion in the resources provided to public federal universities in Brazil, for both undergraduate and graduate studies. Countless federal universities were created and expanded in the interior of the country. Investments were also increased to the network of Federal Technology Institutes, with a significant increase of resources for research. The data expressed in the indicators used by CNPq and Capes are eloquent. 1 This expansion has been accompanied by a growing demand for performance based on criteria that were increasingly homogenized in a quite deleterious manner, as we all know, and which have guided the evaluation of graduate and research programs. Various ways have become established of measuring the so-called internationalization, 2 which is equivocal terminology that designates many different things. In the Brazilian case, internationalization has been measured in different ways over the past 15 years but has increasingly come to refer to the publication of articles and books in foreign languages in qualified and influential international journals.Vibrant was a pioneer in this project, not only in the field of anthropology and the social sciences, but in the humanities in general. Today, various social science journals publish in foreign languages, and most anthropology journals have a multi-language profile. Nevertheless, neither a decade ago or today have there been lines of financing for the translation of articles, and some CNPq research f...