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Introduction

One day in February 2011, Laura Graham walked into my office and asked if I would be interested in applying for the position of editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist. Laura, a colleague of mine at the University of Iowa, had agreed the previous fall to chair the search committee for the editor of the journal. The term of Tom Boellstorff, the current editor, was to end in the summer of 2012. AA, founded in 1888, is one of the oldest and most influential anthropology journals in the world. It was for many years the only journal published by the American Anthropological Association. Although the AAA now sponsors more than twenty journals, the association calls AA its “flagship” publication.

Despite the prestige of the AA editorship, the competition for the job might not be all that intense. Of the many talented people who could do the work, few were likely to apply. When I discussed the possibility with other anthropologists, the most common reaction was wonderment that anyone would want to edit the journal. Most regarded the job as a time-consuming, thankless slog likely to involve unpleasant conflicts with disgruntled authors whose manuscripts were turned down. The unsalaried position provided no significant perks other than a reduced teaching load that might be negotiated with the editor’s university. Nevertheless, I was attracted by the unparalleled opportunity that the editorship would give me to learn about what was happening in anthropology and to influence the content of a celebrated journal.

Taking on the editorship fit well into my future work plans. I would not have wanted to edit the journal earlier in my career. Since I had begun teaching three decades ago, I had been busy with classes, fieldwork, writing, and departmental administrative duties. But I had just published my third single-authored book and had no immediate plans to begin a writing project of similar scope. In addition, starting with academic year 2011–2012, I would be teaching only during the fall semester. Because I had grown tired of university politics and teaching large courses, I had reached an agreement with administrators to teach half-time the next four years and then retire. I would have plenty of time to devote to AA.

I had to think hard, however, about whether I was a good fit for the position. My editorial and administrative experience would likely be attractive to the search committee. I was the editor of the Anthropology of Work Review, a small AAA-sponsored journal, and a member of the editorial board of the University of Iowa Press. In the past, I had edited a book on anthropological studies of U.S. agriculture and had been one of the book review editors for American Ethnologist, a prominent AAA journal. I was the chair of the AAA Labor Relations Committee and had served on the advisory panel for Cultural Anthropology of the National Science Foundation and the boards of directors of the Society for Economic Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of Work. At Iowa, I had twice chaired the Department of Anthropology and had cochaired the Latin American Studies Program.

Aside from my paper qualifications, I was confident in my ability to oversee the assessment of potential research articles, an important task of the AA editor. I was interested in diverse aspects of our eclectic field and enjoyed reading and commenting on the many manuscripts that had been sent to me for review. It was not difficult for me to summarize the main points of these manuscripts and to present what I saw as their strengths and weaknesses.

I was particularly encouraged by a 2011 from-the-editor essay that Tom Boellstorff had written, entitled “An Open Letter to the Search Committee: Three Tips for Choosing the New Editor of American Anthropologist.” Tip 1 was called “Bread and Butter over Bells and Whistles.” Because this essay was influential in my decision to apply for the editorship, I quote from it here at some length:

One of the most overhyped (if understandably attractive) questions to pose to potential editors runs along the lines of “what new things would you do with the journal?” Not just for candidate editors, but for those who have run journals for some time, there is often pressure from publishers and readers to innovate, not to mention one’s own desire to try something novel…. However, one of the phrases that has formed in my mind as editor-in-chief is … “everyone wants to talk about bells and whistles; no one wants to talk about bread and butter.” What I mean by “bread and butter” is the everyday work of making sure manuscripts are reviewed in a timely manner, overseeing production, managing budgets, and workflow, collaborating with one’s editorial board and staff, and communicating with other editors and representatives of the American Anthropological Association. These and other ostensibly mundane tasks are the heart and soul of AA and every other journal; no special issue or new online feature could exist if this regular work failed to take place…. What this means for the search committee is that I strongly urge prioritizing candidates who do not justify their candidacy solely (or even primarily) in terms of “new directions” in which they might take the journal. Look instead for evidence of timeliness, strong organizational skills, and an ability to manage a heavy workflow without resorting to complaints and excuses. Personally, for instance, I would hesitate to hire a candidate who does not respond to emails swiftly. (Boellstorff 2011a:1)

If this was what was needed for the job, I was well qualified. Although I did not have many novel ideas about how to change the journal, I have an excess of the bread-and-butter skills Tom described. Some of these characteristics shade into compulsions that my friends have been known to make fun of. I almost always respond immediately to emails, meet deadlines, and plan my work schedule in detail. My enjoyment of problem solving and numerical data is reflected in a double major as an undergraduate in mathematics and anthropology and a lifelong love of games, crossword puzzles, almanacs, atlases, and baseball statistics. I too often respond to casual assertions about matters of fact by presenting detailed tables filled with quantitative information.

Other aspects of my temperament, however, are less suited for an administrative position. I have almost no tolerance for the platitudes and strategic maneuvers of bureaucrats and am sometimes unable to keep my mouth shut in circumstances where silence would be prudent. At meetings of department chairs, I would irritate deans by asking impolitic questions when they floated ideas about saving time by grading only portions of assignments, talked vaguely about “excellence,” and schemed ineffectively to game the annual ranking of universities by U.S. News and World Report. I once responded to a dean’s request to “show leadership” (by giving some faculty large raises and others none) with an email saying that her idea of leadership was my doing what she wanted.

Furthermore, I had strong views about matters directly related to editing an anthropology journal. Over the years, I have seen theoretical approaches such as structuralism, systems ecology, ethnoscience, sociobiology, and postmodernism come and go. I was skeptical about the hype surrounding just about all of these approaches; those who knew me well often commented on my iconoclasm. Could I be fair when an author of a manuscript enthusiastically used a fashionable theory that I was dubious about? I also despised what I regarded as jargon, pretentious language, and obscurantism. Would my obsession with clarity make me overly dismissive of manuscripts with good ideas buried in difficult prose? Would I just plain be too cranky?

After two months of thinking about the pros and cons of the editorship, I decided to apply for the position. I did not see how I could turn down the possibility of being at an epicenter of anthropological scholarship. That November, I was chosen to be the next editor of AA.

Academic Journals

Although book publication is important in some fields in the humanities and social sciences, in most disciplines journal articles are the principal sources of information for scholars wanting to learn about recent and past research in their areas of specialization. The publication of articles in peer-reviewed journals is also essential for researchers hoping to advance their careers in academia. Committees assessing the credentials of job applicants and faculty seeking promotion and tenure place great emphasis on the number and types of articles candidates have published in reputable journals.

The history of academic journals has been traced (Tenopir and King 2014:160) to two seventeenth-century publications: Le Journal des Sçavans (The Journal of Experts)in France and Philosophical Transactions in England. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were perhaps one hundred scholarly journals worldwide; this number had grown to approximately ten thousand by 1900 (Price 1975:164). Although recent estimates of the number of scholarly journals vary widely, one carefully done study (Tenopir and King 2014:167) gives a figure of about seventy thousand in 2010.

Academic journals differ in their intended audience and degree of specialization. A few highly regarded journals such as Science and Nature are multidisciplinary. Widely read journals sponsored by professional associations provide broad coverage of particular disciplines. Examples of such publications include Perspectives on Psychological Science, Political Science Review, Ecology, and PMLA, the flagship journal of the Modern Language Society of America. The great majority of academic journals, however, are obscure specialized publications. Only people interested in a particular topic are likely to look at or subscribe to journals such as Minnesota History, the Journal of Cellular Plastics, and New Nietzsche Studies.

Scholars have long thought of some journals as being more prestigious than others. Flagship journals of professional associations with many readers are almost always ranked higher than specialized or regional journals with lower circulations. Quantitative measures have recently been developed to measure the “impact” and ranking of journals. The most influential of these measures examine the extent to which articles in a journal are cited in the professional literature. Citations are not the only way in which journals are ranked. Acceptance rates and internet downloads are also commonly regarded as measures of success; the newly developed “altmetric” score attempts to count how often articles are circulated on social media. The various measures of journal impact and quality result in somewhat different rankings of publications. Moreover, every one of these measures has been criticized on both technical grounds (Craig, Ferguson, and Finch 2014) and as unwelcome indicators of the spread of an “audit culture” obsessed with evaluating individuals and institutions on the basis of a few ill-thought-out numerical measures (Shore 2008).

The rise of the internet has dramatically reduced the importance of print editions of academic journals. Almost all scholars nowadays search for and read articles online, sometimes printing them out. Libraries often discontinue subscriptions to print editions of journals that are available online. Many journals have abandoned print altogether. The transition to online journals, perhaps surprisingly, has rarely led to subscription costs being less than when they were available only in print (Cope and Kalantzis 2014:23).

Digital publishing has the potential to change the form and content of journals. Authors can now include links in their articles to relevant publications and websites and have online space to include supplementary material, photographic albums, interview transcripts, videos, and complex data sets. Journal editors can use social media and websites to create interactive forums in which readers and authors can exchange comments on the content of articles. Although some journals have taken advantage of these opportunities, most have not. Online editions of journals are often identical to what once appeared in print.

These technological changes have had a significant effect on the timeliness of publication. In many fields, especially in the sciences, scholars have complained that the slowness of journal publication hinders their ability to keep up with recent research findings. The advent of the internet has allowed manuscripts to become available earlier than was possible when journals came out only in print. In the sciences, prepublication drafts of unfinished manuscripts are often made available online. In all fields, “early view” publication is common, in which readers can see articles as soon as copy editing and typesetting are finished. Journal “issues” have become less relevant; instead, there are “content streams” of articles as they become ready for publication.

Increasing costs and the development of the internet have spurred a movement toward open access journals. Advocates of open access oppose the placement of journal articles behind a paywall in which content is available without cost only to those individuals affiliated with institutions with subscriptions. Scholars without such affiliations—many living in poor countries—often cannot afford the costs of seeing articles essential to their research and teaching. With open access, readers everywhere can see online the content of a journal. Librarians are often among the strongest advocates of open access because of their commitment to making research results widely available and their inability to acquire as many journals as they would like. The economics of publishing, however, make a transition to open access difficult for many journals in the humanities and social sciences.

Since the late 1990s, tightening library budgets have led to striking transformations in journal publishing. College and university libraries in the United States and elsewhere have had to deal with an explosion in the number of scholarly books and the rapidly rising costs of science journals published by commercial firms such as Elsevier and Springer. The result has often been reduced purchases of books and the discontinuing of some journal subscriptions. University presses in the United States in the 1990s could count on about 1,500 purchases of their books from libraries; the current figure is between 200 and 500. Subscriptions to academic journals are scrutinized much more carefully than was once the case. The situation worsened during the economic recession beginning in 2007. Many journal subscriptions were cut in subsequent years and not resumed during the slow economic recovery.

Editorial Work

As I settled into my new position, I was struck by the complexity of the work. The enormous literature on scholarly publishing provided only limited help in my struggles to learn what was involved in editing American Anthropologist. Editors have written a lot about topics such as peer review, measures of impact, digital publishing, access, economics, and ways to write publishable articles.¹ But, as Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (2014:37) observe, many aspects of “pre-publication processes are hidden in confidential spaces … invisible to public scrutiny.” The invisibility alluded to by Cope and Kalantzis refers primarily to day-to-day tasks of academic editing such as soliciting and assessing peer reviews, deciding whether to accept manuscripts submitted for potential publication, and writing decision letters to authors.

Most of what has been written about this kind of work is buried in journals in brief, hard-to-find from-the-editor essays. I have found only two book-length treatments about the daily activities of academic editors. Both were written two decades ago. Stephen McGinty’s Gatekeepers of Knowledge: Journal Editors in the Sciences and Social Sciences (1999) is based for the most part on interviews with editors about diverse topics related to their work. While the interviews are interesting, McGinty does not attempt to provide the thick descriptions characteristic of ethnographic accounts. Furthermore, McGinty’s goal of making generalizations about academic editing leads him to discuss only briefly the operations of many different journals. As a result, readers do not find out much about the intricacies associated with editing any one journal. Andrew Abbott’s Department & Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (1999), in contrast, includes long chapters about editing the American Journal of Sociology. Abbott provides intriguing examples of the ways different editors solicited and reviewed manuscripts and carefully describes their strategies in dealing with controversies concerning the content of the journal. Although Department & Discipline includes a chapter about what Abbott calls the “modern form” of the American Journal of Sociology, most of the book is about the journal’s history.

American Anthropologist

In some ways, American Anthropologist fits well into conventional classifications of scholarly journals. As is typical of major journals sponsored by professional associations, AA is highly selective, has a large circulation, and is generally regarded as a prestigious venue for publication. AA, however, has two distinctive features. First, the topics and methods in AA articles are exceptionally diverse. Second, the journal is unusually magazinelike with many pages devoted to sections other than research articles.

I have sometimes thought that one could study just about anything and call it anthropology. While this is an exaggeration, the subject matter of anthropology includes an extraordinary range of topics. The subject matter of anthropology and the nomenclature for its subfields differ considerably from country to country. In the United States, anthropology is ordinarily divided into four subfields. These are—in order of the number of practitioners—sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. The inclusion of these quite different subfields in one discipline can be understood to a certain extent by examining what anthropologists were doing when the field became a separate discipline in the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists in the United States regarded their general goal as the description of human societies past and present. Their research examined technology, social organization, and ideology in recent times (sociocultural anthropology) and the distant past (archaeology), physical characteristics (biological anthropology), and languages (linguistic anthropology). In what has become a cliché, anthropology came to be described as a holistic discipline that showed relationships among culture, human biology, and language.

From the beginnings of anthropology in the United States, the subjects examined and methods used in studies in the four subfields were so unlike one another that their coexistence in a single discipline must have mystified outside observers. In the first years of the twentieth century, sociocultural anthropologists were interviewing American Indians about their customs, archaeologists were digging up material remains from long ago, biological anthropologists—then called physical anthropologists—were measuring skulls, and linguistic anthropologists were devising ways to describe and analyze unwritten languages. As time passed, the particular topics and methods in each of the subfields changed. Sociocultural anthropologists from the United States now conduct research in all parts of the world, archaeologists examine current material culture as well as remains from the past, biological anthropologists employ sophisticated genetic tools, and linguistic anthropologists focus on relations between language and culture. Nonetheless, the subfields are as separate as ever from one another. This separation is exacerbated by increased professional specialization. In the first part of the twentieth century, some anthropologists did research in more than one subfield. Hardly anyone has been able to do this since the 1930s. Most anthropologists know little even about topics within their own subfield outside of their particular areas of expertise.

The fragmentation of anthropology has led many to wonder if the traditional four-field nature of the discipline in the United States continues to make sense. Most archaeologists and biological anthropologists are not AAA members and professionally identify instead with their own scholarly societies. Many graduate programs have abandoned requirements that students take courses in each of the four subfields. In some universities, biological anthropologists have left the anthropology department and established their own separate department. Linguistic anthropology has become a small subfield, with most of the technical analysis of languages left to members of departments of linguistics.

At the beginning of my anthropological career, I was a sharp critic of the four-field division of anthropology. In the fall of 1968, the Wenner-Gren Foundation provided funds to seventy-two students from twelve departments to attend the AAA meetings in Seattle. I was at the time a first-year graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University. The graduate students in my department decided to choose our six awardees by chance. After my name was picked out of a hat, I went to my first AAA meeting. When we returned, Wenner-Gren asked us to write something about our impressions. I wrote an essay arguing that the four-field division of anthropology was outdated and that many sociocultural anthropologists had more in common with historians, geographers, and sociologists than they did with archaeologists and biological anthropologists. This was a foolish thing to write as a beginning graduate student in a department that took pride in its four-field approach. Some members of the faculty at Columbia were not pleased by these remarks, and one (Marvin Harris) commented sarcastically on my essay in a class I was enrolled in. Although I regret the sophomoric tone of the essay, I continue to think that much of what I argued is reasonable. However, I now see more merit to the four-field approach. The connections among archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology are obvious, even if some biological anthropology seems only loosely connected to the rest of the field.

Many anthropologists continue to favor the four-field approach. The AAA expects editors of AA to provide content in each of the subfields. AA is the only AAA-sponsored journal that includes articles in archaeology and biological anthropology. As a result of its commitment to the four fields, AA’s content is markedly less cohesive than that of most other anthropology journals. Here, for example, are representative titles of articles during my editorship in each of the four subfields: “Orchestrating Care in Time: Ghanaian Migrant Women, Family, and Reciprocity” (sociocultural anthropology), “Circulation as Placemaking: Late Classic Maya Polities and Portable Objects” (archaeology), “Contemporary Primatology in Anthropology: Beyond the Epistemological Abyss” (biological anthropology), and “Storytelling, Language Shift, and Revitalization in a Transborder Community: Tell It in Zapotec!” (linguistic anthropology).²

When AA was founded in the late nineteenth century, the publication was usually referred to as a magazine. This nomenclature made sense; AA was a hodgepodge of articles, book reviews, essays, lists of members of associations, reports of meetings, obituaries, and anthropological miscellanea. Many articles made little pretense of being scholarly and would not have been out of place in a newspaper or general-interest magazine.

Although AA has since its inception included articles, book reviews, and obituaries, the journal has always devoted considerable space to other kinds of content. These sections periodically change. The meeting reports and membership lists are long gone, replaced at different times by sections on discussion and debate, commentaries, letters to the editors, forums, museum anthropology, visual anthropology, and, most recently, public anthropology and world anthropology. Because AA has these sections (often more reader-friendly than the research articles and research reports), the journal is a rare combination of a scholarly publication and a special-interest magazine. This differentiates AA from most other academic journals, which consist primarily of articles and book reviews.

The designation by the AAA of AA as its flagship journal can be misleading. The word “flagship” implies that AA has a preeminent place in the anthropological publishing landscape. Although AA was unquestionably the most prestigious U.S. outlet for anthropological articles for many years, the journal is now only one of several important publications in the field. Of the more than twenty journals now sponsored by the AAA, two (American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology) consistently score better on most measures of “impact” than AA. Moreover, sociocultural anthropologists often try to place their best articles in specialized AAA journals such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly and PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Until recently, AA’s flagship designation made a certain amount of sense because, unlike other AAA journals, it was sent to every member of the association. But nowadays, AAA members have access to all the sponsored journals via AnthroSource, a website maintained by the association. Nonetheless, AA can still be regarded as the most widely circulated AAA journal. AA has by far the most library subscriptions of any of the association’s journals. Furthermore, the number of annual downloads of AA articles from AnthroSource is about equal to that of all the other AAA journals combined. (The dominance in downloads is unrelated to the current popularity of AA. American Anthropologist has been around since 1888; the other journals have been in existence for only several decades. Many more articles can be downloaded from AA than from any other AAA journal.)

Anthropologists often publish in prominent journals that are not affiliated with the AAA. Because AA is the only AAA publication that regularly publishes archaeology and biological anthropology, specialists in these sub-fields do not publish much in the association’s journals. Archaeologists and biological anthropologists instead usually seek to publish their articles in subdiscipline-specific journals such as American Antiquity and the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Sociocultural anthropologists write for Anthropological Quarterly, Human Organization, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Anthropologists in all four subfields publish in Current Anthropology (which has a higher impact factor than any AAA journal) and the Journal of Anthropological Research.

Many sociocultural anthropologists save their most significant work for books. In most research universities in the United States, including my own, candidates for tenure in sociocultural anthropology are ordinarily expected to have a book in addition to journal articles.³ Tenured sociocultural anthropologists as a group write relatively few journal articles, often preferring to present their research findings in single-authored books and invited chapters in edited collections. As a result, most submission to journals such as AA come from junior scholars seeking to improve their chances of finding an academic position or obtaining tenure.

The AAA and AA have been forced to react to the financial pressures in publishing during the past two decades. After putting out AA for many decades, the AAA decided early in this century to seek an outside publisher. An arrangement with the University of California Press proved to be problematic, and by 2007, income from the publishing program was so low that the journals were having serious financial difficulties. The AAA therefore entered in 2008 into a publishing agreement with the large commercial firm Wiley-Blackwell, a division of John Wiley & Sons. Under this agreement, the publisher and the AAA share revenue generated by association journals. Despite the opposition of many AAA members to working with a for-profit business, this agreement has been monetarily advantageous to the association. The financial condition of the journals improved even during the worldwide recession.

By the time I was chosen AA editor, the AAA had become concerned about what would happen after the agreement with Wiley-Blackwell ended. A report that the association commissioned from a consulting firm predicted that rising costs and decreases in library subscriptions would make the AAA’s portfolio of journals less attractive in the future to potential publishing partners. This led the AAA during my editorship to carry out a detailed study of its journals, emphasizing their financial condition and impact.

This book aims at making editorial work more visible by providing an ethnographic and historical account of the operations of a major journal and a behind-the-scenes account of my own experiences. My emphasis is on two aspects of editing that are common to academic journals, whatever their subject matter. First, editors have always had to attend carefully to both the intellectual content of their journals and the need to keep costs down and revenues up. Financial management has become an especially important part of editing in the current economic environment for publishing. Second, editors must cope with pressures to include content that strikes a balance among different theoretical perspectives and topical specialties. Such pressures are particularly salient in anthropology, a diverse field in which scholars differ greatly in the extent to which they adopt scientific or humanistic perspectives.

My experiences editing AA cannot be understood without a close examination of the journal’s complex history. Many of the challenges I confronted would have been familiar to my predecessors. The next chapter describes the strange and winding path that AA took before I arrived on the scene.