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Chapter 1

Trials and Tribulations

AA’s Tangled History

Anyone browsing through back issues of American Anthropologist will notice how changes in the journal’s content over the years reflect the rise and fall of different topical specializations, research sites, and theoretical perspectives among anthropologists in the United States. But the history of AA cannot be understood solely in the context of intellectual currents in the discipline. What has appeared in the pages of the journal has also been influenced by the practical economics of publishing, conflicts within the American Anthropological Association, and the idiosyncratic decisions of the AAA and AA editors.

Despite the many changes in AA since its founding more than a century ago, editors have consistently felt an obligation to strike an ill-defined balance among different subfields, topics, geographical areas, and theories. Since the 1930s, editors have worried that the journal is too dominated by sociocultural anthropology. AA has often been criticized for overemphasizing certain theoretical positions and underemphasizing others. In recent years, these critiques have usually concerned the balance between humanistic and scientific approaches to anthropology.

The Early Years, 1888–1920

The first issue of AA appeared in January 1888. The magazine was published for a decade by the Anthropological Society of Washington, D.C. This Old Series of AA has been described as “the first successful journal devoted to all branches of the science [of anthropology]” (de Laguna 1960:92). Because of the rarity of professional training in anthropology in the nineteenth century, authors came from varied backgrounds. The magazine’s articles might be roughly divided into three types. Most were descriptions of cultural traits among past and present American Indians with titles such as “Remarks on Ojibwa Ball Play,” “Note on the Turtle-Back Celt,” “Some Interesting Mounds,” and “Notes on the Chemakum Language.” Other articles were attempts to make grand generalizations about the origin and evolution of human customs. The scope and ambition of these essays are indicated by titles such as “From Barbarism to Civilization,” “The Development of Sculpture,” “Similarities in Culture,” and “The Beginning of Agriculture.” Finally, there were articles about matters that nowadays would not be considered anthropological such as “The Rural School Problem,” “The Deadly Microbe and Its Destruction,” and “Simplified Spelling.” In addition to articles, the magazine included obituaries, book reviews, notices about recent publications, reports of meetings, and miscellaneous notes and news. AA appeared quarterly from 1888 to 1895 and monthly from 1896 to 1898, publishing about 400 pages a year.¹

In 1897, the American Association for the Advancement of Science appointed a committee to draft a plan for founding an anthropology journal. The Anthropological Society of Washington supported this project, thinking that this journal, also to be called American Anthropologist, would have more funds at its disposal than its magazine. The New Series of AA was to have “quarterly numbers of 200 large octavo pages and be amply illustrated.” The contents of the journal would include “(1) high grade papers pertaining to all parts of the domain of anthropology; (2) briefer contributions, including discussion and correspondence; (3) reviews of anthropological literature; (4) a current bibliography of anthropology … [and] (5) anthropological notes and news” (American Anthropologist—New Series 1898:389).

The first issue of the New Series appeared in 1899. When the American Anthropological Association was incorporated in March 1902, the organization’s constitution stated that “the Association may publish a periodical journal [AA], which will be sent to all members not in arrears.” Membership in the AAA cost $6, the equivalent of about $160 today. AA editor Frederick Webb Hodge became one of the officers of the AAA. AA was also the official magazine of the Anthropological Society of Washington and the American Ethnological Society. AA published on average 759 pages between 1899 and 1913. Issues then became shorter, averaging 478 pages annually between 1914 and 1920.²

The sections of AA during this period were more or less those outlined in the notice announcing the New Series. The allocation of space among sections changed over time. The book review and discussion and correspondence sections took up more pages with each passing year, with less space devoted to obituaries, reports of meetings, and notes and news. About four-fifths of the articles in sociocultural anthropology between 1900 and 1919 were studies of North American Indians, many focusing on expressive culture, material culture, and religion.³ So little attention was paid to economics that the famous anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1918:331) commented in an AA article that “there is probably no phase of native life that has been so unreasonably neglected by American anthropologists.”

Many anthropologists at the time, especially those influenced by Franz Boas, rejected ambitious generalizations and speculation, advocating instead detailed ethnographic and archaeological descriptions. Although AA continued to publish articles with titles such as “Mind and Matter in Culture,” “Some Problems of the American Race,” and “Some Ethnological and National Factors of War,” the proportion of such pieces dropped sharply. Some thoughtful articles by prominent anthropologists such as Boas and Kroeber attempted to make middle-range generalizations without engaging in the speculation and conjectural history of earlier years. AA also included useful essays about methodology, pedagogy, and scholarly cooperation. Most articles, however, were narrow descriptions of cultural traits, languages, archaeological sites, and the dimensions of human bodies (anthropometry). Historians of the period have mixed reactions to this particularism. Frederica de Laguna (1960:102) applauds the move to description, saying that by 1906, the AA had lost much of its old-fashioned flavor. (From a contemporary perspective, it is hard to imagine how AA issues from this time could be more old-fashioned.) Gwen Stern and Paul Bohannan (1970:6) are less enthusiastic, remarking that “what had been a lively journal had become downright dull.” While I agree with Stern and Bohannan, much of the previous liveliness of AA came from speculative articles that in the long run proved to be useless.⁴

A More Professional Journal, 1921–1945

During the first part of the twentieth century, the AAA and AA were controlled by Boasians, who opposed racism and evolutionary speculation. This control was threatened after Boas sent a letter to The Nation in 1919 criticizing certain unnamed anthropologists for being spies in Central America during World War I while claiming to be conducting research. At the annual meeting of the association that year, Boas was censured and forced to resign his position as an anthropological representative on the National Research Council. Counterrevolutionaries, including many scholars less than completely sympathetic to Boas’s historical particularism and antiracism, then attempted to complete their coup by gaining control of AA. The Boasians succeeded in preventing this and in a compromise, the “placid and marginally Boasian” John Swanton became AA editor in 1921 (Stocking 1976:2). By 1923, the Boasians had regained control of the AAA and Robert Lowie became AA editor, a position he kept through 1933. Lowie was succeeded by Leslie Spier, another Boasian, who edited the journal through 1938.

It is difficult to discern evidence of these conflicts in the pages of AA. No matter who was editor, the journal in the 1920s was dominated by descriptive articles. George Stocking comments that with few exceptions, articles in the journal were dull “by almost anyone’s standards.” Even Lowie noted the “lamentable dearth of theoretical discussion” and later recalled that the lack of “good stuff” had forced him to make frantic appeals for aid (Stocking 1976:52).

By the 1930s, the journal had become more diverse and interesting. The proportion of ethnographic articles about North American Indians was down to about 50 percent, with another 15 percent about other groups in the Western Hemisphere and 35 percent about the rest of the world. The most common topics were religion, kinship and social organization, and expressive culture; descriptions of material objects were becoming less frequent. Narrowly descriptive articles, sarcastically characterized by Stern and Bohannan (1970:6) as being about “A Curious Example of X from Y-land,” became less common. Such articles, however, did not disappear from the journal for a long time. In the early 1940s, AA published “Shawnee Musical Instruments,” “A Sioux Medicine Bundle,” and “Games of the Mountain Tarascans.”⁵

In a 1939 AA article about ethnological theory and method, Alexander Lesser discusses new approaches to research in sociocultural anthropology. Although most ethnographers still brought back from the field a “general assortment of data” presented as “a descriptive treatment of a people or culture,” increasing numbers of anthropologists were examining “problems” that could be empirically examined. They were, in Lesser’s (1939:576) words, testing “hypotheses … that assert something about the nature of the real world which is to be checked against the facts.” (This formulation is too positivistic for many contemporary sociocultural anthropologists!) Some AA articles now had titles such as “The Problem of the Incest Tabu in a North China Village” and “A Problem in Kinship Terminology.” In a related development, AA was beginning to publish articles about the use of statistical methods to examine particular problems.⁶

Although anthropologists now did more research among peasants and other members of state societies, this was reflected to only a limited extent in the pages of AA. Stocking argues that the Boasian orientation of AA editors may have made them resistant to this and other changes in the field: “Insofar as they were interdisciplinary in character, the newer trends tended to develop at its intellectual margins. Articles on culture and personality were likely to appear in journals that were rarely or irregularly read by anthropologists. Furthermore, insofar as they were resisted by older anthropologists, the new trends also tended institutionally to be forced to the margins. The Anthropologist published little on culture and personality … [and] was apparently unreceptive to the work of Julian Steward [on cultural ecology]” (Stocking 1976:23).

The distribution of articles among anthropological subfields gradually became less even. The journal became considerably more oriented to socio-cultural anthropology. Physical anthropologists often preferred to publish in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (founded in 1918); American Antiquity (founded in 1935) became an attractive outlet for articles in archaeology. The drop in submissions in these two fields was also related to fields of study among doctoral recipients in anthropology. In the 1930s and 1940s, only about one-quarter of PhD degrees in anthropology in the United States were given in archaeology and physical anthropology compared to about half in the 1920s. Linguistic anthropology remained a small subfield.

Contributors to AA between 1921 and 1945 said little about sociopolitical and economic events in the wider world. Articles in the journal rarely mentioned the boom of the 1920s, the ensuing Great Depression, the inequities of colonialism, and the rise of fascism, Nazism, and communism. Even though many anthropologists were involved with the government and the military during World War II, the journal included few pieces related to the war.

AA was not totally apolitical. In 1939, the journal published an AAA resolution on “racial theories”; several articles in the 1940s discussed constraints on the practice of anthropology during the war in different countries. Nevertheless, the general avoidance of politics and social justice in AA is exemplified by the complete lack of critical commentary about internment centers in the United States for Japanese Americans during and immediately after the war. Although U.S. anthropologists were involved in the administration of these camps, the only AA article about them during the war was Marvin Opler’s “A ‘Sumo’ Tournament at Tule Lake Center.” Opler was a “community analyst” at Tule Lake, and it may be unreasonable to expect him to have made a political critique of such centers during wartime. But the journal editor’s decision to publish an ethnographic article that did not include any social commentary about the situation of the participants in the tournament is not one that would be made today.⁷

The format of AA remained more or less the same between 1921 and 1945. The journal consisted of articles, book reviews, brief communications (the former discussion and correspondence), notes and news, obituaries, and accounts of the proceedings of scholarly societies. The only significant innovation was a series of annual reviews of archaeological fieldwork in the United States and Canada that appeared between 1929 and 1934.

The Heyday of the Journal, 1946–1973

AAA membership grew from 408 in 1947 to 2,536 in 1976. This growth was fueled by a substantial increase in the number of academic positions in the United States as more and more students were attending college. Many new anthropology departments were founded; existing departments doubled or tripled in size. In addition, government organizations such as the National Science Foundation and private foundations such as Wenner-Gren were providing more funding for anthropological research.

The expansion of anthropology was good for AA. In 1953, the AAA budget allowed the journal, which had been a quarterly, to come out six times a year. The number of pages steadily increased, from 762 in 1953 to 1,132 in 1960, 1,615 in 1965, and 2,053 in 1973. AA had more influence than ever, with just about every prominent anthropologist in the United States and Great Britain sending in contributions. The cost of AAA membership, which continued to include a subscription to AA, gradually rose during this period from $9 in the early 1950s (the equivalent of about $95 today) to $30 in the early 1970s (the equivalent of about $185 today).

The bulk of the journal, as always, consisted of research articles and book reviews. Film reviews were introduced in the mid-1960s. Until 1969, the journal ran separate, hard-to-distinguish sections labeled brief communications and letters to the editor. These were then combined into an often-combative section called Discussion and Debate. The journal included obituaries throughout this period, but most reports of meetings and other news were discontinued in the 1950s.

Although AA editors had previously rarely commented in the journal about the economics, mechanics, and intellectual problems of publishing, this changed in the 1950s. In his first issue as editor, Sol Tax, who edited the journal between 1953 and 1955, noted that anthropologists wanted and needed the broader coverage allowed by the increase in pages and said that AA would explore the use of microproduction and other means of distribution of large masses of material. Although nothing much would come of this, Tax presciently observed that publication need not be equated with printing. In subsequent columns, Tax and his associate editors wrote about the need to balance subfield coverage in the journal and summarized the contents of issues.⁸

Walter Goldschmidt, the editor between 1956 and 1959, regularly wrote columns called “From the Editor’s Desk.” In his second issue, Goldschmidt described how he assembled his editorial board:

In establishing a panel of Associate Editors, we have tried to rationalize the processing of manuscripts and to broaden the basis of editorial decision. The Associates were selected to represent the diverse interests of our discipline…. We have selected an archeologist and a physical anthropologist, and four representatives of what may be broadly called social anthropology or ethnology. These latter were chosen to represent theoretical orientations; one for the psychological approach to ethnological material, one for the historical, and two for the sociological. This pattern was based on a rough analysis of articles appearing in the Anthropologist over the past six to eight years. (Goldschmidt 1956a:iii)

He also discussed how manuscripts were reviewed. After Goldschmidt screened submissions, they were sent to the appropriate associate editor, who made a detailed recommendation. Although manuscripts were occasionally sent to anthropologists not on the editorial board, Goldschmidt tried not to do this. He said that using “special readers” placed a burden on them (no one worries much about this anymore), delayed the handling of manuscripts (doubtless the case), and placed the editorial decision in anonymous hands (now thought by many to be a good idea). After looking at the recommendation of the reader of a manuscript, Goldschmidt made a final decision about whether to publish it. This in-house evaluation of manuscripts led to speedy reviews. The journal was not very selective. About half of the manuscripts submitted as potential research articles were accepted.⁹

Goldschmidt usually suggested certain changes on accepted manuscripts. After authors made revisions in response to these suggestions, the journal’s editorial assistant worked on “stylistic and grammatical detail.” It took about three months between sending an article to the printer and its appearance in an issue.

Goldschmidt was the first of many editors to worry in the journal about the fragmentation of anthropology:

Our discipline, which has always been a broad and generalizing one [ignoring AA articles in the Boasian period] has increasingly been subject to the pressures of specialization. Most of us are no longer anthropologists in the old sense; few of us control, let alone contribute to, the data of more than one of the several specialties in our field. We are rather archeologists or linguists, specialists in human genetics, primitive law, or some other particular aspect of the human scent…. Our clan has split into many lineages…. The loyalty to the lineage frequently outweighs the sentiment that binds us to the clan. (Goldschmidt 1956b:iv)

He argued that there was nonetheless a unity of anthropology that rested in “the ultimate goal of providing an understanding of the consistencies and diversities in human existence as they are manifested in the characteristics of peoples over the globe and throughout the course of human history.” AA, he said, was a chief symbol of this greater unity.

Goldschmidt was also the first editor to comment in the journal about writing problems related to specialization. He observed that authors had to communicate their findings in ways that were useful to fellow specialists and understandable to other anthropologists. An author therefore needed to “present his [inclusive language was still in the future] material in such a way that … [nonspecialists] can understand the conclusions and the broad base upon which these rest, even though they cannot control the accuracy of his data or understand the intricacies of his method” (Goldschmidt 1956b:iv). Although editors made efforts to strike a balance among the subfields, the journal was dominated more than ever by sociocultural anthropology. Of 1,106 research articles in AA between 1946 and 1970, 805 (80 percent) were in sociocultural anthropology compared to 86 (9 percent) in archaeology, 68 (7 percent) in physical anthropology, and 47 (5 percent) in linguistic anthropology (Murphy 1976:2).¹⁰ Within sociocultural anthropology, the most common topic was kinship and social organization, followed by social change (“acculturation”), economics, and politics. Articles about peasants and people living in towns and cities became much more common than previously. Despite the tumult of the Cold War, the civil rights era, the Vietnam War, and feminist movements, just about nothing in the journal touched on current issues.

Areal coverage in sociocultural anthropology was evenly divided between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. While coverage of American Indian groups declined, articles about them still took up disproportionate space in the journal. About one-quarter of articles in sociocultural anthropology concerned aspects of the indigenous cultures of North America (not including Mexico) compared to only about 7 percent about other groups and subcultures in the region. Sol Tax, one of the more creative editors of AA, did put together in 1955 an unusual journal section on “American” (nonindigenous) culture that included articles by distinguished anthropologists about social class, acculturation of ethnic groups, biracialism, values, and music. However, these kinds of articles largely disappeared from the journal in subsequent years.

Contributors were mostly white males from the United States. Women wrote only 13 percent of research articles between 1946 and 1973 (Murphy 1976:5); AA did not have its first female editor until Laura Bohannan was appointed in 1971. Although Sol Tax later played an important role in creating the international journal Current Anthropology, issues under his editorship and those of his successors included only a handful of articles written by authors from places other than the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. There were only a minuscule number of Asian American, Latinx, African American, and American Indian authors.¹¹

By the early 1970s, it had become evident that the format of AA was no longer viable. When Laura Bohannan edited the journal between 1971 and 1973, AA had so much material that it was forced to publish three issues a year filled entirely with book reviews and discussion and debate. Other issues regularly had twenty to thirty articles spanning a bewildering mix of topics, subfields, methods, and theoretical approaches. The number of submissions was especially high in sociocultural anthropology, perhaps because AA was the most important outlet in the United States for articles in this subfield.

Debates About Journal Identity, 1974–1994

After the AAA began publishing other journals in 1974, AA declined in size and influence. The journal was once again a quarterly. Robert Manners, the editor of AA, reported in his first issue that “astronomical increases in the cost of paper and other publication expenses would limit the journal for the next several years to about 900 pages of contributed material” (Manners 1974:6). This vague, ingenuous statement only hints at the real reasons why the size of AA had been halved. The cost of paper was a minor factor. What really mattered was that the AAA had decided to devote less money to AA. Prior to the 1970s, most of the AAA budget had been used to support the journal. With the decision to expand the AAA publication program and the desire of the association to spend more on diverse nonpublishing activities, AA became a lesser priority.¹²

The influence of AA was further limited when the AAA was reorganized in the early 1980s. For many years, all members of the association had received the journal. After the reorganization, AA was sent only to members of the new General Anthropology Division. Although at first all AAA members were automatically enrolled in the General Anthropology Division, many soon left, preferring to affiliate with new sections of the association that had formed as part of the reorganization. Between June 1984 and December 1986, membership of the General Anthropology Division dropped from 7,137 to 4,288.¹³

I do not envy Manners’s situation when he became AA editor. In addition to the drastic page reduction, the AAA took away some of the autonomy of the journal’s editor. An AAA committee recommended in 1972 that “the American Anthropologist be changed from a journal primarily devoted to articles in cultural anthropology to a general journal publishing review articles, book reviews, and obituaries, with equal emphasis in applied, archaeological, cultural, linguistic, and physical anthropology.” The AAA required Manners to have associate editors representing different subfields who were chosen by sections of the association. He was also asked to place priority on interdisciplinary articles that appealed to AA readers from all subfields.¹⁴

Perhaps in an effort by the AAA to encourage contributions from sub-fields other than sociocultural anthropology, Manners’s successors were an archaeologist (Richard Woodbury, 1976–1978) and a linguistic anthropologist (David Olmsted, 1979–1981). The shrunken AA was very different from its predecessor. Between 1974 and 1981, most issues had only three to five research articles. The rest of the journal consisted of short review articles of particular topics, discussion and debate (relabeled reports and comments in 1978), book reviews, and obituaries.

Two essays in AA during this time foreshadowed subsequent changes in the journal. In a 1977 piece, Cyril Belshaw, editor of Current Anthropology, noted the importance of work done by anthropologists from places other than the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Western Europe. While Belshaw’s essay had little immediate impact on the content of AA, decades later, editors took pains to make the journal less provincial. In his last issue as AA editor, David Olmsted commented that he had preferred that contributors not use generic masculine pronouns such as “he.” Although Olmsted’s suggestions of alternative pronouns such as “heesh,” “hermself,” and “hisr” were not taken up by any AA contributors, the use of the generic “he” gradually disappeared from the journal. Olmsted also remarked that “surely it is time that we stopped using ‘primitive’ as an adjective for those who collaborate with us on research; similarly for the use of ‘man’ to signify the species.” These suggestions soon became the norm in the journal.¹⁵

H. Russell Bernard, the editor of AA for all but four issues between 1982 and mid-1990, had more control over the journal than his immediate predecessors. He was permitted to choose the associate editors and no longer had a mandate to publish interdisciplinary articles. Bernard was able to increase the number of research articles to an average of six or seven per issue. He also instituted a section for short research reports and began publishing distinguished lectures given at AAA meetings. The format of the journal changed only a little under the editorship of Janet Keller from mid-1990 to mid-1994. She published a few wide-ranging essays that were not research articles, began regular reviews of museum exhibits, and stopped running obituaries.

By the 1970s, the AAA’s newsletter had become a venue for news and debates about AA. In 1978, Eugene Cohen and Edwin Ames wrote in the newsletter to protest what they called the dismemberment of the section on discussion and debate and its replacement by reports and comments. Richard Woodbury, then AA editor, responded that “[there has been too] much space devoted to exchanges between authors or reviewers and their critics—particularly since these exchanges too often discuss narrowly specialized comments, focus on trivialities, descend to acrimony, and sometimes seem intended mainly to publicize the writers’ activities or publications” (Woodbury 1978:33). Despite Woodbury’s pointed and, in my view, accurate response, AA continued to devote many pages to such exchanges—called commentaries beginning in 1982—until the end of Keller’s editorship.

In 1993, Sydel Silverman and Nancy Parezo wrote in the newsletter objecting to the removal of obituaries from AA. Keller replied by citing page constraints and the difficulties of selecting one or two people to highlight from the many deaths of professional anthropologists. She observed that the AAA newsletter published short obituaries and suggested that more lengthy tributes might be placed online. This is one of the earliest comments by an AA editor about possibilities of digital publishing.¹⁶

Editors during this period occasionally provided information about review processes. By the late 1970s, manuscripts were regularly sent to outside reviewers instead of being looked at primarily by members of the editorial board. In 1981, David Olmsted praised the recently instituted practice of blind reviewing, in which manuscript authors and reviewers did not know one another’s identities. Russell Bernard reported that the average time between receipt of a manuscript and initial decision was two and one-half months and that acceptance rates for research articles ranged from 20 to 25 percent.¹⁷

AA’s shifting and uncertain identity resulted in editors being inconsistent about the extent to which articles should be of general interest:

In the American Anthropologist we hope to see an increasing reintegration of the discipline as a whole with specialists writing of their subfields in terms of interest to all anthropologists and beyond them to sociologists, geographers, and others. (Woodbury 1975:25)

The AA publishes front-line anthropology without regard to the breadth of the subject matters. We judge manuscripts on their scientific merit, not their breadth of appeal. My goal is not to publish seven articles per issue, all of which can be read by every anthropologist. My goal is for every anthropologist to find at least one article or research report of interest to his or her career in every issue of the AA. (Bernard 1982:777)

We emphasized the journal’s traditional strengths, especially the responsibility to showcase integrative and synthesizing research that addressed issues of general relevance to anthropology and went beyond the confines of the profession in its implications. We emphasized this mission because it seemed critical to provide a centralizing resource in the present circumstance of increasing scholarly specialization, and we strove to reach our goal by tapping the most vital, significant, and broadly relevant research today. (Keller 1994:261)

Scientific approaches were common in AA articles. Bernard explicitly encouraged such approaches, saying that “the AA must be a place where a lot of the best science [my emphasis] that’s going on in anthropology get published” (Bernard 1984:261). This was the peak time for quantitative data in the journal. I have argued (Chibnik 1999) that such data are a rough indicator of the extent to which authors use scientific approaches. Bernard (2011:21) disagrees. He argues that one should “never use the distinction between quantitative and qualitative as cover for talking about the difference between science and humanism. Lots of scientists do their work without numbers, and many scientists whose work is highly quantitative consider themselves humanist.” These comments must be considered in the context of Bernard’s practices as AA editor, when the percentage of articles in sociocultural anthropology with numerical tables (about 55 percent) was by far the highest in the journal’s history.

Bernard insisted that the editors of AA did not favor numerical analyses: “Many people have remarked to me that the journal seems to contain more statistics and mathematics than it used to. This is correct, but it is not by design of the editors. It is a reflection of changes that are going on throughout the discipline. Archeology and physical anthropology have become highly quantitative fields … cultural anthropology is also becoming a more quantitative field” (Bernard 1985:7).

Bernard is right about the increase in quantification in sociocultural anthropology at the time, but this cannot account for the amount of numerical data in AA during his editorship. The percentage of articles with such data dropped considerably after Keller became AA editor.

Although every AA editor ran articles from archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, attempts to have an even distribution among the four subfields ended with Bernard. In the long run, the AAA’s 1972 mandate to maintain some sort of balance was unsuccessful. The proportion of articles in the journal about sociocultural anthropology during Keller’s editorship in the 1990s was about the same as it had been in the late 1960s. Given the preponderance of sociocultural anthropologists in the profession, this seems to have been inevitable.

During this period, AA ran relatively few articles written by international scholars and hardly any at all by African American, Latinx, and American Indian authors. The proportion of female authors did not increase much, averaging 20 to 25 percent for single-authored research articles. The amount of attention in the journal to gender was surprisingly low, given the emergence of feminist anthropology.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the journal continued to largely ignore contemporary politics, globalization, and environmental destruction. In an editorial in her first issue, Keller indicated that this would change, saying that she encouraged articles on the reduction of biodiversity, the global flow of cultural patterns, ownership of the past, the social and biological implications of development, abortion, drug use, and the historical and contemporary implications of disease. She later reported that “our vision for the journal … as we undertook the editorship was rooted in a commitment to the intellectual issues of the profession and the contemporary significance of those issues in the modern world” (Keller 1994:261). Despite this commitment, it was not until the very end of Keller’s term that articles such as “The Power of the Imagined Community: The Settlement of Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans in the U.S.” and “Global Integration and Subsistence Insecurity” became common in the journal.¹⁸

One would not know from reading AA in the 1980s and early 1990s that various humanistic approaches to anthropology—sometimes labeled critical or postmodern—were becoming increasingly influential. Many anthropologists questioned the apolitical, detached, scientistic, authoritative tone of most ethnographic books and articles. They observed that within any society, individuals differed in their accounts of events and cultural practices; you could not always assume that certain accounts were truer than others. These scholars further argued that power relations between anthropologists and the people they tellingly called informants affected the descriptions of culture found in ethnographies. Humanistic anthropologists often felt shut out of the flagship journal of their professional association. This was about to change in a dramatic way.

Conflicts, Controversies, and Recoveries, 1994–2012

In an essay in their first issue as AA editors, Barbara and Dennis Tedlock mentioned what they called without explanation “terrific tensions in anthropology.” They took what on the surface seemed to be a conciliatory approach, saying that “it is time that we stop fighting and got on with showing our neighbors on both sides that they haven’t even begun to deal with the full range of human diversity and that no one knows how to do that better than anthropologists” (Tedlock and Tedlock 1994a:521). The Tedlocks replaced what they regarded as contentious commentaries and dull research reports with a section called Forum that provided anthropological perspectives on contemporary issues and discussed new ways of presenting anthropological data: “Our intent is to provide a space where anthropologists can discuss and critique educational, multicultural, international, and public policy issues of importance to the discipline as we approach the millennium. Here … will appear work that broadens the very forms of anthropological discourse, whether by extending writing strategies, crossing the boundaries of standard genres of writing, or using graphic means to challenge the dominance of the printed word” (Tedlock and Tedlock 1994a:522).

Despite the Tedlocks’ stated commitment to reducing tensions in anthropology, their first issue seemed to many readers to be a deliberate provocation. The issue began with a poem in the Forum called “ ‘Je Est un Autre’: Ethnopoetics and the Poet as Other.” The other three contributions to the Forum were a piece about cultural studies, a feminist critique of agricultural development, and an essay on why so many primatologists are women. Articles included “The Anthropological Unconscious,” “Embodying Colonial Memories,” and “From Olmecs to Zapatistas: A Once and Future History of Souls.” In subsequent issues, it became clear that the Tedlocks’ version of AA included a much greater proportion of articles using humanistic approaches and a much smaller proportion of articles using scientific approaches than had been characteristic of the journal in the preceding two decades. Quantification just about disappeared from articles in sociocultural anthropology.¹⁹

The reaction was immediate, with many anthropologists who had been alienated from AA appreciating the experimentation with new writing forms, the space for humanistic approaches, and the greater attention to contemporary issues and gender. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a mostly laudatory article called “A Shakeup in Anthropology: New Editors Dramatically Revise a Staid Journal” (McMillen 1994). Other anthropologists were outraged by the transformation of the journal, with the inclusion of poetry being an often-mentioned symbolic flash point. At the annual business meeting of the AAA in November 1994, the new editors were accused of turning away from “the diversity that has always marked our flagship journal.” A resolution disapproving the changes in AA was narrowly defeated, 112 to 86.

The Tedlocks were inconsistent in the tone they took when defending their editorial practices. They mildly and sensibly observed in the AAA newsletter that “we are open to quantitative research in any subfield, but would caution that the possession of objective data [it is interesting that they used the word objective without quote marks] does not exempt authors from the effort to achieve clarity and felicity in their writing, striving for the widest possible readership” (Tedlock and Tedlock 1994b:41). Nevertheless, I cannot help noticing the implication that articles using quantification are sometimes written for a small in-group, ironically a criticism often made of postmodern prose. The Tedlocks were less even-tempered when claiming in AA that one reason for the increase in humanistic articles was that “the very anthropologists who berate us for not publishing enough hard science are also the harshest in their assessments of one another [in peer reviews]” (Tedlock and Tedlock 1995:8). They also complained in the newsletter about rude, sexist behavior of male authors (implicitly of scientifically oriented articles): “It is sad for us to report that the number one problem in the day-to-day running of the journal has been phone calls and e-mail messages in which disappointed or impatient male authors repeatedly attempt to intimidate female members of our office staff. We have started keeping a file of calls that are loud, insulting, and laden with threats to bring in higher authorities. The e-mail messages have been similar, with the addition of four letter words. In our view, such actions constitute harassment, and they will not be tolerated” (Tedlock and Tedlock 1994b:41).

Some criticisms of the Tedlocks were unjustified. Previous editors had neglected certain humanistic approaches to anthropology and paid little attention to public policy, globalization, human rights, gender, and other contemporary issues. Furthermore, the Tedlocks did publish numerous scientific articles—especially in archaeology and biological anthropology—with titles such as “Transportation Innovation and Social Complexity Among Maritime Hunter-Gatherers” and “Biocultural Interaction and the Mechanism of Mosaic Evolution in the Emergence of ‘Modern’ Morphology.” Still, the journal had taken what many, including me at the time, considered to be too much of a turn.²⁰

The AAA’s selection of biological anthropologist Robert Sussman as the next AA editor was doubtless in part an effort to assuage some of criticism of the journal. Sussman resurrected commentaries, research reports, and obituaries. His vision statement in an editorial in his first issue was unpolemic, saying that “empirical research can be both qualitative and quantitative, and the combination of these two approaches are what makes the results of anthropological research unique” (Sussman 1998:606). In the AAA newsletter, Sussman noted that the journal would continue its focus on world issues through a Contemporary Issues Forum that would include cross-disciplinary research in areas such as race and racism, international interdependence and global economics, AIDS research, urban anthropology, deforestation and development, the uses of satellite imagery, feminism, nutrition, and disease.²¹

To my eyes, the journal under Sussman’s editorship struck a nice balance among anthropological subfields and scientific and humanistic approaches and appropriately included material about contemporary issues. The Tedlocks, however, could not hide their unhappiness with Sussman’s editorial practices and comments, which they interpreted as an unsubtle rebuttal of their work. In 2000, they acerbically observed in an essay in Anthropology News that Sussman’s editorial board members were all from the United States and that submissions were down 31 percent. They also objected to new text on the masthead that replaced the words international journal with flagship journal and referred to the mission of the AAA. According to the Tedlocks, flagship and mission were inappropriate military metaphors used in diplomacy and evangelism.

The Tedlocks even complained about the masthead’s seemingly inoffensive statement that “of particular interest are manuscripts … that develop general implications from exacting substantive research.” They asserted that this was a “rather transparent effort to reassert the hegemony of positivistic over qualitative research.” Making no attempts to be conciliatory, they went on to say that “in our opinion, anthropology will never realize its full possibilities in the post–Cold War era until the positivist camp gives up the idea that qualitative researchers are somehow second-class citizens, or that they should be treated as subversives.”²²

In 2000, the AAA decided that AA would once again be sent to all members. Despite this show of support, Sussman resigned the editorship in 2001 because of his unhappiness with the amount of funding the association provided for the journal. Louise Lamphere and Don Brenneis became interim editors of AA for four issues. The journal became longer, with more than 1,200 pages in both 2001 and 2002. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the issues edited by Sussman, Lamphere, and Brenneis was an increase in special sections. A centennial issue marked the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the AAA; forums examined race and racism, urban anthropology, historical archaeology in the United States, and social welfare and welfare reform.

In mid-2002, sociocultural anthropologists Frances Mascia-Lees and Susan Lees became AA editors. Because their theoretical approaches differ—Mascia-Lees is more humanistic and Lees is more scientific—their appointment suggests that the AAA was trying to tamp down the science-humanities tensions associated with the editorships of the Tedlocks and Sussman. Mascia-Lees and Lees committed themselves in their vision statement to publish scholarly commentary and research on critical issues such as the environment, health, education, and the information revolution. They followed through on this commitment by running In Focus sections examining the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks, indigenous rights movements, race, landscape degradation, and human rights.²³

As usual, most submissions and articles were in sociocultural anthropology. Mascia-Lees commented in Anthropology News that there were especially few unsolicited submissions in biological anthropology. Perhaps for this reason, she and Lees ran a special section in an issue in 2003 with nine essays on biological anthropology. These included a piece on recent developments in anthropological genetics and historical overviews of past AA articles on race, human variation, skeletal biology, and primatology.²⁴

During Ben Blount’s editorship from 2006 to 2007, the journal emphasized In Focus sections and short research reports. Blount ran relatively few lengthy research articles; two issues had only three such articles not part of an In Focus section. Tom Boellstorff became AA editor in June 2007, a position he held for the next five years. He was initially appointed on an interim basis after Blount’s unexpected departure. After the position was advertised, Boellstorff was officially given the position of editor-in-chief with the word interim removed.

Blount had left Boellstorff only three articles in the pipeline. AA’s future budget was uncertain; the AAA’s publishing contract with the University of California Press was not working out well. Despite Boellstorff’s prodigious efforts to revive AA, he was able to publish only 556 pages in 2008 and 552 pages in 2009.

The situation improved markedly as a result of Boellstorff’s hard work and the AAA’s move to a more profitable publishing partnership with Wiley-Blackwell. In each of Boellstorff’s last three years as editor, AA published more than 700 pages. Boellstorff made more significant changes in the journal than any editor since the Tedlocks. He greatly increased international representation on the editorial board and regularly wrote lively from-the-editor columns about the journal, publishing in general, and ongoing anthropological controversies. In 2009, AA began publishing lengthy year-in-review essays on biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, public anthropology (called practicing anthropology the first three years), and sociocultural anthropology. A new public anthropology section was inaugurated in 2010; the visual anthropology section was expanded. Vital topics forums were another innovation. These were occasional collections of short essays by distinguished anthropologists about general topics such as “On Nature and the Human,” “On Happiness,” and “What Is Science in Anthropology?” Boellstorff also edited an online-only “virtual issue” of past AA articles in linguistic anthropology.²⁵

Boellstorff cut the amount of space devoted to other parts of the journal. He eliminated research reports and published fewer commentaries and In Focus sections. The number of book reviews dropped to an average of twenty-two per issue, compared to an average of forty when Mascia-Lees and Lees were AA editors. The difference would be even greater without Boellstorff’s first issue, which included eighty-six reviews mostly acquired during Blount’s editorship.

The types of articles Boellstorff published were similar to those run by other editors in this century. Although sociocultural anthropology articles continued to dominate AA, the journal ran numerous pieces from the other subfields. About half the authors were women; gender issues were frequently addressed by both male and female contributors. The number of articles written by members of underrepresented minorities in the United States remained low.²⁶ The research areas covered in articles spanned the globe, including many papers about aspects of U.S. culture. Contributors to the journal examined the usual diversity of topics, with globalization, economics, the environment, politics, and migration being especially common foci of research. AA was no longer isolated from the messiness of the world.

Editors disagreed somewhat about the extent to which articles should be of general interest:

The journal primarily will publish unsolicited articles that add substantially new anthropological knowledge … synthesize and integrate anthropological knowledge, and focus on broad cross-cutting problems, themes, and theories. (Sussman 1998:605)

To fulfill the AA’s role as a unifying force, we will be looking for articles of the highest quality that are accessible to readers across the discipline…. [Contributors] should try to balance the reporting of specific research results with general theory and articulate the general importance of what they are doing for the discipline as a whole. (Mascia-Lees and Lees 2001:9)

Publications within each field ideally will be accessible to anthropologists in any field of specialization—that is, they should be of interest across the traditional fields—but they will not be expected to directly address cross-field issues, concerns, or topics. (Blount 2006:463)

American Anthropologist welcomes work that bridges subfields or speaks to the interstices of subfields, but also recognizes that the vast majority of anthropological research lies squarely within one subfield. …A “lowest common denominator” approach that would require authors to frame research questions in a manner intelligible to all subfields is a near-impossible task…. Anthropologists not invested in a four-field vision of the discipline should feel welcome to publish in American Anthropologist. (Boellstorff 2008a:1)

Despite these stated differences, the balance between general and specific articles seems to me to have been about the same no matter who was editor.

The vision statements of editors usually included something about the importance of accessible writing for the journal’s diverse readership:

In order to increase readability, we will give close editorial scrutiny to diction, rhetoric, and clarity. We will go beyond copy editing into style editing, and to this end we will employ an editorial assistant with appropriate editorial skills. For the sake of readability across subfields, we will ask all authors to explain terms that have yet to gain a place in the general anthropological lexicon. (Tedlock and Tedlock 1993:24)

I believe that clarity of writing and minimal use of jargon are necessary in order to allow readers from all subfields and fields outside of anthropology easy access to articles and reviews within the journal. (Sussman 1998:605)

We will encourage contributions written in a language that we all, as trained anthropologists, can understand. We will work with authors to ensure that the language in which they present their work is comprehensible. (Mascia-Lees and Lees 2001:9)

We work through the editorial process to unpack subdiscipline-specific terminology and provide contextual information that will make manuscripts maximally intelligible to all readers without requiring that authors alter their research questions, analytic style, or writing voice. (Boellstorff 2008a:1–2)

Acceptance rates for articles remained fairly consistent at 20 to 25 percent through this period. Time between manuscript submission and initial decision was more variable. Mascia-Lees and Lees reported an average of two to three months; the Tedlocks said that it often took six months to get the three peer reviews they needed to make a decision.²⁷

The work of editors was eased by a transition to online processing of manuscripts. AA began requiring electronic submissions during the editorship of Mascia-Lees and Lees. The move to Wiley-Blackwell in 2008 provided the journal with access to a good online manuscript control system, ScholarOne, for papers submitted as potential research articles.

Despite AA’s sometimes-turbulent recent history, the journal was in good shape when the position of editor-in-chief was advertised in 2011. Profit sharing from the Wiley-Blackwell contract had allowed the journal to publish substantial issues even while library subscriptions were declining. Under Tom Boellstorff’s editorship, the journal had instituted attractive new features while managing to avoid science-humanities controversies. ScholarOne allowed efficient, timely processing of submissions.

Nevertheless, the next editor would have to deal with many of the same questions that had challenged previous editors during the past half-century. What was the appropriate balance of articles among subfields, topics, geographic areas, and theoretical approaches? What was the niche of a general anthropology journal in a time of increased specialization? Did the idea of a four-field journal continue to make sense? How could authors be encouraged to write in an accessible way? How could the journal be further opened up to contributions from anthropologists from underrepresented minorities in the United States? How international should the journal seek to be?

New questions had arisen because of the rapidly changing publishing landscape. How could the journal have more of a digital presence? Was it still necessary to have a print version of AA? Would the AA continue to have the same level of support from its publisher and the AAA? What, if anything, did the concept of a flagship journal mean nowadays?

The job of the next editor-in-chief would not be easy.