In 1976, when I began editorial work on what would become the first issue of CMP, I could not foresee that CMP would eventually come into its third decade of publication, as it does with the first issue of volume 20. By the time I ended my watch-the decade of stewardship from 1976-1986-the burden of editorial labor wore so heavy on my soul that I had trouble seeing the forest from the individual trees, each had so absorbed my concern. Fortunately the journal passed into the effective hands of my long-time colleagues, Byron Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, who are now also completing a decade at the helm.
When I said goodbye to the editorial duties in 1986, I literally walked away from CMP. I did not want to burden Byron and Mary-Jo with a backward looking reflection on the journal's past. It was time for new editors to put their own stamp on the journal (as indeed they have done). And so, with the exception of the odd review of a relevant manuscript, I stayed away. In fact, only in the last 3 or 4 years, have I begun to read CMP from cover to cover again: because the papers attract my deep substantive interests, not because of any feeling of distant paternity or continuity of a proprietary sentiment.
Thus, it is all the more marvelous to read an issue and come away with the disinterested feeling that this journal is really quite good; and with the pleasing recognition that it has found a special niche of its own. The cultural field is now much more cluttered with journals in medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, cultural psychology, ethnicity and health and the like. But CMP leaves its own mark with its famously long interpretive essays, its mixture of anthropological and psychiatric studies, its cross-generational themes like the relation of somatization to culture, its interfusion of contributions by scholars from the Western and non-Western worlds, and its unpredictable multiplicity of subject matter, which makes a reader feel that this is a journal in constant search of limits and borders to transgress.
It never ceases to surprise me how CMP's papers are cited in the literatures of a dozen fields and disciplines. That is what an interdisciplinary journal should be doing: namely, influencing readers who in turn will bring the writings of medical anthropologists and cultural psychiatrists into new areas and colloquies.