Scholarship, Money, and Prose: Behind the Scenes at an Academic Journal 9780812297072

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Scholarship, Money, and Prose

Scholarship, Money, and Prose Behind the Scenes at an Academic Journal

Michael Chibnik

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL A DELPHI A

Copyright 䉷 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-0-8122-5217-0

Contents

Preface vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Trials and Tribulations: AA’s Tangled History 14 Chapter 2. A Lot to Learn: Becoming AA Editor 36 Chapter 3. Reviews: Experts Comment on Manuscripts 55 Chapter 4. Yes or No: How I Made Manuscript Decisions 71 Chapter 5. Writing: My Attempts to Make AA Readable 91 Chapter 6. Sections: AA as a Magazine 110 Chapter 7. The Bottom Line Matters: AA as a Business 136 Chapter 8. Moving On: The Editorship Ends 157 Notes 175 Bibliography 181 Index 197 Acknowledgments 205

Preface

From 2012 to 2016, I was editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist (AA), a major journal sponsored by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Editing AA was a complicated job that involved working with a large editorial board, six associate editors, a managing editor in California, an editorial assistant at my university in Iowa, and staff at the AAA and our publisher, Wiley-Blackwell. Articles and essays in AA examined an astonishing variety of topics. Issues included research articles, research reports, book reviews, obituaries, interviews, commentaries, vital topics forums, distinguished lectures, and sections on public anthropology, visual anthropology, and world anthropology. One of my topical specialties is the anthropology of work. Researchers in this field have carried out careful ethnographic studies of farmers, hedge fund traders, truck drivers, geishas, and drug dealers. When I was learning about the complexities of editing AA, I wondered why there was not also an ethnography of the work of academic editors. Their activities, after all, directly affect the careers of anthropologists writing books and articles about other professions. I could not even find a breezy, gossipy memoir about academic publishing similar to those written by editors at popular magazines and commercial presses. In the 1950s, two editors of AA, Sol Tax and Walter Goldschmidt, wrote numerous short columns for the journal about various aspects of their work. Such essays appeared only sporadically in AA in subsequent years until Tom Boellstorff became editor-in-chief in 2007. Tom wrote a fromthe-editor column for every issue about matters related to anthropology and publishing. These essays provided insightful, inside glimpses of a world of editing that most readers of the journal knew little about. Because I enjoyed the columns and thought that they included useful information, I decided to continue them after I took over the editorship of AA.

viii Preface

The from-the-editor columns that Tom and I wrote were the immediate inspiration for this book. Some parts of the book are greatly expanded treatments of ideas that we first explored in our essays. Most of what I say here, however, examines aspects of editing that we never got around to discussing. This book is not intended to be either a definitive study of scholarly editing or a manual of how such editing should be done. Instead, it is a historical and autobiographical account of my experiences and practices at AA. As such, the book is a perhaps unusual hybrid of an ethnography and a memoir that focuses on work. The story I tell must be understood in the context of the particularities of AA and the AAA, the field of anthropology, and my own interests, obsessions, and eccentricities. Although I have done my best to be as straightforward as possible, I realize that many of the events I describe might well be interpreted differently by others. I take some comfort in knowing that such ambiguities characterize all ethnography. Much of this book is based on articles and essays from AA and Anthropology News (called Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association from 1960 to mid-1974 and Anthropology Newsletter from mid-1974 to mid-1999). In an effort to avoid too much clutter, I have provided in-text citations for information found in these journals only for direct quotes. References to other material from these journals can be found in endnotes. All references to sources other than AA and Anthropology News have intext citations. The bibliography at the end of the book includes both sources cited in the text and sources cited in the endnotes.

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 timeconsuming, 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

2 Introduction

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

Introduction 3

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

4 Introduction

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 Sc¸avans (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.

Introduction 5

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

6 Introduction

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

Introduction 7

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

8 Introduction

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 cliche´, 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

Introduction 9

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 WennerGren 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)

10 Introduction

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 fourfield 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 specialinterest 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

Introduction 11

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 subfields 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

12 Introduction

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.

Introduction 13

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.

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

Trials and Tribulations 15

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

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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

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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)

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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 sociocultural 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

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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 WennerGren 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).

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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 oftencombative 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

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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

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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

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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

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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 subfields 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 mid1990 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

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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” (Woodbury1978:33). 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 onehalf 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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 sciencehumanities 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

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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 fromthe-editor columns about the journal, publishing in general, and ongoing anthropological controversies. In 2009, AA began publishing lengthy yearin-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

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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.

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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 subdisciplinespecific 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.

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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.

Chapter 2

A Lot to Learn Becoming AA Editor

For most of the people I interviewed . . . journal editorship has been . . . [an] accidental profession. (McGinty 1999:13)

During the two months in early 2011 when I was thinking about applying for the AA editorship, I realized that I had not been paying much attention to the journal. When AA arrived in the mail, I would briefly look at the contents, noting any articles and book reviews that might be relevant to my research and teaching. Although I often cited material from AA in my publications and regularly assigned articles from the journal in my courses, I was not particularly knowledgeable about the contents of issues over the past two decades. I therefore decided to look carefully at what had been published in the journal in recent years. I reached two general conclusions from my examination of past issues of AA. First, there was a significant history of conflict and tension between AA editors and the AAA. These problems sometimes arose because of the behavior of particular editors. But it also seemed to be the case that financial pressures at the AAA could lead the organization’s administrators to compel the editors to be more cost-conscious than they might like. Robert Sussman had quit as a result of such pressures; Fran Mascia-Lees and Susan Lees had seen significant cuts in the size of the journal. I knew vaguely that changes in the financial structure of publishing were affecting scholarly

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journals and worried that these developments might lead to difficult relations between the AAA and the new editor of AA. My second general conclusion was that AA was doing well under Tom Boellstorff’s editorship. The new editor would not have to immediately make any significant changes in the journal. I had nothing but admiration for what Tom had been able to do after the sudden departure of Ben Blount, but I had no desire to repeat his experience of taking over a journal in serious trouble. Although I remained concerned about how well I would get along with the staff at the AAA, I applied for the editorship in mid-April by sending a two-page letter and my curriculum vitae (CV) to Emilia Guevara of the AAA and Laura Graham. The letter included descriptions of my scholarly interests, publications, and editorial and administrative experience. In early June, I received a response from the search committee saying that “your initial statement and CV lead us to believe that you would be a very strong candidate for the position.” I assumed that this meant that I was on a short list of candidates who had passed an initial winnowing. The committee asked for a vision statement, two letters of recommendation, and information about potential institutional support by September 1. The letter was signed by Laura Graham and Virginia Dominguez, the president of the American Anthropological Association. Virginia, a good friend, was a former colleague at Iowa who had moved a few years earlier to the University of Illinois. I wondered if Laura and Virginia would later have to remove themselves from the search committee because of what might be perceived as conflicts of interest. Before approaching administrators at Iowa, I decided to find out what support was currently provided for the journal. The publication of AA involves the paid positions of managing editor and editorial assistant as well as unpaid volunteer labor such as that provided by manuscript reviewers and the editorial board. Staff at Wiley-Blackwell are responsible for the production of the print and online versions of AA and assist with copy editing and proofreading. My immediate concern was about support provided by the AAA and the editor’s institution. Tom Boellstorff provided me with the relevant information. The AAA annually paid the salary of the managing editor, $25,000 toward the support of a graduate student editorial assistant, $500 in supplies, and travel by the editor-in-chief to the annual meeting of the association. Each year, Tom received $10,000 toward the support of the

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editorial assistant, a reduced teaching load, $500 in supplies, and minor accounting support from his institution, the University of California, Irvine. I next contacted administrators at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Graduate College at Iowa to see what support might be available. I was not sure that they would promise anything. A year earlier, I had been informally contacted by the Society for Applied Anthropology about the possibility of my applying for the editorship of its journal, Human Organization. Although I had been ambivalent about this possibility, I asked Linda Maxson, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, if support would be available if I took on the position. The dean, citing budgetary considerations, offered nothing. Dean Maxson turned out to be more willing to consider supporting the AA editorship. She called Jim Enloe, the chair of my department, to ask about the prestige of AA. After Jim told her that American Anthropologist was the flagship journal of the AAA, the university promised essentially the same support that Tom was receiving at Irvine. I would get $10,000 a year for a graduate student editorial assistant (the remainder of the salary for the position would be paid by the AAA), money for supplies, and a nice office for the journal. I would also have a reduced teaching load, from two courses in the fall to one.1 Two friends agreed to write letters of recommendation. Ellen Lewin, a distinguished feminist anthropologist, had been a colleague of mine at Iowa for many years. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, an economic anthropologist with scholarly interests similar to my own, had occupied the office next to me for a decade before recently moving to the University of North Carolina. Although lining up organizational support and letters of recommendation had taken some time, it was not difficult. I was not looking forward, however, to the remaining task of writing the vision statement. I understood why the search committee wanted to know what the journal might be like under my editorship. Nonetheless, I was skeptical about the many cliche´-filled vision statements that I had seen produced by universities, administrators, and job candidates. The few concrete proposals in these cloying documents were only sometimes carried out. Despite my antipathy for vision statements, I knew that what I wrote might be crucial to the search committee’s decision making. I had several months to produce what would be only a single-spaced document of three to five pages. After some

A Lot to Learn 39

uncharacteristic procrastination, I began mulling over what I might want to say and how I should present my ideas. The vision statement had to express my enthusiasm for the position, present my approach to editing, indicate any potential changes to the journal, and assure the search committee that I would not do anything that might be troublesome for significant segments of AA’s diverse readership. In addition, I had to address two aspects of the journal that I knew the search committee was especially concerned about. Even though the title of the journal was American Anthropologist, the AAA wanted to attract more contributions to its flagship journal from authors based in places other than the United States. The AAA was also concerned with AA’s use of digital technology. The two other most cited AAA-sponsored journals—American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology—were well ahead of AA in their employment of social media. Both journals had well-designed websites that allowed rapid online responses to articles. I started my statement with some enthusiastic words: “It would be an honor and pleasure to edit American Anthropologist. The editor-in-chief of AA is able to present the latest developments in the field to a large, intellectually-engaged readership. I have long enjoyed learning about new ideas in anthropology by editing and reviewing manuscripts.” After few sentences about my relevant past experience, I then threw in another platitude-heavy paragraph intended to reassure the search committee of my neutrality in the ongoing science wars in anthropology: The editor of the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association is committed to publish both articles from the four traditional subfields (archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociocultural anthropology) and articles from other disciplinary subdivisions such as medical anthropology, applied anthropology, and public anthropology. Although some articles cross subfield and subdivision boundaries, such pieces are no more central to the journal’s mission than those presenting the best research within particular subfields and subdivisions. The editor of AA should give no priority to any particular subfield, subdivision, or theoretical perspective. Articles employing both scientific and humanistic approaches are deserving of publication, as are those that bridge or combine scientific and humanistic approaches.

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The next paragraph was the first with any discernible content. I had long loathed journal articles about obscure topics written in impenetrable and often deservedly mocked academic prose. If I became AA editor, I wanted to try to publish understandable articles about matters of some importance: AA can only accept a small fraction of the manuscripts submitted for possible publication. In choosing articles for publication, my principal consideration would be to give preference to those submissions that present material that is important and new in the discipline theoretically, methodologically, and empirically. All other things being equal, I would also give preference to articles that demonstrate how anthropological research improves our understanding of issues of practical importance and cultural significance in both the present and past. To the extent possible, the main ideas of articles should be comprehensible to nonspecialists. As editor, I would encourage clear writing and straightforward organization and would discourage the overuse of jargon intelligible to only to those with particular theoretical perspectives. I would emphasize the importance of lucid, logical, evidence-based arguments, and discourage polemical statements in the absence of empirical content. I then tried to deal with the issue of international scholarship in AA: American Anthropologist attracts many readers from outside of the United States. The editor of AA therefore needs to encourage the participation of international scholars both as contributors to the journal and as members of the editorial board. Increasing the number of international contributions to the journal is not a straightforward consequence of attracting more submissions from scholars living outside of the United States and providing extra copy editing for non-native speakers of English. The style of writing in scholarly publications in many countries differs somewhat from that typically found in articles in U.S.-based journals such as AA, American Ethnologist, and American Antiquity. This is not an insurmountable obstacle. As editor of Anthropology of Work Review (which comes out twice a year, has only three to five major articles per

A Lot to Learn 41

issue, and focuses to a certain extent on the United States), I have been able in the past three years to publish pieces by scholars from Canada, Great Britain, Argentina, India, Uganda, and Japan. Even I did not find this persuasive. I had worked hard on these pieces in the Anthropology of Work Review but would not have time for similar amounts of labor at American Anthropologist. Furthermore, these articles might not have been accepted for publication in AA, with its highly critical peer reviewers. My vision statement went on to praise Tom Boellstorff’s version of AA, noting the mix of articles and the efficient ways in which manuscripts were processed. I said that I would not make major changes in either the content of the journal or the methods for selecting reviewers and evaluating manuscripts. I actually had only a vague idea of what these methods were, but I assumed they worked well because AA was publishing good articles and making timely decisions about whether to publish potential manuscripts. The only changes I suggested were bringing back two AA sections that had been dropped—research reports and commentaries on articles (discussion and debate). Next I said what I could—which was not much, given my lack of expertise—about ways of increasing AA’s digital presence: All publications must make changes in response to dramatic developments in digital technology and increases in online readership. Although many (perhaps most) readers of AA interact with the journal primarily by printing out online articles, the journal to date has taken little advantage of digital publication of material aside from what is available in the print version. I would encourage authors of articles and research reports to make more use of the “supporting information” capability already available to present online supplementary material such as photographs, charts, tables, interview transcripts, appendices, and videos. Wiley-Blackwell now provides online space for supporting information free of charge, but this may not be the case with publishers in the future. The extent to which I would be able to use this method of presenting information depends not only on authors’ interest in providing materials but also on financial exigencies.

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I knew that this was weak, but I had no idea what more I could say given the unclear support of any initiatives along these lines from the AAA and my university. The final paragraph explained why at this point in my career, I had the time to devote to what I called “the rewarding task of editing a major journal.” After circulating a draft of the vision statement to friends, I made some minor changes and sent the document off to the search committee along with details about institutional support for the journal. I was glad to see the last of this task.

The Interview In mid-October, I received an email from the search committee saying that I was one of the finalists for the position as AA editor. At this point, I no longer had to worry about perceived favoritism because of my connections with key members of the committee. Laura Graham and Virginia Dominguez had recused themselves from the search. The brief email listed the members of the search committee and noted that finalists would be interviewed at the annual meeting of the AAA in November in Montreal. I was not then or later told anything more that might help me prepare for the interview. I received no information about who would be at the interview, how long it would last, and who would make the decision about selecting the editor. I was a bit worried about the interview. Although I had talked to many job candidates at the University of Iowa over years, I had not been on the other side of a serious interview for a position since 1978. When I had been on the job market long ago, I had not done particularly well in interviews. I was reticent in promoting my virtues and tended to be overly candid about my opinions about different types of anthropology. I could not even give concise answers to expectable questions about the topic of my dissertation. Of course, I was much more experienced now and hoped that I would be self-assured and tactful when meeting with the search committee. The interview took place on the first day of the meetings. I was ushered into a room with about twenty people seated around a large table. In addition to members of the search committee, the interviewers included people from the AAA staff in Washington, D.C., and—with the significant exception of Virginia Dominguez—elected officials of the association. I had met or corresponded with most of the people in the room and knew just about all the rest by reputation.

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The meeting was chaired by Lee Baker, an anthropologist who had recently written a book titled Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (2010). Although I had expected the interview to start off with some softball questions, this turned out not to be the case. Baker immediately asked about my plans concerning diversity at AA. To this day, I have no idea if I took the right approach in my response. I was fairly sure that Baker was mostly concerned about what efforts I would take to encourage the publication of articles and essays by members of underrepresented (in anthropology) minorities in the United States such as African Americans, Latinx, and American Indians. Although I wanted to do this, I had no ideas about what actions I might take beyond what Tom Boellstorff was already doing. Nonetheless, I quickly responded by discussing the different meanings of diversity with respect to AA. There needed to be diversity among anthropological subfields, theoretical approaches, topics of research articles, and journal sections. The AA editor also had to pay attention to diversity among contributors with respect to nationality, gender, and underrepresented minorities.2 I said that I would appoint an editorial board with all these types of diversity in mind and would reach out to various subsections of the anthropological community in my efforts to solicit contributions to the journal. Baker did not look particularly happy with this answer and later on asked me specifically about U.S. minorities. I knew that it was time to trot out platitudes and gave a pleasant-sounding answer notably lacking in specifics. Most of the rest of the questions were straightforward inquiries about matters covered in my vision statement. I did my best to reassure the committee that I was not planning drastic changes in the journal. There were, however, a series of questions about something I had hardly thought about. Several people wanted to know what I would do to further incorporate biological anthropology into AA. I was surprised by this line of inquiry because Tom Boellstorff had published a number of articles in this subfield. I responded briefly that biological anthropology would continue to be an important part of the journal. After the interview was over, I realized that these questions were related to a recent skirmish in the seemingly never-ending science wars. In 2010, the AAA had made a change in its long-term plan. The introduction to this document had previously stated that the association’s goal was “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” The AAA executive board changed this to “the purposes of the association shall

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be to advance the understanding of humankind in all its aspects.” The word science was also removed from two other places in the plan. When questioned about this, Virginia Dominguez had replied—in my view sensibly— that the changes had been made in order to include anthropologists who did not locate their work in the sciences. This was not how many scientifically oriented anthropologists interpreted the changes. They saw them instead as emblematic of what they perceived as the increasing dominance of humanistic and postmodern approaches in anthropology. Biological anthropologists, never all that enthusiastic as a group about the AAA, were especially unhappy. The controversy was covered in some depth in publications such as the New York Times (Wade 2010), Inside Higher Education (Berrett 2010), and Psychology Today (Joyce 2010). The search committee did not want an editor who would adopt policies that would further alienate biological anthropologists and lead to more unfavorable publicity for the AAA. When I rehashed the interview in the months that followed, the questions about diversity worried me more than the inquiries about biological anthropology. In retrospect, this was a mistake. While I was never criticized about diversity during my years editing the journal, complaints from biological anthropologists resulted in some of my most difficult moments. The interview lasted no more than twenty-five minutes. I left the room thinking that I had not done particularly well. I told my friends that I probably would not be offered the position and began to think about other work-related ways to spend the next several years. The executive board of the AAA was to select an editor later in the meeting, which lasted until Sunday. On Tuesday, Leith Mullings, who had just succeeded Virginia Dominguez as AAA president, called to offer me the position. Although I eventually learned the name of one of the other finalists (interestingly, a biological anthropologist), I never found out who the other two were. Years later, someone at the interview told me that one reason I was offered the position was the search committee’s confidence that I would not have problems reliably producing the journal. The executive board had evidently agreed with Tom Boellstorff about the importance of bread-and-butter qualifications. The Chronicle of Higher Education contacted me by email asking about my plans for the journal. Not wanting to stir up controversy, I responded with some bland statements from my vision statement. The resulting paragraph in the Chronicle was reassuringly free of anything likely to cause problems for me or the AAA.

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Getting Started During the seven months between being offered the position and taking on the editorship, I was busy with work on the journal. In addition to setting up an editorial board, I had to find a managing editor, an editorial assistant, and editors for the sections on public anthropology, visual anthropology, book reviews, and obituaries. As I took on these tasks, I learned a lot about work organization at the journal and some of the logistical problems associated with editing AA. I had no trouble finding a good managing editor. Mayumi Shimose had held the position for more than a decade and wanted to continuing working for AA. However, the structural position of AA within the AAA made it surprisingly difficult to keep Mayumi on. All but two of the more than twenty AAA-sponsored journals are affiliated with sections of the association such as the American Ethnological Society, the Society for Medical Anthropology, and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. (It is difficult to give a precise figure for the number of AAA journals because periodically some are added and others disappear.) The sections are primarily funded by member dues and a complicated profit-sharing arrangement between the AAA and Wiley-Blackwell. Each section that publishes a journal receives an amount of money determined by a formula based on the revenue generated by the title and the number of downloads of articles from an AAA site called AnthroSource. Journal editors receive funds from this allocation from the treasurer and other officials of their section. For example, when editing Anthropology of Work Review, I received funds for a copy editor from the Society for the Anthropology of Work. American Anthropologist and the much smaller Anthropology News are the only AAA-sponsored journals not affiliated with a section. In order for AA editors to obtain funds and other support for the journal aside from that provided by their institution and Wiley-Blackwell, they must negotiate with the director of publishing of the AAA. During most of my editorship, this position was held by Oona Schmid. I knew from my time editing Anthropology of Work Review that Oona was cautious about spending even small amounts of money. We had exchanged lengthy emails about funds for covers and financial penalties for the Society for the Anthropology of Work if the journal exceeded its page limits. Each year, the AA editor submits a budget for approval by the AAA that includes items such as partial funding for the editorial assistant, travel for

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the editor to the annual meeting, and miscellaneous supplies. When Tom Boellstorff edited AA, the AAA gave money to the University of California, Irvine to hire Mayumi Shimose and provide her with some benefits. I never did fully understand the arrangement at Irvine, where Mayumi was hired as a part-time employee of the university. The costs for hiring Mayumi through the University of Iowa turned out to be considerably higher than they had been at Irvine. Oona, who did not want to spend this extra money, decided to see if Mayumi would be willing to work freelance for a somewhat higher salary, forgoing benefits. Because Mayumi had medical benefits through her husband’s job, she somewhat reluctantly agreed to this arrangement. As the former chair of the Labor Relations Committee of the AAA, I was not happy to hear about this. This arrangement was an example of the outsourcing of work increasingly common in industrial societies. The Labor Relations Committee had strongly opposed the terrible working conditions often associated with outsourcing for adjunct faculty. In this particular case, I was also worried about the precedent set by the agreement. Future managing editors might not have Mayumi’s access to medical benefits. Although I did not say anything at the time, I should have. Hiring an editorial assistant was straightforward. Brandi Janssen, one of my advisees, had just started to write her doctoral thesis on the production and sale of local food in eastern Iowa. Brandi is smart, reliable, and well organized. She was glad to have the position, which offered flexible hours and work that could be done from home.3 Tom Boellstorff had a large editorial board. The members included associate editors in archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, public anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology. Compared to practices at many other scholarly journals, the duties of most AA editorial board members were limited. They suggested manuscript reviewers and were occasionally consulted on policy matters. The associate editors were also responsible for finding authors for and editing the annual year-inreview essays in their subfields. I assumed that Tom sometimes asked them to do other tasks. Since this organizational system seemed to work well, I saw no reason to change it. I appointed an entirely new editorial board, thinking that the current members might be weary of their duties. One of my goals was to have a board as diverse as possible with respect to members’ subfields, topical interests, and geographical specializations. I was not especially concerned

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with gender diversity. I correctly assumed that I would end up with a fairly even balance between men and women and some LGBTQ representation. Many people sent me useful suggestions for potential members of the editorial board. The one ironclad rule I followed was that members had to be relatively senior with significant scholarly achievements. For people at academic institutions in the United States, this usually meant that they held tenured positions. My letter of invitation included the following, adapting prose Tom had given me: The primary job of members of the Editorial Board is to suggest reviewers for manuscripts. If I determine that a manuscript is appropriate for review, my Editorial Assistant sends the abstract to every member of the Editorial Board for suggestions for readers. Board members are, of course, expected to suggest reviewers only in the minority of cases in which they have expertise. We typically seek 3–4 reviewers for a manuscript. We ordinarily need ten names to obtain this number of reviewers. We must obtain names of reviewers who are familiar with the subfield, specialization, and approach of particular manuscripts. The American Anthropologist publishes work from a wide range of topical, geographic, theoretical perspectives, and cannot be seen as reflecting the limited research interests of the editor-in-chief. By tapping into your own networks to suggest reviewers, you provide a crucially important service to ensure that the full range of anthropological research receives a fair hearing. In putting together the board, I thought it was important to include adequate representation of scholars from countries other than the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. I also wanted to have significant numbers of members from underrepresented minorities from the United States. Because of my own geographical specialization, I did not have problems finding potential board members who were either Latinx or citizens of different countries in Latin America. Lee Baker provided useful suggestions of potential U.S. minority board members. I was helped in my recruitment of potential international board members from places other than Latin America by suggestions from anthropologists conducting research in different places around the world. The great majority of people I asked—perhaps 85 percent—accepted the invitation, resulting in a board of more than fifty members. Despite the

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size of the board, it was impossible to satisfy all the possible ways to achieve diversity. For example, I showed a list of people who had agreed to serve to a friend who edited another major anthropological journal. She immediately observed that there were no sociocultural anthropologists specializing in East Africa, her particular area of expertise. My protest that there were already quite a few board members specializing in other parts of Africa was unconvincing to her, and I ended up inviting a specialist in East Africa. But I knew that many other parts of the world lacked representation on the board. While I was sending out invitations to potential board members, I was also seeking associate editors. I wanted distinguished scholars knowledgeable about their subfields who were open to different theoretical orientations. This was an easy task, with only one person turning down my invitation. The most important associate editor position was in sociocultural anthropology, the subfield of about 70 percent of manuscripts submitted to the journal as potential research articles. I selected Rudi ColloredoMansfeld from the University of North Carolina, my former colleague at Iowa. Rudi is widely read in our discipline, even-tempered, tactful, and a skilled administrator. (He later became chair of the anthropology department at North Carolina.) I chose Rachel Caspari from Central Michigan University as the associate editor in biological anthropology. In addition to writing scholarly articles, Rachel had published in semipopular magazines such as Scientific American. Although most biological anthropologists are not AAA members, Rachel had long been active in the association. After looking at Miriam Stark’s vitae at the suggestion of one of my colleagues at Iowa, I asked her to be the associate editor for archaeology. Miriam is a professor at the University of Hawaii who is knowledgeable about diverse archaeological topics and geographical areas. Kathryn Woolard from the University of California, San Diego became the associate editor for linguistic anthropology. I had known Kathryn long ago when I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and greatly respected her scholarly judgment and common sense. David Griffith from East Carolina University became the associate editor for public anthropology. He had previously edited both the Anthropology of Work Review and Human Organization. David was one of my first teaching assistants at the University of Iowa. Before entering our MA program, he had been in the renowned Writers’ Workshop at the university.

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After receiving his doctorate from the University of Florida, David had gone on to write many books and articles about labor and immigration in the Caribbean and the United States. The principal responsibility of the public anthropology editor is to provide a section of articles and essays that periodically appear in AA. Before selecting David Griffith, I had asked the previous coeditors of the section if they wished to stay in their positions. They reluctantly agreed to provide a section for my first issue but after that wanted to move on. David appointed a three-member editorial team to help him beginning with the June 2012 issue. The editors of the sections on visual anthropology and obituaries agreed to continue their work during my editorship. John and Naomi Bishop had only recently begun to edit the visual anthropology section. Sydel Silverman, who had edited the obituaries section since 2002, was also pleased to stay on. My biggest headache during the editorial transition was the book review section, historically one of the most important parts of AA. The number of book reviews in AA had gone down over time. Before 2000, it was common to have fifty to seventy-five book reviews per issue, with occasional issues entirely devoted to reviews. In the years just before I became editor, AA issues usually included only twenty to twenty-five reviews. This was not a matter of space constraints. Although Wiley-Blackwell permitted the publication of 964 pages in AA annually, the journal had recently been publishing about 700 pages a year. I wanted to come closer to filling our page quota; book reviews seemed to be a good place to begin. Lilith Mahmud from the University of California, Irvine was the current book review editor for sociocultural and linguistic anthropology; Rosemary Joyce from the University of California, Berkeley was the editor for archaeology and biological anthropology. Irvine provided $8,000 annually to support two graduate students each working year-round an average of four hours a week in the book review office. The students’ work consisted of tasks such as corresponding with publishers and reviewers, organizing books in the office, and sending books out for review. The funding for graduate student support would end when Tom left the editorship at the end of June 2012. Mahmud was willing to continue for a short while but only if further funding for her assistants was forthcoming. Joyce, however, would not work past the end of Tom’s term as editor. Work needed to be carried out in the summer and fall of 2011 for reviews that would appear in the first two AA issues of 2012. I contacted

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Oona Schmid to see if the AAA would be willing to provide some funding for the book review office. Although my immediate concern was for the $4,000 needed to keep the office at Irvine for the remainder of 2011, I also thought funding might be needed in the future. At a time when universities were increasingly worried about the finances, I doubted that many would be willing to provide money for a book review office for AA. I was disappointed when Oona declined to make any commitment of AAA funds for a future book review office. Because AA provided threequarters of the revenue generated by the AAA publishing program, I thought it reasonable to spend a small part of that money for such an office. I became unhappier when Oona refused to provide the $4,000 necessary to support the office for the remainder of 2011. Oona said that the AA budget for 2011 had been set before I became editor and that there was no way to provide additional funds. She suggested simply not publishing any book reviews in my first two issues. I did not find this resolution acceptable. I knew that if I had been the incoming editor of most other AAA journals, I could have turned to my section for help. The American Ethnological Society, for example, was providing $6,000 annually for partial support of the book review office of American Ethnologist. After a few months of inconclusive emailing back and forth, Oona came up with a solution for the short-term problem. The AAA had allocated an extra $11,000 in 2011 for the editorial transition. Much of this money was to be used to pay the outgoing and incoming editorial assistants simultaneously during several months in the spring. After consulting with Brandi Janssen and Tom’s editorial assistant, Erin Moran, I learned that they needed only the month of June to work simultaneously. The money saved by reducing the months of simultaneous work could be used to hire graduate assistants for the book review office at Irvine for the summer and fall of 2011. Mahmud then agreed to stay on for the rest of the year. I was relieved to know that there would be book reviews in my first two issues, even if they would not include any books in archaeology and biological anthropology. Because I still needed to find an editor for the book review section after Mahmud left the position, I circulated an announcement about the position to various listservs and my editorial board. The announcement began: The American Anthropologist (AA) seeks applications for the position of book review editor. The AA, the longtime flagship publication of the American Anthropological Association, is one of the

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most influential and prestigious journals in the discipline. The AA publishes approximately 100 book reviews annually in all subfields of anthropology. The book review editor is responsible for choosing books to be reviewed and selecting reviewers. The editor is responsible for overseeing the contents of reviews, but is not involved in copyediting. . . . The host institution of the book review editor must provide an office with space for books sent by publishers. Some financial support for the office may be available from the American Anthropological Association, but at this time it is not known how much, if any, will be available. The current book review editor has the help of two graduate assistants working four hours a week year-round; the approximate cost for this is $8,000. The announcement went on to ask for a cover letter outlining the applicant’s qualifications, an indication of a possible starting date, and a description of any support provided by the host institution. There were few responses to this call for applicants. Only two potential editors were able to promise any support from their institution. Luckily, both applicants were well qualified. Even more fortunately, one was a sociocultural anthropologist and the other a bioarchaeologist. Both could start on January 1, 2012, in time to get reviews for the September and December AA issues. Tim Smith from Appalachian State University in North Carolina became the editor in sociocultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology; Christina Torres-Rouff from the University of California, Merced became the editor for archaeology and biological anthropology. Both Appalachian State and Merced promised $8,000 annually to support the book review office. After Mahmud noted that it would be confusing to publishers to send books to two different places, we decided to house the books in only one office. The choice of Appalachian State was obvious because the journal received many more books in sociocultural anthropology than in the other subfields. We therefore accepted the money from Appalachian State and turned down the generous offer from Merced. The remainder of the editorial transition went smoothly. During this time, I often talked on the phone with Tom Boellstorff. Our conversations mostly consisted of his teaching me about ScholarOne, the manuscript control system for AA. The system was used by the editor-in-chief, the editorial assistant, the managing editor, authors of research articles, and manuscript

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reviewers. Although all research articles, year-in-review essays, and fromthe-editor columns were submitted and processed through ScholarOne, Tom did not use the manuscript control system for the rest of the journal. Book reviews, obituaries, vital topics forums, year-in-review essays, and pieces in the public anthropology and visual anthropology sections were directly sent by the relevant editors to the managing editor, who then worked on them along with the staff at Wiley-Blackwell. Tom ordinarily did little or no editing of these parts of the journal. Tom sent me a file with all the decision letters he had written about manuscripts submitted as potential research articles. Many included six to eight pages of single-spaced text plus several pages of reviews. Tom made detailed comments even on manuscripts that were turned down. The only short letters in the files were those Tom sent to authors whose manuscripts were rejected without being sent out for review. After reading these letters, I realized that they were not quite as laborintensive as I had initially thought. Tom assessed manuscripts in certain common ways. For example, he frequently noted that the theoretical part of a manuscript was only loosely connected to its empirical sections. Such critiques were often supported with lengthy excerpts from reviewers’ comments. Despite the boilerplate language that Tom sometimes used, each letter was carefully tailored to the manuscript under consideration. The many hours I spent reading these letters were great preparation for when I later wrote my own. During the transition period, Tom gave me the opportunity to write a decision letter. He had a policy of not allowing submissions to the journal from members of the AA editorial board and faculty in his department at Irvine. Nonetheless, Tom had decided to permit one of his editorial board members to submit a manuscript that, if accepted, would be published during my tenure as editor. After reviewers were found for the manuscript, Tom recused himself from further involvement with the paper and asked me to write the decision letter. He suggested this would be good practice for the many letters I would later write. I found that I was able to write the letter without much difficulty and was easily able to make a revise and resubmit decision. (The authors did not resubmit the manuscript.) While working on this letter, I thought about Tom’s policy of not allowing submissions from editorial board members and faculty in his department. Although I understood his desire to avoid perceived favoritism, I decided not to continue this policy. I did not expect many submissions

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from my department and thought I could recuse myself from decision making on any that came in. More important, I did not want to rule out the possibility of publishing articles written by the distinguished scholars on the editorial board. I thought that I would be able to make decisions on their manuscripts without feeling any particular favoritism toward their submissions. During my term as editor-in-chief, one member of my department and two members of the editorial board submitted manuscripts to AA. All three were eventually published as research articles after receiving initial revise and resubmit decisions. As planned, I was not involved in decision making on the manuscript from the faculty member from my department. Not long after becoming AA editor, I met with staff from WileyBlackwell in their office near Boston. I had previously had some contact with Wiley-Blackwell through editing the Anthropology of Work Review. My limited interactions with the company had been professional, amicable, and efficient. I knew, however, that my relationship with the publisher would be much more extensive with AA because of the journal’s size, prestige, and financial importance. At the meeting I was introduced to many of the people I would be working with and heard presentations about matters Wiley-Blackwell thought would be relevant to my editorship. The discussions and presentations were mostly about issues I had not considered much. The staff seemed mostly concerned with activities that would promote the visibility of the journal as measured by subscriptions and citations. We talked at some length about their efforts to provide information to potential readers about articles that were likely to appeal to the general public. This often involved social media. We also discussed different metrics used to measure the prominence of the journal. I did not pay all that much attention to the talk about metrics. This was a mistake. Both Wiley-Blackwell and the AAA were greatly concerned about these measures during my tenure as editor. When I had thought about the AA editorship prior to my interview for the position, my main concern had been the journal’s intellectual content. During the editorial transition, I learned that the administrative complexities and headaches associated with editing a major journal are comparable to those I had experienced when chairing a medium-sized anthropology department. I knew all too well about pleading for funds, dealing with unpredictable administrators, and coping with impenetrable bureaucracies. Wiley-Blackwell is a large organization similar in some ways to a university

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administration with its diverse activities and complex hierarchy. My initial contacts with Wiley-Blackwell were sufficiently pleasant, however, that I was not much concerned about working with the publisher. I was more worried about the AAA, where the small, harried staff seemed considerably less organized. Perhaps the most important tasks of the AA editor-in-chief are choosing research articles for the journal and working with authors to improve their manuscripts. The next three chapters describe how I carried out this work.

Chapter 3

Reviews Experts Comment on Manuscripts

Anyone who labors at academic scholarship knows how dependent that enterprise is on a procedure known as “peer review.” (Shatz 2004:1)

Manuscripts submitted to academic journals as potential research articles were once ordinarily reviewed by editors and editorial boards. Since about 1960, however, most major journals have sent such manuscripts to outside reviewers. Although the details of what editors ask reviewers to do vary, almost all seek comments about the merits and shortcomings of manuscripts and request an overall recommendation about publication. The transition to outside peer reviewing came about because of technological developments and increased specialization among scholars. First photocopying and later the internet allowed manuscripts to be more easily distributed to reviewers. Members of a journal’s editorial staff no longer had the expertise to competently assess many submissions. When I became AA editor, one of my main concerns was whether I would have problems getting good peer reviews. I had heard that editors often had troubling finding people willing to comment on manuscripts. Such reviewing was increasingly regarded as volunteer unpaid labor that took time away from more important and remunerative work. The academic folklore was also full of stories of reviewers misunderstanding manuscripts and providing destructive, nasty comments. Reviewers were reputed

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to often focus on minor errors in a manuscript rather than giving constructive comments that would help authors improve their papers. I knew from personal experience that this could happen. Early in my career, I received a few reviews of manuscripts that I submitted to journals—including American Anthropologist—that seemed to me to be unduly critical and obtuse. The common wisdom about peer reviewing is not altogether baseless. Many scholars turned down our requests to review; others could be less than helpful in their comments. Nevertheless, I was pleased to find that my worries were for the most part unfounded. My editorial assistants had little trouble quickly finding manuscript reviewers. Most reviews were constructive and helpful. The great majority of manuscripts that reviewers looked at were potential research articles, limited to 8,000 words on initial submissions. Such articles were the most important part of the journal. To be accepted for publication, research articles had to make theoretical contributions to anthropological scholarship. A few submissions were potential research reports, limited to 2,500 words on initial submissions. The reports, which could be largely atheoretical, had less lofty goals than the articles. They mostly aimed at providing information—often numerical data—that would be interesting to many of our readers. AA’s complex review process consisted of numerous steps. After I received manuscripts submitted as potential research articles or research reports, I quickly read them to see if they should be sent out for review. If a manuscript passed this initial screening, my policy was to obtain at least three reviews for pieces submitted as potential research articles and at least two reviews for manuscripts submitted as potential research reports. This involved getting suggestions for potential reviewers from our editorial board, inviting potential reviewers, providing guidelines to reviewers accepting invitations, keeping track of reviews as they came in, reminding late reviewers to return their comments, and figuring out what to do when reviewers never provided comments. My editorial assistants and I also developed separate procedures for dealing with resubmissions of manuscripts. Scholarly journals differ considerably in the proportion of manuscripts submitted for potential publication that are turned down without being sent out for review. When Tom Boellstorff edited AA, he rejected about one-quarter of manuscripts without getting reviews. In contrast, the policy of American Ethnologist in recent years has been to get reviews for the vast

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majority of submissions. I knew that I did not want to send out for review manuscripts that seemed very likely to be rejected. Doing so in my view would be a waste of reviewers’ time. I also thought it was a courtesy to the authors of such manuscripts to receive a rejection decision as soon as possible. I ended up being even more selective in my initial screening than Tom had been. More than one-third (36 percent) of manuscripts submitted as potential research articles during my editorship were rejected without being sent out for review. Most of these papers consisted primarily of descriptions of cultural practices or archaeological sites in particular places. Although revised versions of these papers might well be publishable in a scholarly journal, they were too atheoretical for AA. Furthermore, not many of our readers would be likely to be interested in such narrow topics. For the many manuscripts I received of this type, my rejection letter included the following: “All research articles published in AA must make contributions to anthropological theory and be placed in the context of comparable -specific examples from other places. This paper is too descriptive and to be appropriate for the journal. I suggest that you submit it elsewhere.” Even though anthropology is a wide-ranging, eclectic discipline, other manuscripts submitted to the journal seemed unrelated to anthropological theory and method. These too were rejected without being sent to reviewers. A disproportionate number of manuscripts rejected without review came from authors based in places other than five industrial Anglophone countries—the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. During my editorship, 512 manuscripts were submitted as potential research articles. Of these, 268 were from authors based in the United States, 84 from authors based in the four other Anglophone industrial countries, and 160 from authors based in the rest of the world. (For manuscripts written by two or more people, I counted the place of residence of the first author.) About a fifth (22 percent) of manuscripts submitted by U.S.-based authors were rejected without review. Although the figure for manuscripts submitted by authors from the four other Anglophone industrial countries was somewhat lower (17 percent), it was much higher (69 percent) for authors based in the rest of the world. These figures had been similar under Tom Boellstorff’s editorship. They doubtless reflect in part the relative familiarity that authors from different parts of the world have with the kinds of manuscripts appropriate for AA. One might argue that

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we should have been more willing to send out manuscripts for review written by authors from places other than the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. However, I—and probably also Tom—did not see any chance that even greatly revised versions of manuscripts rejected without reviews would work for the journal. Because of my lack of expertise, I was occasionally unsure what to do when screening a few potential manuscripts in biological anthropology. Although I was reasonably certain that these manuscripts were unsuitable for AA, I was not confident that I could explain well to the authors why their manuscripts were being turned down. I would send such manuscripts to Rachel Caspari, our associate editor in biological anthropology, and ask her to write a short review. Rachel always recommended turning down these manuscripts and provided useful reviews that I incorporated— suitably anonymized—into my decision letters. The AAA regularly consults editors of its publications about problems finding scholars willing to comment on manuscripts, raising the possibility of compiling a database of reviewers that might be shared among journals. I was well aware of how hard it could be to recruit reviewers from my previous position as editor of Anthropology of Work Review. Even though I was knowledgeable about the topics of almost all the manuscripts that were submitted to the journal, it was not easy to come up with names of potential reviewers. Furthermore, most of my invitations to review during my first year of editing Anthropology of Work Review were turned down. I eventually concluded that the only people likely to accept such invitations were either my friends or members of the Society for the Anthropology of Work. After restricting invitations to people in one or both of these categories, I was more successful at finding reviewers. Nevertheless, I knew that the methods I used at Anthropology of Work Review would not work at AA. Because AA receives many more submissions than Anthropology of Work Review, I would not have as much time to think about who might be appropriate reviewers for particular manuscripts. In addition, I had no idea who might be good reviewers for the many manuscripts submitted to AA about topics and geographical areas in which I lacked expertise. I was pleased when Tom Boellstorff told me that he had not had much difficulty finding reviewers during his editorship of AA. Tom’s editorial assistant would send abstracts of manuscripts along with keywords to members of the editorial board, who were then asked about appropriate reviewers. The editorial assistant also had access for some manuscripts to a list of

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preferred and nonpreferred reviewers provided by authors. I had already planned to use these methods to compile lists of potential manuscript reviewers. I was quite surprised to learn, however, that Tom’s editorial assistants had the entire responsibility for choosing reviewers from these lists. I wondered about their ability to sift through the suggestions. Although the editorial assistants were advanced graduate students chosen for their reliability and academic ability, they lacked Tom’s scholarly networks and wide-ranging knowledge of anthropology. Tom assured me that this did not matter; he got good reviews. After trying a slightly modified version of Tom’s method, I saw his method worked well. I was a bit more hands-on than Tom had been. I read all the suggestions from the editorial board and sometimes commented to my editorial assistant when certain suggestions seemed unreasonable. I also made a few suggestions—no more than ten during my four years of editing—of potential reviewers. The editorial assistant would invite five people to be reviewers for research articles and three people for research reports. When authors provided lists of preferred reviewers, the editorial assistant usually invited one of them to make comments. People listed as nonpreferred reviewers were never invited. We sometimes received enough acceptances from the initial list of invitees. This usually resulted in three or four reviewers for research articles and two or three reviewers for research reports. If we did not receive enough acceptances, the editorial assistant made further invitations from the suggestions that had been provided by editorial board members. On a few occasions, the editorial assistant had to go back to our editorial board for further suggestions. Within a week or two after the initial submission of a manuscript, we ordinarily had enough reviewers. Editorial board members differed greatly in the number and quality of suggestions of potential reviewers. A few gave thoughtful suggestions about large numbers of manuscripts, often indicating why a particular person would be a good reviewer. Most board members responded when a topic of a manuscript was one they were familiar with, listing names of potential reviewers without providing details. About a quarter of the members of the editorial board did not seem to take their duties seriously. They hardly ever responded, making suggestions only when the topic was directly in their area of expertise or when they knew someone in their own academic department who might be helpful. Three members did not make a single suggestion during their four years on the editorial board.

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About half the people invited to review accepted our request. Some of the rest declined without giving an explanation. Others provided details about why scholarly commitments, family obligations, fieldwork, illness, teaching responsibilities, or vacations prevented them from providing a timely review. Perhaps the most common reason given for declining an invitation was when reviewers thought that the topic of a manuscript was outside their area of expertise. Scholars turning down our invitations often offered helpful suggestions of alternative reviewers and said that they would be willing to review at another time. A few well-known anthropologists turned down multiple invitations to review. In such cases, I used a feature of ScholarOne called red flag to ensure that they would not be asked again. Because editorial board members did not know that I had done this, they sometimes suggested as reviewers prominent anthropologists who had been red flagged. One red-flagged anthropologist, who did not even respond to our requests, was suggested so often that I found it necessary to tell the board that he should not considered as a potential reviewer. Although I understood that some famous anthropologists needed to protect their time, I could not help observing that other distinguished scholars were willing to provide useful reviews. Potential reviewers were asked if they thought they had conflicts of interest with authors. A few reviewers turned down invitations because they could figure out the author of a manuscript and saw such conflicts. I was appalled, however, to learn in several cases that reviewers had agreed to make comments on manuscripts by former doctoral students or coauthors. If I discovered such conflicts in time, I unassigned the reviewer from the manuscript. I know, however, that I missed one conflict of interest— unfortunately in an article that was published—and am sure that this happened for other manuscripts. The strangest refusal came from a well-known sociologist. When his name was suggested by an editorial board member as a potential reviewer, we added it to our ScholarOne database. The sociologist then received a form letter notifying him about his being in the database. He sent us an irate email, with many sentences in all caps, saying that he had never authorized us to do this. The renowned scholar went on to assert that our putting his name in the database would lead to his receiving “email and other market abuses.” This is not the case as far as I know. My bewildered editorial assistant asked for details and got another angry reply accusing us of “violating basic professional standards and laws regarding privacy.” The

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sociologist went on to threaten legal action. We red flagged him and found other reviewers. Some reviewers had problems using ScholarOne. In most cases, our editorial assistant was able to help them through the system, politely ignoring their sometimes aggrieved and cranky complaints. A few reviewers—all more than seventy years old—refused to use the system. They insisted on having manuscripts sent directly to them, often specifying hard copy and regular mail. However, even those reviewers were willing to return their comments via email. Manuscript reviewers were asked if they would be willing to look at a resubmission. When reviewers indicated that they would do this, we would sometimes send them new versions of manuscripts that had received previous revise and resubmit decisions. We asked for second reviews from only those scholars whose initial recommendation had been a revise and resubmit. We did not ask for reviews of resubmissions from people whose previous recommendations had been for either acceptance or rejection. I thought that such reviewers had usually reached firm conclusions about the suitability for publication of the manuscript. My editorial assistant would try to find additional reviewers for revised manuscripts from the list of suggestions given by editorial board members when the manuscript was initially submitted. We sometimes ran out of potential reviewers from the list and had to go back to the editorial board to get additional suggestions. Reviewers of resubmissions were given the option of seeing earlier reviews and an anonymized version of my decision letter. Fewer than half asked to see these reviews and letters. When Tom Boellstorff edited AA, manuscript reviewers were asked to return their comments within three weeks. Because the length of time requested was less than for most other journals (American Ethnologist, for example, gave reviewers six weeks), I asked Tom for his reasoning. He said that three weeks was sufficient; giving reviewers additional time would just lead to reviews coming in more slowly. Tom added that the three-week request resulted in AA being able to write initial decision letters more quickly after receipt of a manuscript than most other journals. This all made sense to me, and I decided to continue Tom’s practice. Only a few potential reviewers turned down our invitation explicitly because of the three-week deadline. The short review time worked well; most reviewers returned their comments within three weeks. The automated reminders that ScholarOne sent

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to reviewers about due dates doubtless helped. I was able to write decision letters on average (both mean and median) about seven weeks after the initial receipt of a manuscript. Of course, not all reviewers returned their comments on time. Reviewers sometimes would ask for extensions of a week or two, which my editorial assistant always granted. I would get unhappy, however, when reviews were more than three or four weeks late. In such cases I sent a nagging email: “Would it be possible to let me know as soon as possible if you intend to return your review of this manuscript within the next few days? If not, I would like to send it out to another reviewer. I like to make decisions about manuscripts within two months after submission. The decision on this manuscript has been delayed because of our wait for your review. We greatly appreciate your willingness to review the paper, but in order for the journal to function efficiently we must depend on the good will of reviewers to return their comments in a timely manner.” This almost always resulted in an apologetic response from the tardy reviewer and the receipt of comments within a week. Sometimes reviewers explained that they could not provide comments because of illness or other unforeseen events. A few reviewers, perhaps ten or so, never responded to my prodding. My actions when reviewers did not come through depended on how many reviews we already had. If we already had at least three reviews, I would go ahead with a decision letter. In such cases, I would red flag delinquent reviewers unless they had provided a reasonable explanation for their inability to provide comments. My policy when we did not have enough reviews to make a decision changed over the years. During my first two years at AA, I would ask my editorial assistant to contact the editorial board to see if any members would be willing write a quick review. Almost all editorial board members who responded misread our (in my view) clearly stated request and suggested additional potential reviewers. Because I did not want to delay the process further by getting a new reviewer, I would often have to contact the board again to ask for volunteers. This procedure was rarely successful, and I usually ended up asking the associate editor in the relevant subfield—in all cases Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld in sociocultural anthropology—to write a review. In my final two years with AA, I skipped the step of asking for volunteers from the editorial board and went directly to ultrareliable Rudi. He provided several prompt and useful reviews in these circumstances.

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Content of Reviews When reviewers agreed to comment on a manuscript, we sent them a letter indicating which aspects of a manuscript I was particularly interested in. This letter, slightly adapted from one used by Tom Boellstorff, included the following: On the review page, there’s a space for comments to the editor and a space for comments to the author. . . . The comments to the author are the most useful, since I can share them with the author of the manuscript. You don’t even need to provide any comments to the editor unless there’s something in particular that you want to tell me but don’t want the author(s) to see. I have placed below some general guidelines for reviewers which you may find helpful. I neither expect nor want you to restrict your comments to these guidelines. I am interested in whatever you have to say about the manuscript. 1. Ideally, articles published in American Anthropologist show some kind of novel research finding or theoretical intervention; does this manuscript do so? 2. What is the general significance of the main topic or argument of this manuscript? What important questions does this manuscript address and answer? Are the findings of this manuscript related to broader issues and concerns in anthropology? (Note that while manuscripts that speak across subdisciplines are welcome, it is perfectly acceptable for manuscripts to address broader issues and concerns within a single subdiscipline.) 3. Does the manuscript adequately cite and engage with scholarship in anthropology and beyond that is relevant to its argument? 4. Some manuscripts published in American Anthropologist are solely conceptual analyses, but the majority engage with some kind of data (ethnographic, archaeological, historical, quantitative, linguistic, etc.). Do the data and/or analysis presented in the manuscript adequately support its claims? Please comment specifically, when appropriate, on the use of evidence and the logic of arguments. 5. One of my goals as editor of American Anthropologist is to encourage clear writing. In your comments, please comment specifically on the readability, clarity, and organization of the manuscript. To what extent are the main ideas of the manuscript understandable to nonspecialists?

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6. Note that authors are limited to 8,000 words all-inclusive for manuscripts (sometimes up to 10,000 words for a revised-andresubmitted manuscript), so manuscripts can rarely cite all possible relevant literatures or present exhaustive data. The question is if the data, citations, and analysis are sufficient to make a convincing argument that contributes significantly to some set of debates in one or more subfields of anthropological research. The only significant change I made from Tom’s letter was to add the part about clear writing. If I received this letter, I would write a review in direct response to the guidelines. However, only a small minority of reviewers—maybe one in ten—chose to do this. Most completely ignored the guidelines and provided free-ranging comments about the manuscript. A few also sent us a marked up copy of the manuscript with their comments. Reviews varied in length from a few sentences to as many as five singlespaced pages. The great majority of reviews were useful. Reviewers often commented on a manuscript’s novelty or lack thereof, its attention to the relevant theoretical and ethnographic literature, and the relation of theory to data. Many reviews went into considerable detail about particular ethnographic points. Comments about methods addressed technical issues such as sampling, interview techniques, and the ways observations were made. Perhaps the most common methodological concern was with the types of information—archives, interviews, observations, secondary sources—that the authors presented as evidence. Reviewers did not often focus on two aspects of manuscripts that I emphasized in my decision letters. I could count on one hand the number of times that reviewers commented on the logic of arguments that authors made to back up their conclusions. I was also disappointed in most reviewers’ seeming lack of interest in writing style. Despite my direct question about this in the reviewer instructions, the majority of comments about writing concerned problems with manuscripts whose authors seemed not to be native speakers of English. Hardly any reviewers commented about ethical questions. In one case, however, a reviewer wrote a lengthy critique of a manuscript that she thought, if published, would harm particular individuals. I agreed with the reviewer and rejected the manuscript, resulting, to my lack of surprise, in an unhappy emailed response by the author.

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Even though most reviews were helpful, I did receive some that were so useless that I had to ignore them. In such cases, I would often have to seek additional reviews. Almost all these unsatisfactory reviews were too short, sometimes consisting of only a short phrase (“well done”) or a sentence or two commenting on one aspect of the paper. I rarely received vituperative reviews of the kinds that authors often complain about. However, one reviewer, who to my astonishment insisted that his name be given to the author, wrote a textbook example of destructive commentary. He said the paper he was sent was a “disaster,” characterized the theoretical section as “abysmal,” and went on in this unpleasant vein for three single-spaced pages with no paragraphs. After mulling over the reviewer’s request that his name be passed on to the author, I made the debatable decision to do so. I had expected that many reviewers would use the comments to the editor section of the review form to make candid critical remarks about manuscripts. Although some did this, most left this part of the review form blank. The section on confidential comments seemed to confuse a number of reviewers. Some provided the same comments to the editor that they gave the authors. Others wrote full constructive reviews as comments to the editor and left only a few sentences as comments to the authors. When reviewers did this, I was in the uncomfortable position of deciding whether to send these useful comments ostensibly intended only for me to the author.

Extent of Agreement Among Reviewers Critics of peer reviewing have argued that it is unreliable because reviewers often disagree among themselves in their recommendations (Bornmann 2011:203–204). The extensive scholarly literature on this problem ranges from statistical studies (Bornmann, Mutz, and Daniel 2010) to philosophical inquiries (Shatz 2004) to what has been called “the ruminations” of former editors (Stieg Dalton 1995:215). Although statistical methods used vary, most empirical studies show that the degree of interreviewer agreement is fairly low but higher than would be expected by chance (Bornmann 2011:207–208). Because I was curious about the extent of interreviewer agreement at AA, I carried out a study, which I reported on in one of my from-theeditor columns.1 My data consisted of 418 manuscripts submitted for initial consideration as research articles between June 1, 2008, and November 30,

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2015, that had received three recommendations from reviewers about suitability for publication. The reviewers made 348 recommendations (28 percent) for acceptance, 519 recommendations (41 percent) for revision and resubmission, and 387 recommendations (31 percent) for rejection. There are ten possible combinations of recommendations by three reviewers. The first part of my analysis compared the observed numbers of each combination to what would be expected by chance. I then divided the various combinations into three groups: Perfect agreement. All three reviewers made the same recommendation. Good agreement. This group include the following cases: two recommendations to accept, one recommendation to revise and resubmit; one recommendation to accept, two recommendations to revise and resubmit; two recommendations to revise and resubmit, one recommendation to reject; one recommendation to revise and resubmit, two recommendations to reject. Poor agreement. This group includes the following cases: two recommendations to accept, one recommendation to reject; one recommendation to accept, two recommendations to reject; one recommendation to accept, one recommendation to revise and resubmit, one recommendation to reject. There were 69 cases of perfect agreement, 240 cases of good agreement, and 109 cases of poor agreement. In other words, for almost three-quarters of submissions, either all three reviewers agreed on a recommendation, or two reviewers agreed on a recommendation and the third reviewer’s recommendation differed only slightly. At first glance, this would seem to suggest that there is a fairly high degree of interreviewer agreement. However, a mean agreement score that I calculated was only 8 percent better than what would be expected by chance.2 Just about every manuscript submitted to AA that is sent out for review has considerable merit and is potentially publishable in a good journal. Reviewers unsurprisingly disagree about which ones are best and merit initial recommendations to accept. Reviewers also often disagree about whether a promising, though significantly flawed, submission should receive a recommendation to revise and resubmit or a recommendation to reject. Furthermore, some reviewers are more generous than others in their

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recommendations. I often saw a revise and resubmit recommendation for a particular manuscript accompanied by comments more critical than those given by another reviewer recommending rejection. After reading the literature on comparable studies in other disciplines, I was not surprised that the extent of reviewer agreement for AA manuscripts was not particularly high. This finding might be reassuring for authors whose manuscripts are turned down by AA. A set of reviewers at another journal might reach a different conclusion about the suitability for publication of a revised version of a manuscript incorporating suggestions by AA reviewers. Over time, I noticed that revised versions of several manuscripts that we turned down appeared in journals such as American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, and Human Organization. I also know from reviewers’ comments that we published articles that were revised versions of manuscripts that had been turned down by other journals.

Blinding American Anthropologist uses a system of double blinding in which authors and reviewers in theory do not know one another’s names. Blinding can require considerable effort from manuscript authors, who must remove their names from all self-citations in the text and the references cited section. This can be especially difficult when there are multiple authors of a manuscript. Many journals do not use double blinding. When I edited Anthropology of Work Review, for instance, we used single blinding in which reviewers knew the names of authors, but authors did not know the names of reviewers. Some publications do not blind at all; authors and reviewers know one another’s names. Single blinding and nonblinding are the most common practices in the natural sciences. Journals use double blinding for several reasons. Editors want to guard against reviewers being influenced in their evaluations by knowing an author’s name, reputation, gender, nationality, or ethnicity. They also want to allow reviewers to provide candid assessments without worrying about adverse consequences resulting from authors knowing their identities. In practice, reviewers sometimes reported, not always correctly, that they had figured out who authors were from the content of their manuscripts. Furthermore, I am sure that some authors could guess the identity of one or more reviewers. This might happen, for example, when reviewers recommended their own publications to authors.

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A few potential reviewers made clear their dislike of double blinding. One refused for unexplained reasons to review because of blinding. Others submitted reviews but asked that their names be given to authors. I always complied with these requests. In most such cases, the reviewer wanted to be able to communicate directly with the author about ways in which the manuscript could be improved. Some, however, wanted their names given as a matter of some, mysterious to me, principle.

Recommendations About Suitability for Publication Manuscript reviewers were asked to make one of the following recommendations about suitability for publication—accept, accept with minor revisions, revise and resubmit, reject but submit to journal X, or reject. These were the possibilities that Tom Boellstorff had provided. I adopted them without thinking about other possible options. Later I found out that AAA journals varied in the choices offered. American Ethnologist, for example, offers reviewers the possibility of recommending acceptance with major revisions. Reviewers usually did not have difficulty with the options we provided. Some would note in their comments to the editor that they had wavered between two options. I found such remarks helpful when making decisions about a manuscript. I was also pleased that we provided the option of “reject, but submit to journal X.” This helped me soften rejection letters by indicating that authors’ manuscripts might well fit other journals better than AA. The from-the-editor column I wrote about peer reviewing included a calculation of an overall reviewer recommendation score for initial submissions receiving three reviews. I gave two points for each recommendation to accept a manuscript, one point for each recommendation to revise and resubmit, and no points for recommendations to reject. Scores therefore ranged from 0 (three recommendations to reject) to 6 (three recommendations to accept). The mean score was 3.3, which is revise and resubmit. This meant that Tom and I could not have based our manuscript decisions entirely on reviewers’ recommendations even if we had wanted to do so. Because AA is highly selective and space in the journal is limited, editors find it best to make more initial decisions to reject and fewer initial decisions to revise and resubmit than reviewers recommend. Otherwise,

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authors, editors, and reviewers waste too much time on manuscripts that are unlikely to ever get published.

Feedback to Reviewers Journals vary in the types and amounts of feedback they give to manuscript reviewers. Some let reviewers know decisions about publication and provide copies of the comments of all reviewers. Others let reviewers know of decisions but do not provide copies of reviews. Many give reviewers no feedback at all. When I became AA editor, the only feedback that reviewers received was a form letter thanking them for their comments. One day early in my term, I was talking with my editorial assistant Brandi Janssen about her experiences reviewing a manuscript she had been sent by a journal in another field. Brandi told me that the journal had informed her about the manuscript decision and had sent her all the reviewers’ comments. This conversation led me to consider doing the same at AA. In the past, I had rarely found out what happened to the many manuscripts I reviewed. This was disappointing, given the amount of work I had put into the reviews. I consulted Wiley-Blackwell to see if it would be possible to use ScholarOne to automatically send reviewers the decision on the manuscript they looked at and copies of all the reviewers’ comments. My contacts at the publisher responded that this was a feature of ScholarOne, noting a minor limitation on what could be done. Reviewers would be able to see only comments on the version of the manuscript they looked at. Most reviewers of initial submissions of manuscripts receiving revise and resubmit decisions are not involved in the assessment of subsequent versions. This meant that they would be able to learn if a manuscript had been eventually accepted or rejected only by seeing if it ever appeared in the journal.3 I decided to ask members of the AA editorial board and a number of other anthropologists what they thought of the idea of providing reviewers with manuscript decisions and other reviewers’ comments. Although I thought the suggestion would be uncontroversial, this was not the case. Some people enthusiastically approved the idea and said the practice was common; others were appalled by the suggestion and said that they had never heard of the practice. About two-thirds of the people responding to my query favored the idea. They thought that it was interesting to see what others said about a

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manuscript and that providing information about the fate of a paper was a professional courtesy. About one-sixth of people I questioned opposed providing such feedback. They worried that identities of reviewers would be inadvertently revealed or guessed, jeopardizing the double-blind process, and argued that the editor-author relationship should be private. The remaining people I queried had ambiguous views about the idea, echoing many of the points presented by both advocates and opponents of the proposal. After I received these responses, I delayed instituting the practice. My main concern was that reviewers would be angry if their comments were shared with others. At the AAA meetings in 2013, I was able to resolve this problem after a conversation with two friends. They pointed out that all I had to do was to include a section in my letter sent to people accepting invitations to review that informed them that their comments would be shared with other reviewers. Reviewers unhappy with the practice would have the option of withdrawing from the process. I adopted this suggestion and began sharing manuscript decisions and reviewers’ comments in 2014. Despite the concerns of opponents of the idea, the change in policy turned out to be uneventful. Not one reviewer decided to withhold comments after being informed of our policy. A number of reviewers emailed me to say how much they appreciated seeing other reviewers’ comments. Alex Golub, a columnist at the online anthropological publication Savage Minds, noted his approval of the new policy and interviewed me for the publication. There were hardly any negative consequences. Two reviewers wrote to ask why I had made a particular decision, given the reviewers’ comments. I provided them with my decision letter, leaving out the name of the author. One reviewer wrote me to say that he was surprised at how mean the other reviewers were. Although peer reviews were important influences on my manuscript decisions, it was not always easy to assess their diverse and often contradictory comments. Furthermore, decisions were also influenced by my own reading of manuscripts, which usually differed in some respects from those of the reviewers. The next chapter gives details of how I made these decisions.

Chapter 4

Yes or No How I Made Manuscript Decisions

Making well-reasoned decisions on manuscripts is by far the most important and difficult element of an editor’s duties. (Milardo 2015:175)

When I edited AA, most of my work days began by logging onto a computer to see if any manuscripts submitted as potential research articles or research reports had received all the peer reviews we had requested. Making decisions about whether to accept such manuscripts was the most interesting and time-consuming of my many journal-related tasks. I spent on average about twenty hours a week year-round reading manuscripts and writing decision letters. Because anthropology is a broad and ill-defined field, submissions covered a wide variety of subjects and theoretical approaches. During the week of December 8–12, 2014, for example, I made decisions on manuscripts about how anthropologists are portrayed in popular films, storage systems for seals in the Arctic, lay healing in an Ethiopian hospital, and ways to predict political systems by examining economic and environmental variables. Although I am unable to provide neat rules that guided my manuscript decisions, I can say what I focused on when reading submissions. The three main influences on decisions were the content of peer reviews, the reviewers’ recommendations about manuscripts’ suitability for publication, and my own opinion of the quality of a submission. I was also influenced by my perception of the interest of manuscripts to our readership and the

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need to balance the content of the journal with articles from different subfields and subdisciplines. In what follows, I illustrate the ways in which I evaluated manuscripts by providing excerpts from decision letters for papers that were eventually published after revision. I have anonymized these excerpts so that the authors and articles cannot be identified. Because all these manuscripts were promising (otherwise, they would have been rejected), my aim was to help authors improve papers in ways that would increase their chances of being published. I did my best to frame these comments as constructive suggestions, but my direct and sometimes critical style was once accurately described as “prodding” by an author in the acknowledgments accompanying her published article.

Presenting Arguments In a surprising number of otherwise promising submissions, I had a hard time understanding the authors’ main points. I often mentioned this in decision letters, knowing that readers skimming articles wanted to be able to figure out quickly what authors were arguing. After rereading this [submission] several times, I am still unsure about what your main point is. Are you examining past anthropological studies of [topic X], finding them inadequate, and then proposing a new way of looking at X? If so, you probably (as Reviewer 噛1 says) should devote less of the paper to a review of X studies and say more about your alternative. Or do you have another goal? .” Although this seems to In the introduction, you write “ be your central argument, I find it very hard to understand. I suggest that you rewrite this sentence (avoiding the reader-unfriendly word “instantiate”) and add a paragraph or so explaining what you mean. If this is not your central argument, you need to more clearly say what are the principal points of your paper. The reviewers and I also often noticed problems with authors’ discussions of relevant anthropological theories. Some authors presented ideas as novel that had been discussed at length long ago in the anthropological literature; others provided exhaustive lists of relevant citations without engaging in any depth with what these publications said. Reviewers were

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helpful in providing references that may have escaped the attention of authors. Consider more (a) the relevant literature on [general topic A and general topic B] and (b) the literature about [more specific topic C]. Anthropologists interested in both A and B have written extensively about [C]. Your paper entirely ignores this literature. Be much more careful in discussing the anthropological literature on [topic X]. As I understand your paper, you are saying . . . . The evidence you present tells us something about that X in the sites discussed. I remain unclear about what this is and think you need to be clearer in this respect. . . . It is important that you present an accurate view of past anthropological theorizing . The following sentence will be extremely puzzling to about any sociocultural anthropologist with even a passing knowledge of .” Sociocultural recent and not-so-recent writings about X: “ anthropologists have not thought this for a long time. See for example the classic piece by [anthropologist A] . . . on X. I thought initially that perhaps this sentence refers to popular perceptions, but your next sentence suggests otherwise. Connections between theory and data in academic writing are not always as tight as they could be. (See Besnier and Morales 2018 for a lucid discussion of problems of this kind in manuscripts submitted to American Ethnologist.) My comments on a lack of fit between theory and data were usually brief. How does an analysis based on concepts A and B help our understanding of the ethnographic events that you write about so well? The lengthy theoretical section does not do enough to relate the ideas presented there to the subsequent ethnography. This section seemed too much like an insufficiently focused “lit review.” It would be better, perhaps, to focus more narrowly on what people have written about the meanings attached to [specific topic X]. Perhaps my most common theoretical suggestion was that authors do more to place their findings in the context of comparable cases. Many submissions were astute examinations of ideas and behaviors in societies at

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particular times and places. In order for such manuscripts to appeal to the broad readership of AA, I thought that they should not focus exclusively on one case. My view, not shared by all anthropologists, is that good social science relies on comparison. I therefore often urged authors to say something about how and why the situations they described resembled and differed from similar situations elsewhere. The current version of the manuscript focuses almost exclusively on your case study in [place X]. Ethnographic articles in AA must compare and contrast their findings with those of researchers who have examined similar situations in other places. There are many parts of the world where cultural ideas about [topic A] and [topic B] have changed . . . as people become [more C] and/or [more D]. How is what you observe similar to and different from other such cases? Could you add some comparative material on attitudes towards [topic A] elsewhere in the world, relating this material to [activity B]? When reading your manuscript, I thought of all the individuals ) and practicing B in the and groups concerned with A (e.g., United States and Europe.

Methods Most of my comments about methods were directed at manuscripts written in a scientific style. These papers frequently included technical material that I thought needed further explanation. Because of my background in statistics, I was also able to see problems in authors’ analyses of numerical data. My comments about methods in humanistically oriented manuscripts were diverse, focusing on matters such as the authors’ positionality, sampling, and data collection. [You write] “The sample was stratified on two levels to anticipate different perceptions of X.” Despite your subsequent discussion, this ”? is confusing. How about something like “ Be clearer about your measures of A and B and the methods you used to assess correlations between these two measures. The discussion of your methods for measuring degree of A on p. 9 was very hard for me to follow, which suggests [given my background in

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statistics] that most readers of the AA will find it incomprehensible. Footnote 噛4 is especially murky. Readers need to more about your “positionality.” Who hired you at [business A]? Why did the people who hired you think that an anthropologist . . . would help them in doing whatever they do? Did they ask you to work on [topic X] or was that your decision or was this something mutually negotiated? What were your conditions of work at A and whom did you work with on a day to day business? Who are the people you variously call “interlocutors,” “informants,” “collaborators,” and “colleagues”? Are these the same people or different groups of people? Could you say more about the project you worked on? Was this part of the job you were hired to do? Who works with you on the project? Is this collaboration formal, informal or some combination of formality and informality? Say more about your sample. One of the major shortcomings of the current version of the manuscript is the lack of attention to the characteristics of the members of the [type X] communities described. To what extent do they represent all members in [type X] communities? Or are they a self-selected group whose characteristics limit the extent to which generalizations can be made?

Organization Many manuscripts—especially in sociocultural anthropology—began with nicely written vignettes aimed at drawing in readers. After these vignettes, however, authors frequently had trouble previewing their arguments and providing concise descriptions of the evidence underlying their conclusions. Introductions were often too long, including material that would be better placed in later sections of papers: In the introduction early on (a) say what your main argument is; and (b) describe the ethnographic data/evidence/fieldwork underlying your argument. . . . The paper begins with four paragraphs describing different ideas about [topic X]. Readers are likely to wonder why they are being told all this. It would be much better to have one or two paragraphs about theory related to your main point, followed by a paragraph describing your field setting and another paragraph previewing your argument.

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Reviewers only occasionally mentioned problems with the structure of a manuscript, perhaps thinking this a matter more appropriately handled by copy editors. I therefore looked at the organization of manuscripts carefully, often observing that material was presented in a confusing order. My suggestions could be specific and prescriptive. I think the manuscript needs considerable reorganization. a. There needs to be a theoretical section about [topic X] immediately after the introduction. This should include some of the material that is on pp. 8–10 of the current version of the manuscript (too late in my view) and some of the material from the conclusion. b. Some of the material from the conclusion and perhaps also pp. 8–10 should be moved into the introduction after the vignette and some brief remarks about your research. c. Most of the background material from the introduction should be moved to a separate section on the research setting after the (new) theoretical section.

Background Information Authors sometimes needed to provide additional background information to enable readers to more easily understand their arguments. This was usually not hard for them to do because we provided a longer word limit for revised manuscripts than was permitted in initial submissions. All three reviewers noted (as do you in the text of the manuscript) that AA word limits prevented you from providing some useful contextualizing about (a) the reasons for the changes you describe and (b) variability both within the community you describe and more generally within [region X]. With the provision of a longer word limit, I would think that you might be able to do more of this than possible in the current version of the manuscript. Say more about the current situation of the [group X] (and perhaps other peoples) in [place Y]. . . . This might . . . involve including some of your own ethnography, if relevant. Some authors did not think carefully about what their readers were likely to know:

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You need to omit or explain further [term X]. Hardly any AA readers will be familiar with this. I suggest changing the title in a way that does not include [term X]. The great majority of our readers will be mystified by this term.

Assessing Reviews After I read a submission, I would carefully consider the comments of the peer reviewers and their recommendations about a manuscript’s suitability for publication. This was not a straightforward task. As noted in the previous chapter, reviewers varied greatly in the length and types of comments they offered and often disagreed with one another in their overall evaluations of manuscripts. Although the reviewers’ recommendations and comments often paralleled my own assessments, in numerous cases I disagreed with some or all of the reviewers about certain aspects of papers. Nevertheless, reviewers’ assessments strongly influenced my decisions. (The correlation between the average reviewer recommendation on initial submissions and my decision was .67.) Because of their expertise on the topics and geographical areas of manuscripts, many reviewers were able to see strengths and weaknesses of papers that I could not. My decision making on manuscripts was sometimes based on factors not considered by reviewers. Many reviewers were so familiar with the topics of manuscripts that they failed to see problems apparent to less-expert readers. Reviewers would comment that manuscripts were well written when they included sections that would be comprehensible to only a small fraction of our subscribers. Sociocultural anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists taking humanistic approaches would assume that readers would have no trouble with in-group vocabulary such as chronotype, orthopraxy, and soteriological. Archaeologists and biological anthropologists did not worry when manuscripts failed to explain terms such as anteneres, acetylation, and jackplate. Reviewers of scientifically oriented manuscripts would not comment on dense passages about methods such as partitioning of nodes or nonrandom balanced block design. In addition, not all reviewers seemed to share my view about the importance of presenting research findings in the context of comparable examples. Using reviews in making decisions about manuscripts was one of the most intellectually challenging tasks I confronted when editing AA. Two

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editors faced with the same set of reviews on a manuscript can make different decisions. They might differ both in their assessments of the reviews and in their overall evaluations of a manuscript. My impression from reading Tom Boellstorff’s decision letters is that we did not differ all that much in the ways we used reviews in our evaluations of manuscripts. Nonetheless, as will be seen, Tom’s decision making on initial submissions was quite different from mine.

Making Decisions My choices about what to publish were constrained by the research articles and research reports people sent us. The kinds of manuscripts we received were similar to those sent to my predecessor, suggesting that my being editor-in-chief had little effect on our submissions. (This put an end to any delusions I might have had about the editorship enabling me to have a major influence on the content and quality of AA research articles!) My decisions were also influenced by the need to accept enough articles to fill issues. We published on average about thirty-five research articles and three research reports during each of the four years of my editorship. These were not evenly distributed over the course of a year. Because the June issue included three to five year-in-review essays, fewer articles and reports were needed for that month than for AAs appearing in March, September, and December. The number of research articles per month also depended on how many journal pages were needed for other sections of the journal. In AAA’s periodic reviews of its journals, acceptance rates were emphasized. Two other association journals, American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology, had acceptance rates of 10 to 15 percent. Because AA’s acceptance rate was more than 20 percent when I assumed the editorship, the AAA urged me to be more selective in my manuscript decision making. The association suggested that I try to reduce acceptance rates by soliciting more submissions. I was reluctant to make great efforts to do this, thinking that many of the additional submissions would be of low quality. I knew that this had happened when a leading journal in sociology had attempted to improve its acceptance rates by increasing submissions. Despite little change in the number of submissions during my editorship, I was able to reduce our acceptance rate to about 15 percent. Any lower would have left AA with too few articles.

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During my editorship, only 3 percent of manuscripts sent out for review received initial decisions of accept with minor revisions. These manuscripts were always regarded favorably by both me and all the reviewers. My predecessor had been equally reluctant to accept initial submissions; the comparable figure during Tom Boellstorff’s editorship was 5 percent. This meant that almost all articles and research reports published in AA between 2008 and 2016 received initial revise and resubmit decisions. My general approach to manuscript decision making was to encourage only those authors whose papers seemed to have a reasonable chance of eventually being published. Manuscripts sent out for review often receive mixed recommendations about their suitability for publication. In such cases, it is tempting to make a revise and resubmit decision to give authors the opportunity to make substantial improvements to their manuscripts. Tom was considerably more willing to do this than I was. About half the manuscripts he sent out for review received initial revise and resubmit decisions. Under my editorship, only a quarter of such manuscripts received revise and resubmit decisions. Because AA could publish only a limited number of articles, this difference between Tom’s and my approach to manuscript decision making is reflected in the ultimate fate of papers receiving initial revise and resubmit decisions. About half the manuscripts I gave such decisions to eventually appeared in AA; the comparable proportion during Tom’s editorship was one-third. This difference was the result of both the percentage of authors who never resubmitted and our editorial decisions on revised manuscripts. When I edited AA, 32 percent of authors never resubmitted and 17 percent of resubmissions were rejected. Under Tom’s editorship, 38 percent of authors never resubmitted and 27 percent of resubmissions were rejected. Although there were many reasons why authors did not resubmit manuscripts, one relevant factor was the degree of encouragement in decision letters. I adopted with some minor modifications prose Tom had used to differentiate the amount of encouragement given. While I did not keep records, I would guess that authors receiving encouraging revise and resubmit letters were more likely to resubmit than those receiving less enthusiastic letters. Nevertheless, quite a few manuscripts receiving tepid letters were greatly improved in resubmissions and eventually published. I cannot easily explain why I turned down submissions. Because of AA’s selectivity, a manuscript really had to stand out in order to be accepted.

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Rejections were usually the result of what the reviewers and I saw as multiple problems in a manuscript, most of which alone would not be sufficient reason for turning down a submission. I can say that most rejected manuscripts had one or more of the following flaws: an unclear argument, muddled organization, inadequate treatment of relevant theory, or a topic too specialized or incomprehensible for most of our readers. I rarely rejected a manuscript solely on the basis of insufficient attention to comparable examples, the failure to cite relevant previous publications, or poor writing. These were weaknesses that I thought could be remedied in resubmissions. Although decision letters for initial submissions sent out for peer review were individually tailored, most had similar formats and included a shared boilerplate. Letters began with a description of the review process, followed by a paragraph giving the decision on the manuscript. In the infrequent cases where initial submissions were accepted with minor revisions, the section about the decision was easy to write: “I am pleased to inform you that I have decided to accept this exceptionally well-written and interesting manuscript for publication in American Anthropologist (AA), contingent on minor revisions. What this means is that the revised manuscript will not go out for further anonymous review.” These letters gave suggestions about how the manuscript might be further improved. They also included information about administrative matters such as unblinding, opportunities to publish online-only supporting material, and the possibility of submitting abstracts in languages other than English and Spanish. We provided translations of abstracts in Spanish for all research articles. These were mostly done by Consuelo Guyara, who was hired freelance by the AAA. In a few cases, the authors provided their own Spanish translations. Authors could provide up to two abstracts in languages other than Spanish and English. We did not edit these abstracts. While rejections were straightforward and courteous, they made it clear that resubmission was not possible: “Although the reviewers and I found the content of the paper interesting, I am unable to accept it for publication in the American Anthropologist (AA). This is a definitive rejection, without the possibility of revision and resubmission. Because the American Anthropologist is a selective journal, we can only accept a small proportion of manuscripts that are submitted. We must turn down many submissions that have considerable merit and may well be publishable elsewhere.” Most rejection letters provided a few suggestions about what authors might do if they wanted to revise their papers and submit them to other journals.

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The most detailed letters I wrote went to authors whose manuscripts received revise and resubmit decisions. After the initial two paragraphs of boilerplate, I wrote a general paragraph about what needed to be done to make the manuscript more likely to be published. This was followed by specific suggestions about how to improve the paper, supported by excerpts from the peer reviews. Letters often also included a section of minor points about miscellaneous matters such as unclear phrases or the need for a new title. I occasionally did some editing of the reviews appended to the end of decision letters. This almost always consisted of taking out reviewers’ recommendations about whether a manuscript should be published and fixing typos and spelling errors. In a few cases, I thought it necessary to remove what I thought were overly unpleasant and derogatory comments. Authors who sent back manuscripts receiving initial revise and resubmit letters ordinarily did so fairly quickly, averaging about three months after I made my decision. Authors resubmitting manuscripts were asked to provide responses to my decision letter and the comments of the reviewers. Some authors provided short responses, a page or two generally describing revisions. Most, however, went into great detail about the reasons for the changes made or not made, usually taking up three or four single-spaced pages. A few responses were almost half the length of the resubmitted manuscript. Responses were almost always thoughtful and courteous. Although I accepted a few second submissions immediately after reading them (6 percent), the rest were sent out for external review. When the reviews came in, I would first read my initial decision letter to remind myself what I had suggested in a revision. Next, I would look at the author’s response. I would then quickly look at the comments and recommendations of the reviewers of the resubmission and read the revised manuscript. My last step before writing the decision letter was to look more carefully at the reviews. I always hoped to be able to accept revised versions of initial submissions. I enjoyed giving good news to authors and was eager to acquire material for future issues. Even though Wiley-Blackwell recommended having ready for publication at all times two or three issues’ worth of articles, I never was able to do anything like this. After an issue came out, I rarely had more than one or two accepted articles in the pipeline. Nevertheless, I did not allow my fervent desire to amass more publishable articles to overly affect my decision making. I accepted only about half of the revised versions

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of initial submissions. My remaining decisions were split evenly between revise and resubmits and rejections. I greatly disliked making second revise and resubmit decisions. I knew that authors who chose to resubmit would have to do considerable work to revise their manuscript yet again. Even after making extensive changes, there was a significant chance that their manuscript might be rejected. Because the thought of making a third revise and submit decision horrified me, I promised authors a definitive decision on second resubmissions. I broke this rule once for a manuscript that had received two revise and resubmit decisions under Tom Boellstorff’s editorship. The author sent in a greatly revised manuscript six years after her second submission. I thought the latest submission was so different from the earlier versions that yet another revise and resubmit decision was reasonable. Three-quarters of authors receiving second revise and resubmit decisions sent in third versions of their manuscripts. I read these thirty-one resubmissions carefully in the hope that I would be able to accept them without getting additional peer reviews. In twelve cases, I was able to do so. The rest still seemed to me to have sufficient shortcomings that I wanted to see reviewers’ comments. After receiving the reviews of these nineteen submissions, I was able to make nine additional acceptances. One of my most painful tasks as editor was writing the ten letters to authors whose third submission was rejected. Four such letters went to authors whose previous two submissions had been handled by Tom Boellstorff. I thought in such cases the authors may have run into problems not of their making because of differing assessments of the manuscripts by Tom and me. I felt especially bad in the six cases where I was the one making the two previous revise and resubmit decisions. My disappointment was obvious in one such letter I sent to an author: With considerable regret, I have decided that I cannot accept this paper for publication in American Anthropologist. . . . The fascinating ethnographic material in this paper clearly is worthy of publication somewhere. I greatly appreciate your detailed response to the previous reviewers’ comments and your time-consuming efforts to revise the paper. However, papers published in AA must place their findings in the context of relevant anthropological theory and comparable examples from other places. Despite your best efforts, the comments of all the reviewers (especially those of 噛2 and 噛3)

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suggest that you have not sufficiently succeeded in doing this to make the paper publishable. I would suggest submitting an ethnographically-focused version of this paper to a journal that is less theoretically oriented. I hope that the extensive comments of the current and previous reviewers are helpful as you work further with this material. [A revised version of this manuscript eventually appeared as an article in another journal.] I doubt such regrets did much to mollify disappointed authors. Manuscripts accepted with minor revisions were reviewed further only by me. Such acceptances varied considerably in the extent of further changes requested. Some letters asked for only minimal revisions. When you revise the manuscript, I suggest considering the suggestions of Reviewers 噛1 and 噛2 about ways to make your argument even clearer than it is in the current version of the paper. These are minor tweaks and I leave to you to determine which, if any, of their suggestions you follow. The only significant revision I am requesting is to say something at the outset summarizing the content of [author X’s] article. Although many of our readers will be familiar with the article, most probably are not. These readers need to see something near the beginning of article (this need not be long) about the content and style of [title of X’s article]. More often, I asked authors to make several substantial changes. (1) Do even more to place your findings in the context of relevant anthropology and comparable examples. Although this version of your manuscript is greatly improved over the initial submission in this respect, I think it is necessary to do even more along these lines. The comments of Reviewer 噛3, for example, might well reflect the reactions of many of our readers. I suggest adding theoretical and comparative material in (a) the introduction; (b) a separate and new section following the introduction; and (c) the conclusion. (2) Cut out much, if not all, of the signposting saying what you will do in the paper and what you have already done.

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(3) Define [language X] terms in the text and not in footnotes. Cut down on the use of terms in X to whatever extent is possible. Readers should not have to look at footnotes to find out what terms in X mean. The more these terms are used (even if defined in the text), the more readers are likely to be confused. I therefore suggest using them as little as possible. In a few cases, I accepted a manuscript contingent on fairly extensive revisions. When I did this, I told authors it was possible that I might have to return their resubmission for even further work. This was fortunately rarely necessary. In one case, however, I was never satisfied with the author’s revisions. I suggested to the understandably upset author that he might be better off submitting the article elsewhere. I was relieved when I later saw a version of the article in another journal. I am sure that many authors were unhappy about my decision letters and the contents of peer reviews. When I took over the editorship of AA, I expected to get a certain number of irate letters from authors whose manuscripts were rejected. This hardly ever happened. To my surprise, some authors of rejected manuscripts emailed me with thanks for our prompt consideration of their papers and my suggestions about possible revisions if they wanted to submit their papers to other journals. Authors submitting revised manuscripts almost always thanked the reviewers and me for our comments. I realize, of course, that this was in part because authors were eager to have good relations with professional gatekeepers like me. Expressing anger to the editor of AA would not be a good career strategy. Nonetheless, I admired their tact and restraint.

Personal Preferences When I became AA editor, I knew I had to be careful about the extent to which my own interests and preferences affected decision making on manuscripts. I found that my topical and areal interests—economics, environment, decision making, agriculture, artisans, Latin America, the United States—had little effect on whether or not I assessed a manuscript favorably. Any preferences I might have had for manuscripts about these topics and areas were balanced by my ability to read these papers more critically than those about subjects and places I knew less about.

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I also think my liking for certain theories had at most a minor effect on decisions. My negative feeling about three theoretical approaches was probably more relevant. Two of these perspectives, experimental economics and evolutionary psychology, appeared in only a handful of manuscripts submitted to AA. However, the third theoretical approach, a certain type of science and technology study, showed up in many submissions. I gave revise and resubmit decisions to four manuscripts even though all the peer reviewers recommended acceptances. It is probably not coincidental that two were in science studies and one in evolutionary psychology. (The fourth was an archaeology manuscript that I thought needed more comparable examples.) During the first decade of this century, many anthropologists were conducting experiments in diverse settings intended to test theories about the extent to which human beings are willing to cooperate with one another. In 2002, the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation gave its largest grant, $463,425 over a three-year span, for such studies. Current Anthropology, the most cited journal in our field, regularly published articles about experimental economics. The results of these experiments were also reported in prestigious publications such as Scientific American (Sigmund, Fehr, and Nowak 2002), Nature (Fehr and Gachter 2002), and the Wall Street Journal (Wessel 2002). I did not share the widespread enthusiasm for this work and had written an article (Chibnik 2005) and a book chapter (Chibnik 2011:90–117) sharply criticizing the assumptions and logical underpinnings of these ambitious, intriguing experiments. I contrasted the parsimonious theoretical models underlying the experiments with the messy ethnographic realities of daily life. I expected numerous submissions in experimental economics and worried about whether I could be fair to the authors of these manuscripts. My plan was to counterbalance my own biases by recruiting peer reviewers who advocated this approach. This turned out to be irrelevant because I received only one manuscript about experimental economics. Because the reviewers were unenthusiastic about the paper, my rejection decision was unproblematic. I am not sure why we did not receive more manuscripts on the topic. By the time I became AA editor, this approach had become less common in economic anthropology than it had been only a few years earlier. I would guess, nonetheless, that some authors of manuscripts about experimental economics who knew of my views decided that AA might not be the best outlet for their submissions. Current Anthropology continued to publish

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articles on experimental economics during the period of my editorship, although not as many as in earlier years. The general idea of evolutionary psychology, sometimes called behavioral ecology, is that much of human culture can be explained as adaptations that increase inclusive fitness, the degree to which an individual’s genes are reproduced in succeeding generations through offspring or closely related kin. This approach, a modified descendant of the sociobiology of the 1970s and 1980s, is accepted to a certain extent by many biological anthropologists. Although some sociocultural anthropologists are enthusiastic about evolutionary psychology, most feel strongly that this approach overstates the effects of inclusive fitness on human culture. This opposition is widespread, coming from scholars with diverse theoretical perspectives. My views about evolutionary psychology are similar to those of most sociocultural anthropologists. I think that many explanations of particular aspects of human culture with reference to inclusive fitness are logically flawed. Other types of explanations usually seem more plausible to me. My antipathy to evolutionary psychology is unlikely to have affected submissions to AA. Because I had not written about evolutionary psychology, my ideas about this theoretical approach were known to only a few students and colleagues. When we received submissions that attempted to explain cultural features from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, I paid more attention than usual to our selection of reviewers. I took care to send such manuscripts only to scholars sympathetic to the approach. Because most of these reviewers turned out to be unenthusiastic about the submissions, I was ordinarily able to reject them without worrying that my views influenced the decision. The main exception was a case in which my views delayed the publication of a submission. This manuscript examined economic and caregiving roles of biological fathers among the Mosuo, a group in southwest China.1 The Mosuo are often described in the ethnographic literature as an unusual human society lacking fathers and husbands. The authors presented persuasive evidence that biological fathers actually provided considerable direct care and economic support for their children. Because this was an important contribution to our knowledge of kinship, I was eager to publish the manuscript. The three reviewers, all biological anthropologists, liked the paper and unanimously recommended publication. The authors interpreted their findings in the context of behavioral ecology. They compared families in which biological fathers invested

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significantly in child care and economic support with families in which biological fathers were less important in raising children. Mothers in families where biological fathers were important had their first child at an earlier average age than mothers in families where biological fathers were largely absent. The authors also demonstrated that children received more formal education in families in which biological fathers invested more. They argued that these findings were evidence that the presence of biological fathers increased inclusive fitness. I saw several shortcomings in this argument. The authors did not present data showing that the age of the first-born child was correlated with ultimate family size. This seemed especially relevant because of China’s famous one-child policy at the time. I also had difficulty understanding what level of education had to do with inclusive fitness. There was no evidence in the paper that highly educated Mosuo had more children than those with less schooling. Furthermore, in many parts of the world, increases in education are associated with decreased fertility. I additionally thought there was a plausible economic explanation for the authors’ finding of a correlation between the presence of biological fathers and the education of children. Families with male earners present would be likely to have more income to invest in education than families in which male earners were absent. I assumed a positive correlation between the presence of male earners and the presence of biological fathers. Although my initial decision letter was a favorable revise and resubmit, I urged the authors to revise the paper by placing more emphasis on economics and kinship and less emphasis on behavioral ecology. Their gracious response accompanying the resubmission indicated that they had made some changes along the lines I had suggested. The authors made it clear, however, that they were unwilling to change their theoretical focus, saying they hoped to demonstrate the contribution that human behavioral ecology can make to diverse subfields of anthropology. We sent the revised manuscript to a sociocultural anthropologist and two biological anthropologists. The biological anthropologists recommended acceptance; the sociocultural anthropologist recommended another revise and resubmit, offering criticisms different from mine. I decided to accept the manuscript but suggested again to the authors that they soften their arguments about relationships between the contributions of biological fathers and inclusive fitness. They did not do this. I accepted their decision, thinking it would be unfair to compel them to accept my views.

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I enjoy reading many science and technology studies in anthropology. These include thought-provoking examinations of topics such as the organization of research, the ways in which scientific controversies are discussed and evaluated, and the influence of scientific innovations on diverse aspects of culture. I am less enthusiastic, however, about an approach often found in science and technology studies called actor-network theory (Latour 2005). Advocates of this approach attribute equal weight to human and nonhuman participants in systems. These various actors are said to co-create one another. Human cultural practices, according to this framework, depend on the extent to which nonhuman actors such as minerals, animals, and artifacts can or will cooperate. Authors of submissions to AA using actor-network theory often seemed to attribute agency to inanimate objects such as forests, mountains, and rivers. Although ecological anthropologists have long written about the ways in which the physical and biotic environment affects cultural ideas and behavior, attributing agency to inanimate objects seems quite strange to me. Furthermore, many of the manuscripts submitted to AA using actor-network theory employed a vocabulary I had trouble understanding. AA published numerous articles about science and technology during my editorship.2 Submissions using actor-network theory, however, did not fare well. In most cases, such manuscripts were rejected because of shortcomings described by reviewers sympathetic to this approach. I have to wonder, though, whether my reservations about actor-network theory led me to reject some manuscripts that received mixed reviews. One initial submission that used actor-network theory received recommendations to accept from all three reviewers. I nonetheless made a revise and resubmit decision based on my puzzlement by sentences that seemed to attribute agency to certain inanimate objects. Although the author was willing to rephrase such sentences in the published version in ways I found acceptable, I worried that I had forced her to frame arguments in ways somewhat different from what she had originally intended. The vocabulary in another manuscript in science and technology studies resulted in a decision at odds with the comments of the peer reviewers. Although all four reviewers recommended acceptance, I had great difficulty understanding the author’s argument. My comments in a revise and resubmit decision letter were in retrospect too direct. Although I am convinced by the reviews of the merits of this piece, I think that the paper would be better suited for another

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journal (e.g., Cultural Anthropology or American Ethnologist) than it is for AA. American Anthropologist has a diverse readership, most of whom would find this article hard to understand. The vocabulary and theoretical perspective presented are obviously understandable to certain anthropologists . . . such as the reviewers of the paper. But to the majority who are unfamiliar with this perspective (such as myself), this paper will be almost incomprehensible. I am committed to including articles with diverse styles and theoretical perspectives in AA. However, it is essential that the main points of every article be understandable to the majority of our readers. The author wrote back politely, saying he would submit the manuscript elsewhere. I later saw that he had succeeded in publishing a paper similar to the one I had seen in another anthropological journal. One of the reviewers, however, was so unhappy with my unwillingness to immediately accept the manuscript that he complained to our associate editor in sociocultural anthropology, who had nothing to do with the decision, and refused a later request to provide comments on another manuscript.

General Interest and Balance The AAA, Wiley-Blackwell, and I all wanted to publish articles that would be widely cited. I therefore gave some preference in my manuscript decision making to submissions that examined topics I thought would interest many readers. Most of these articles fell into two general categories. Some examined newsworthy issues in particular places, such as the changing nature of the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, reconciliation efforts in Rwanda, and conservation in Wyoming. Others were about broad topics such as difficulties with the concept of informed consent, kinship studies, the role of anthropologists in studies of climate change, and epigenetics. We also published a number of hard-to-categorize articles that I thought would attract readers such as an examination of anthropologists in film, an analysis of the cross-cultural prevalence of romantic-sexual kissing, and a discussion of the disappearance of the bumbling ethnographer in accounts of fieldwork.3 AA is the only AAA-sponsored journal that includes articles in archaeology and biological anthropology. Accepting sufficient numbers of manuscripts in these subfields was not easy. During my editorship, 69 percent of manuscripts submitted as potential research articles were in sociocultural

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anthropology, compared to only 10 percent in archaeology, 7 percent in biological anthropology, and 6 percent in linguistic anthropology. The remaining 8 percent of submissions could not be easily categorized as being in any one subfield. The acceptance rate for submissions in archaeology was 26 percent, considerably higher than for manuscripts in other subfields. I am unsure if the greater acceptance rate in archaeology was the result of my desire to achieve some sort of balance among the subfields. I did not accept a disproportionate percentage of manuscripts in biological anthropology and linguistic anthropology. However, the number of members of anthropology departments and the AAA who are archaeologists is considerably higher than the number who are biological and linguistic anthropologists. I therefore thought it was important that the journal publish a reasonable number of archaeology articles. My impression, moreover, is that the overall quality of submissions in archaeology was especially good. Most archaeologists are not AAA members and do not publish the results of their research in the association’s journals. Those who submit manuscripts to AA are a self-selected group whose research usually examines theoretical questions of interest to sociocultural anthropologists. Archaeological submissions to AA are rarely the largely descriptive manuscripts that comprise a significant percentage of rejected submissions. I also found most archaeologists to be responsible peer reviewers, providing timely, useful comments that could aid authors in revising manuscripts. The AAA made it clear to me that it would be desirable for AA to have a significant number of authors from places besides the United States. Although it was not hard to find good submissions written by scholars from Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and Israel, most other international authors had difficulty producing manuscripts that the peer reviewers and I thought were appropriate for AA. Issues related to the internationalization of AA are discussed in detail in Chapter 6.

Chapter 5

Writing My Attempts to Make AA Readable

Unfortunately, scholars often deploy technical language to make an otherwise simple concept sound complex. It does nothing to enrich the world of ideas and exacerbates the insular and exclusionary nature of academic research. (Ghodsee 2016:6)

When I studied anthropology as an undergraduate in the 1960s, I was occasionally discouraged by the prose in books and articles in the field I had chosen as my major. Some authors presented important ideas in ways that I found almost incomprehensible. I remember, for example, struggling while writing my honors thesis to understand the theories about kinship, exchange, and myth of the French anthropologist Claude Le´vi-Strauss. Nonetheless, most sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists at the time were writing lucid—if sometimes deadly dull—ethnographies and site reports. Because the dominant theoretical approaches aimed at being scientific, authors usually attempted to present logical arguments and define terms when necessary. Although there were prominent exceptions, I got the impression that anthropologists seldom used terms understandable to only a minority of their colleagues. Terms such as matrilineal, Rorschach test, and carbon dating were reasonably assumed to be part of the knowledge base of almost all anthropologists. As anthropologists became more specialized in the latter part of the twentieth century, books and articles became harder for me to read. Many

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authors wrote primarily for those who shared their topical interests and theoretical perspectives. Moreover, the rise of humanistic approaches— especially postmodernism—in the 1980s led some anthropologists to advocate experimental modes of writing in which defining terms and testing clearly stated hypotheses were not paramount considerations. Because AA is the only AAA-sponsored journal covering all four subfields of anthropology, I thought that the main ideas of articles should be comprehensible to our diverse readership. Past editors of AA had varied in the degree of attention they seemed to give to clear writing. On the whole, however, articles in AA in this century in my view had been more accessible to a general anthropological audience than those published in three other leading journals in our field. Current Anthropology included many articles written in a scientific style in which authors made relatively little effort to present their principal ideas in an easily digestible form. Authors of articles in Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist often seemed to assume that the readers they cared about were familiar with their complex theoretical perspectives. Articles in these journals were cited as much or more than those in AA, suggesting that there was not a strong relationship between readability and impact in the field. Still, I thought that the niche of AA in the journal landscape was one in which clarity of presentation should be emphasized. I made great efforts throughout my editorship to improve the writing in research articles and research reports. Initial submissions describing fascinating research were often poorly organized and marred by convoluted sentences. Many manuscripts employed a vocabulary that only a small minority of our readers were likely to understand. I became so vexed by some authors’ lack of attention to their audience that I vented my frustration by periodically posting on my Facebook page “anthropology words of the day” such as nosology, actant, and illocutionary. Editors of scholarly journals differ in the kinds of writing problems they find most irritating. I was struck by these differences when reading the comments on writing in an essay by the editor-in-chief and copy editor of American Ethnologist (Besnier and Morales 2018). The authors discuss at length issues such as “evasive metadiscourse,” “citational excess,” and “nominalization” that never occurred to me when looking at manuscripts. Although Besnier and Morales also complain about “obfuscating language,” “formal diction,” and “overwrought prose,” they emphasize the importance of avoiding jargon and convoluted syntax only when discussing article abstracts.

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This chapter includes numerous examples of my comments about lessthan-stellar prose in submissions to the journal. These comments were all made on manuscripts that were eventually revised and published in AA. As a group, these manuscripts were considerable better written—even in initial submissions—than those we rejected.

Anthropologists and Writing I am far from being the first person to notice problems with academic writing (see, for example, Billig 2013). In an excellent book on this topic, Helen Sword observes, Pick up any guide to effective writing and what will you find? . . . always use clear, precise language, even when expressing complex ideas; engage your reader’s attention through examples, illustrations, and anecdotes; avoid opaque jargon; vary your vocabulary, sentence length, and frames of reference; favor active verbs and concrete nouns; write with conviction, passion, and verve. Pick up a peer-reviewed journal in just about any academic discipline and what will you find? Impersonal, stodgy, jargon-laden abstract prose that ignores or defies most of the stylistic principles outlined above. . . . What is going on here? Is there a guidebook for graduate students learning the trade that says, “Thou must not write clearly or concisely.” (Sword 2012:3, 5) Sword (2012:7) briefly mentions possible explanations for poor academic writing such as authors’ desire to use jargon indicating their command of appropriate disciplinary discourse and demands for productivity that leave scholars with too little time to be concerned with their prose. Her main concern, however, is not why academics write badly. Instead, her goal is to encourage good writing by giving examples of what she calls stylish academic prose. I would have been delighted to receive submissions with stylish prose and often wished that AA could regularly publish graceful and intelligent essays of the sort often found in the New Yorker. While we were able to publish a few such pieces during my editorship, stylish writing was ordinarily too much to expect.1 Few anthropologists, including me, seem capable of this level of writing; I was content with competent, serviceable prose.

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My concern about anthropologists’ prose might seem surprising, given our discipline’s “long tradition of self-reflective writing about writing” (Sword 2012:15). Advocates of the postmodern movement in anthropology some time ago (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986) convincingly showed that many ethnographies were rhetorical performances written in ways to convince readers of the authors’ authority and objectivity. In a recent edited collection entitled The Anthropologist as Writer (Wulff 2016), contributors discuss topics such as “the anthropologist as storyteller,” “life-writing: anthropological knowledge, boundary-making, and the experimental,” “fiction and anthropological understanding,” and “digital narratives in anthropology.” Most articles and books about anthropological writing, however, have little to say about the importance of clarity. A notable exception is Kristen Ghodsee’s From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies That Everyone Can Read. Ghodsee (2016) forcefully criticizes anthropological writing, saying that the prose is often opaque, impenetrable, jargon laden, and gratuitously verbose. The first chapter of her book is called “Why Write Clearly?” Ghodsee’s intent is to encourage anthropologists to write accessible ethnographies for undergraduate students and the general public. Although some of her suggestions apply to articles in scholarly journals, most are aimed at the writing of popular books. Her recommendation to incorporate great amounts of ethnographic detail, for example, would not work for submissions to AA. My decision letters for manuscripts receiving revise and resubmit and accept with minor revisions decisions usually included comments, queries, and suggestions about word choice, sentence structure, and overall organization. I am sure that I paid more attention to such matters than most other editors of academic journals, who reasonably see their principal task as assessing the scholarly merit of submissions. I was, however, psychologically incapable of ignoring horrendous prose. In particular, jargon irritated me no end.

Jargon Although almost every critic of academic writing complains about the overuse of jargon, defining this term is not easy. The word is commonly used to refer to terms that are understandable to specialists in a particular discipline or topic but are incomprehensible to others. The implication is that

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the use of such terms is often unnecessary because they could be replaced with plain English. However, every discipline needs specialized terms that are efficient ways to describe complex concepts. When most people complain about jargon, they are not ordinarily referring to terms such as differential equations (mathematics), string theory (physics), mitral valve prolapse (medicine), and cross-cousin marriage (anthropology). Authors often tried to demonstrate their erudition by using vocabulary that most of our readers would have to look up in dictionaries. In my decision letters, I sometimes asked that authors either define or use readerfriendly substitutes for words such as prolegomena, aporia, doxa, and hexus. Such words may be pretentious but are not jargon. When I commented about jargon in decision letters, I referred only to nontechnical, subdiscipline-specific words that would be hard to understand for many of our readers. I knew that what I might consider jargon in an AA article would be completely acceptable in a more specialized journal. I also thought that there was a continuum of jargon words, with at one end those that would be understandable to many readers (discursive, mediated, contestation, subaltern), in the middle those that would puzzle most readers (interpellate, co-constitutive, episteme, chronotope), and at the other end those that would mystify just about all our subscribers (generic regimentation, dicentization, heteronomy). I had the most difficulty deciding what to say about words on the less obscure end of the continuum. Many authors regard words such as mediated and contestation as part of ordinary scholarly discourse. Although they are right, I think that the overuse of such words is likely to repel some readers who might otherwise be interested in the topic of a manuscript. Ontology was the most common jargon word in manuscripts submitted during my editorship. Many sociocultural anthropologists at the time were intrigued with what was called an ontological turn in the discipline. Attempts to say exactly what this consisted of often employed difficult language. Excerpts from two frequently cited articles on ontology show how hard this prose can be to understand: The ontological turn in anthropology is premised on the notion that anthropologists are fundamentally concerned with alterity [another term I dislike] and that this is not a matter of “culture,” “epistemology,” or “worldview,” but of being. Associated with this premise are some important ideas; that the notion of stable and

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universal “nature” viewed through various “cultural” perspectives is not shared by many of the people we study; that it would be a remarkable coincidence if concepts whose radical difference we acknowledge turned out to as easily translatable into our own as we often assume and that presupposing commensurability and a single ontology makes us unfaithful both to our own intellectual project of investigating difference and to our subjects as we fail to “take seriously” what they tell us. (Heywood 2012:143–144) The ontological solution—which brings the experimental realism of Bruno Latour, the fundamental alterity of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and the universal scope of Descola into uneasy alliance— finds common analytic fuel in the sense that the “Enlightenment Great Divide” between nature and culture is the deeply flawed and apocalyptic premise of an outmoded “European cosmology.” (Bessire and Bond 2014:440) I have never completely understood how ontology differs from longstanding anthropological notions of culture. My bafflement is apparently shared by a significant minority of scholars. A debate in Manchester, England, in 2008 considered the motion that ontology is just another word for culture. By the end of the debate, the speakers had generally agreed that ontology and culture described broadly similar concepts with different emphases. Nonetheless, the vote on the motion by the audience was nineteen in favor, thirty-nine opposed, with six abstentions (Rollason 2008:31). Despite debates about the meaning, usefulness, and originality of the concept of ontology, authors of manuscripts submitted to AA embraced the term. The word was often used in ways that did not seem to me to be helpful. My eyes would glaze over when reading phrases such as ontological criminals, episodic ontology, and ontological belonging. Although I found it irresistible to focus on individual words when venting on Facebook, most jargon in submissions consisted of off-putting phrases and sentences. Taken alone, these phrases and sentences were only mildly objectionable. They tended, however, to occur in clumps, especially in sections devoted to theory. In decision letters, I often commented that the writing got much better once the manuscript turned to ethnographic or archaeological description. Here are some of the countless examples of jargon-laden prose found in manuscripts:

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The public is involved as an agent in the implementation of the meetings of bodies in everyday interaction; a vector of knowledge; practicing his own implicatory denial; embodied agents as sites of subjectivity; we heuristically address what might be called the domestic sphere as a social domain; a concomitant proliferation of modes of analysis; the language of the commodification literature reifies capitalism as a coherent object; abreacted this dis-ease; life itself was framed discursively as a site of contention; the performatization of practice; what is conjured by the juxtaposition of these voices is a chronotope of knowledge-in-circulation; over the surpluses inscribed in their own life cycles. You might think that this is overkill and that I could have made my point using only three or four examples. But I want to show how stultifying it can be to read a manuscript filled with phrase after phrase of this type. It was a rare manuscript that did not have at least one ugly jargonish sentence. In reading over sections of my decision letters about phrases and sentence that I thought were confusing or awkward, I can see that I was not always as tactful as I might have been: Can you say this in plain English? [responding to “government ontology that defines their mode of embodiment and perception”] This is one of many examples of phrasing that would be hard for most of our readers (including me!) to understand. [responding to “the affordances of this particular symbolic technology”] Sometimes I became so frustrated by obscure writing in otherwise interesting manuscripts that I provided long lists of phrases that I thought need to be fixed. Few authors seem to have been upset by my acerbic comments about jargon. Although they gave detailed responses to substantive critiques of sections on theory and method, there were usually just brief mentions of changes in phrases I had criticized. I never got the feeling that most authors were particularly committed to their jargon. If a cranky editor objected to certain phrases, they were willing to jettison them. My comments about jargon in decision letters were almost always intended to improve a manuscript’s clarity. When I had trouble understanding sentences, I sometimes suspected that my difficulties were only

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partly related to writing issues. Bad writing, I thought, might indicate muddled thinking: I think many AA readers would have difficulties (as I do) understanding what you are attempting to say here. What is “[theoretical term A]”? Why do you want to “suture” [concept A and concept B]? Why can’t this be said more simply? As I read the paper, you . Am I right? If I am right, why do you need an are saying elaborate theoretical apparatus to say this? I have great difficulty understanding what this means. . . . How is [concept A] recognized in the archaeological record and distinguished from [concepts B and C]? As far as I can tell, A in the archaeological record [often] seems to be [particular types of material remains]. But how can we know anything about what these [material remains] tell us about [concepts A, B, and C]?

Technical Terms Some submissions written in a scientific vein included sections with large numbers of technical terms that I knew would be unfamiliar to most of our readers. These passages most often appeared in descriptions of methods and concepts in archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, and statistical analyses in all subfields. I often urged authors to put such material in endnotes, appendices, and online-only supporting information. In some cases, however, the technical information was an essential part of a manuscript and had to remain in the text. Here are two examples of my comments about technical prose: Our readers will not be familiar with many of the terms you use, even if some (for example A and B) seem obvious to you. You need to explain these terms either in the text or in footnotes. Here are some examples of terms I am unfamiliar with—[long list]. Perhaps you could generally say what you did in the text and put the technical stuff (without further explanation) in footnotes. Although I do not expect you to present a detailed exposition, it would be helpful if an in-text citation or footnote could direct readers to a relevant source providing a fuller explanation of [concept X]. . . . It would be very helpful to readers if you could remind

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them what . . . [term A] is. Perhaps you could use the word “B” instead of [A]. One of my most lengthy sets of comments about technical terms was on a first submission of a review article on an important topic. My remarks included the following: The second paragraph of the current version of the paper will be incomprehensible to most of our readers. You need to explain what you mean by [theoretical term A]. You also need to do something about the last sentence which includes a host of terms that will be unfamiliar to most of our readers (including me!). What are [list of technical terms] etc.? In general, you need to consider the audience for the paper. You are not writing for specialists. Either define or omit terms. You might consult with a popular science writer if you know one. Although the third paragraph does not include as much unfamiliar language, it also would be hard to follow for nonspecialists. What is [term B]? Why should anyone care about [B]? In their revision, the authors added a helpful boxed insert defining many of the terms they used. They also completely rewrote the two paragraphs I had critiqued. One paragraph was what I was hoping for when I asked for changes. The other paragraph, although clearer than the first version, remained difficult for general readers even with the boxed insert. It was, however, probably as good as I could reasonably expect with such technical material. The use of difficult technical terms in manuscripts was much less of a problem than the omnipresent jargon. Nevertheless, some comments I made about technical terms led to the first significant controversy of my editorship. Knowing that the AAA was concerned about a perceived dearth of articles in AA in biological anthropology, I was pleased that my third issue (September 2013) included a presidential address by Alan Goodman and three additional articles about that subfield.2 I devoted my from-theeditor column in that issue to “Biological Anthropology in American Anthropologist,” hoping to encourage more submissions about topics such as epigenetics, human evolution, and human variation. In the column, I

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mentioned the difficulty I had with the use of technical terms by biological anthropologists: While putting this issue together, I thought about what kinds of articles in biological anthropology would be best suited for AA. In my initial “From the Editor” [column] . . . I noted that the main ideas of pieces in AA should be understandable to nonspecialists and discouraged the extensive use of terms unfamiliar to most of our readers. This poses particular problems for biological anthropologists, whose work often entails specialized techniques about which most sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists know little. Biological anthropologists therefore need to be particularly careful to write in a way that is comprehensible to the generalized readership of the journal. (Chibnik 2013a:357) I probably should not have been surprised that some biological anthropologists were unhappy about these remarks. I was told that my column had been the subject of criticism at the meeting of the biological anthropology section at the annual meeting of the AAA later that year. In the biological anthropological section column for the December Anthropology News, Julienne Rutherford wrote, “I think it is fair to assume that the techniques used by many sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists are often obscure and sometimes even incomprehensible to specialists in other subdisciplines. To put the onus on only one subfield to be intelligible may be part of the reason some of our colleagues don’t feel particularly welcome within AAA or excited about publishing their most thoughtful work in AA” (Rutherford 2013). After the editor of Anthropology News asked me to respond, I sent her the following: I regret that my comments seem to have been misunderstood. In my very first “from the editor” piece, I emphasized the need for all authors to avoid using specialized jargon understandable to only a minority of AA readers. These comments were primarily intended for sociocultural anthropologists. I spend considerable time working with sociocultural anthropologists in my decision letters asking them to revise pieces to make them more comprehensible.

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There is a significant difference in the problems posed in this respect by sociocultural anthropologists and biological anthropologists. Sociocultural anthropologists too often write in a complicated way when their ideas could be expressed more simply and clearly. Biological anthropologists, in contrast, often use technical terms that most AA readers will not understand. The problem here is not clarity, but instead the nature of our readership. . . . There was . . . no intent on my part to imply that vocabulary is not a problem for sociocultural anthropologists. On the contrary— the use of obscure language by sociocultural anthropologists is a much greater concern for me as editor than the use of technical terms by biological anthropologists. These comments do not seem to have ever been published. The staff at Anthropology News was unable to find my reply when I asked in 2017 what had happened to it. My hopes that this minor flap was at an end were soon dashed. I received an email from Scott Jaschik, a reporter at Inside Higher Education, asking about the controversy. This influential publication, much more widely read than Anthropology News, had extensively covered the science wars in anthropology. Someone had sent the column from Anthropology News to Jaschik, who saw it as evidence of a continuing conflict between scientists and humanists in anthropology. I sent Jaschik my response to the Anthropology News piece. The article Jaschik (2013) wrote for Inside Higher Education was accompanied by some impassioned comments—several by Julienne Rutherford—about what the writers regarded as the AAA’s hostility to scientific approaches in general and biological anthropology in particular. In retrospect, I think there were several reasons behind the reactions of some biological anthropologists. Most important, many biological anthropologists had long felt marginalized by the AAA, which is dominated by sociocultural anthropologists. In addition, my statement that biological anthropologists had a “particular problem” was an unfortunate word choice. What I meant to say was that biological anthropologists had problems with terminology related to technical terms, which differed from the jargon problems of sociocultural anthropologists. Instead, it seemed that I was saying that biological anthropologists were especially prone to using difficult vocabulary. Many of the readers of the from-the-editor column in

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the issue with four pieces on biological anthropology had not seen a previous column (March 2013) that noted the distinctive (particular) problems with vocabulary of sociocultural anthropologists.3 Jaschik asked Ed Liebow, the executive director of the AAA, to respond. Seeking to avoid more unpleasantness, Ed blandly said that the controversy was “part of the healthy ongoing exchange about how to highlight best for a broader audience the important contributions that anthropologists make.” Although I had hoped for more support from the AAA, I was not surprised by Ed’s remarks. I knew that his main concern was that Inside Higher Education was focusing on the science wars in anthropology rather than on other activities of AAA members. My experiences with articles submitted during the rest of my editorship convinced me that my comments about the use of unexplained technical terms by biological anthropologists had been appropriate. This was exemplified by a vital topics forum that we published in the December 2015 issue on genetic anthropology, a field that was increasing prominent because of advances in biology. This section was edited by Andrew Kitchen, a colleague of mine at the University of Iowa who uses big data in genetics to investigate topics of general anthropological interest such as the settling of the Americas. Drew solicited short essays from prominent scholars working in genetic anthropology. Although the initial submissions of these essays all addressed important, intriguing topics, most assumed that readers had a substantial knowledge of genetics. Drew and I spent hours and hours copy editing the essays before sending them on to Mayumi. For one essay, we made changes in almost every sentence. This was the only time that I did such extensive copy editing of manuscripts.

Manuscripts Include More Than the Main Text The writing in manuscripts submitted to AA as potential research articles and research reports consists of more than the main text. Every manuscript has a title, an abstract, and a list of references cited. Most include endnotes; many also have maps, charts, graphs, tables, and photos. A few have illustrations, appendices, and online-only supporting information. My decision letters usually included brief comments about this ancillary material. I probably should have paid more attention to these parts of the manuscript. By the time I had finished commenting on the main text, I sometimes regarded my ideas about other parts of the manuscript as afterthoughts.

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My main concern about titles was that they should clearly indicate what articles were about. I also tried to make sure that titles did not include words that would puzzle our subscribers. Wiley-Blackwell and the staff at the AAA were, however, more interested in how titles affected citation rates. They worried that some articles might not be cited because their insufficiently descriptive—often overly cute—titles prevented them from being found by scholars conducting bibliographic searches. I therefore often suggested to authors with playful titles that they add some descriptive information after a colon. I thought it particularly important to indicate where research was carried out. Authors were asked to provide abstracts of up to 200 words. These article summaries were important because many of our subscribers look at abstracts before deciding whether to read research articles and research reports. Furthermore, abstracts are often open access even when articles are behind paywalls. For the most part, my comments about writing in abstracts were similar to those I provided for the main text, indicating unclear sentences and obscure terms. I also sometimes asked authors to more explicitly state their arguments and indicate the evidence presented in their articles. But I did not read abstracts any more carefully than the main text. AA style requires that notes be placed after the main text of an article. These endnotes, which are separate from references cited, usually consist of information related to an article that is not of sufficient importance to be included in the main text. Of the 119 research articles and research reports published in AA during my editorship, 104 (87 percent) included endnotes. A third of the articles had more than ten endnotes. I have to admit that I did not carefully read endnotes. I sometimes suggested that material in the text might be better placed in an endnote because it slowed the flow of manuscript, was highly technical, or seemed tangential to an essay’s central argument. I also occasionally suggested that material in an endnote was sufficiently important that it belonged in the main text. Most often, however, my perusal of endnotes was limited to observing how many there were. A few authors had more than 40 endnotes in their initial submissions. In such cases, I asked authors to eliminate some endnotes. References in AA are given in short form in parentheses in the text (e.g., “Doe 1923:41–46”) and listed in detail in a section that appears after the acknowledgments and endnotes. The AA website provides a link to detailed explanations of the proper form for the references cited section. Many

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authors—perhaps in part because they were unaware of this link—did not use the proper form in their references. During my first months of editing, I would note these problems in revise and resubmit decision letters and refer authors to the links. Mayumi Shimose, our managing editor, eventually suggested that I no longer do this, saying that getting the form of references right was her responsibility. She and the staff at Wiley-Blackwell also checked to see that every citation in the text appeared in the references cited section and that every entry in the references cited section was cited in the text. I was relieved that I did not have to worry about these matters. Tables were most often found in articles adopting scientific perspectives. They were relatively uncommon, occurring in only one-fifth of the research articles and research reports I published. I looked at tables carefully and often indicated in my decision letters how they might be clarified. I also sometimes suggested that authors provide tables in addition to or instead of text. You could add a table dividing households according to some measure of [characteristic X] into terciles (or quartiles) and present the means and medians of various measures of X. There is no need in the text to puzzle our (for the most part) statistically unsophisticated readership with terms like “log normal transformed” and “overlaid terciles.” I also wonder why you presented the information in Table 1 in what appear to be absolute numbers. Should not this be supplemented with information about per household figures? You probably also should say a bit more about how numbers in the tables were calculated. Just saying that they come from “surveys” doesn’t see to me to be quite enough. This table needs explanation. The great majority of our readers will have no idea what factor analysis is . . . or what “standardized obliquely rotated loadings are” (surely this can go in a footnote rather than as part of the table title). Either in the text or in a note, briefly define the following terms used in Table 1. I treated graphs similarly to tables, commenting mostly on their clarity. About a third of the manuscripts published during my editorship had maps. I often urged authors to add maps to their articles, thinking that they were essential for readers’ understanding. Authors almost always responded to such requests.

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Photographs were appealing additions to articles, allowing readers to visualize what authors were writing about. Although photos appeared in black and white in the print edition of AA, they could be in color in the online version of the journal. My revise and resubmit decision letters often included mildly worded inquiries about whether authors could add photos to their manuscripts. Such requests were usually ignored; only a third of the articles and reports published under my editorship included photos. Drawings were a common feature of articles in AA in the first part of the twentieth century. Over the years, the number of drawings in the journal has dropped considerably. The reduction in the number of drawings in AA over the years cannot be entirely accounted for by their replacement by photographs. Although there were a few photos in early issues of AA, they disappeared almost entirely from the journal between 1940 and 1970. During this period, illustrations were also uncommon. Most illustrations in AA nowadays are archaeological sketches. However, illustrations played an important role in two nonarchaeological articles in AA during my editorship. One was a research report about khipus, knotted-cord devices once used in the Andes for communication and recording information. Several of the reviewers of the initial submission either had trouble understanding the author’s diagrams or requested additional illustrations to explain material in the text. The author made extensive changes in her illustrations in response to the reviewers’ helpful comments.4 The other article discussed the meanings of different kinds of handshakes among Muslim women and children in coastal Kenya. Because I thought visualizing these handshakes was necessary to understand the text, I asked the author if she could include photographs. Although the author agreed that illustrations would be helpful, she said that they could not be provided. She was unable to find an illustrator, and the women in her fieldwork site refused to be photographed. While I ordinarily would have accepted this response, in this case I persisted: “I was disappointed that you were unable to add some illustrations of handshakes to the article. I think the addition of such material would aid greatly in both attracting readers to the article and increasing their ability to understand its content. I am not insistent on your adding such illustrations, but urge you to try again to do something in this respect.” I was pleased when the resubmission included some terrific illustrations, including one used for the cover of the March 2016 issue. The author had

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photos taken of people reenacting the greetings. These were transformed into drawings using a computer program. The author added an endnote explaining that the illustrations were reenactments rather than actual greetings in the field.5 I liked working with Mayumi in selecting covers for AA. She would ask authors of articles and reports in an issue if they had any photos or illustrations that they thought might work well as covers. These included, but were not limited to, visual material already submitted along with articles. After Mayumi gathered the responses, we would discuss via email which photo or illustration would be best for the cover of the issue. I was disappointed that the AAA would not allow us to have color covers, especially because this was permitted for American Ethnologist. When I asked why we could not have color covers (without mentioning American Ethnologist), I received the nonanswer that it was a matter of budgeting. This response was not at all satisfying, given that the AAA earned much more money from AA than from any of its other journals. But I did not press the point, thinking that my stock of indignation was better used on other matters.6 Our system of communication about covers broke down in one case. Mayumi and I had narrowed down our choice of covers for an issue to several photographs given to us by one of the authors. Mayumi left the final choice up to me. Because of a mix-up possibly related to how we numbered the photos, Mayumi thought that I had picked a different image from the one that was my actual first choice. The wrong image therefore appeared on the cover. I thought the photo that appeared was fine and was not overly concerned with the error. When AA became primarily online in 2016, I worried that covers might be a minor casualty of the transition. The online version of the journal provided only a tiny cover image, which could not be enlarged. After I prodded Wiley-Blackwell several times about making it possible to enlarge the cover image, they did so and provided a prominent link to the cover image. Nonetheless, I am sure that many fewer people look at covers than previously. I sometimes suggested that authors move material from the main text to an appendix. They just about never were willing to do this. Only two articles published under my editorship included appendices. Authors were more willing to either move material to an endnote or cut it out of the manuscript. Another possibility was to put some material into what is called supporting information. This is an unedited, online-only section that

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can take up as much space as authors desire. In addition to technical material, supporting information could include videos, transcripts, and additional photographs. Although I encouraged this option in every acceptance letter, only four authors took advantage of the opportunity.

Word Count Manuscripts initially submitted to AA as potential research articles were officially limited to 8,000 words. The word limit included references, endnotes, figures, and tables. When manuscripts came into the journal via ScholarOne, one of my first tasks was to check the word count. If a manuscript was a few hundred words too long, I was willing to send it out for review. Longer manuscripts were rejected with authors given the option to resubmit papers that met the word limit. Many authors who submitted manuscripts that were too long seem not to have read the guidelines about word count on the AA website. Even if they had looked at the guidelines, they apparently had forgotten the part about the words in the references cited section. Most quickly trimmed their manuscripts and resubmitted within a week of receiving a technical rejection. I occasionally got requests from potential authors asking if the word count guidelines could be relaxed. These authors always provided explanations of why their material could be not presented well within our word limits. I declined these requests because there was no way I could come up with a consistent, fair policy for making exceptions. One such request came from a member of our editorial board. I replied that it was especially important not to make an exception in this case because it would be perceived as favoritism. The author decided not to shorten the manuscript and instead submitted the paper to Current Anthropology, where it was eventually published. Authors receiving revise and resubmit decisions were given longer word limits for resubmissions. They needed extra space to make changes suggested by myself and the reviewers. These word limits were ordinarily 9,500 words for first resubmissions and 10,500 words for second resubmissions. The average word count of published articles during my editorship was about 9,800. The author of one resubmission seemed oblivious to word limits. He had received an initial revise and resubmit decision from Tom Boellstorff. When I received the resubmission, I was amazed to see that it was 18,000

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words long. I reminded the author of our policy on word limits. He then returned a manuscript of 13,000 words, saying that it could not be shortened any further. At this point I turned the manuscript down. A couple of years later, I saw that the author had succeeded in getting a long version of the paper published in Current Anthropology. Our word limit for initial submissions was considerably shorter than that of peer journals such as American Ethnologist (11,000 words) and Current Anthropology (12,000 words). I think that the shorter word limit helped the quality of writing in our articles. Authors were forced to be concise in presenting arguments and needed to avoid including too much marginally relevant material. The shorter word limit also allowed Mayumi and me to pay more attention to sentence-level writing than would have been possible for longer articles.

Copy Editing and Writing Mayumi and I could do only so much with respect to writing. Even though I thought my efforts were worthwhile, I had neither the time nor the skill to be a thorough copy editor. Mayumi’s workload did not permit her to do the extensive copy editing that some publishers of scholarly books are still willing to provide. She did admirable work improving sentences and word choice, checking references, and putting manuscripts in proper format. I could not reasonably expect her, however, to make substantial changes in manuscripts. When promising manuscripts were poorly written, I suggested that authors work with professional copy editors. Some such manuscripts understandably came from authors whose first language was not English. These authors were usually able to find someone to help with grammar and word choice. Most badly written submissions, however, came from native speakers of English. Although I tried not to show my frustration with such submissions, I was not always as polite as I should have been: Because I can’t figure out how to say this tactfully, I will just bluntly comment that the prose in this manuscript is substandard. You will find numerous specific comments about style, word usage, etc. below. The writing in this paper is considerably below the standard acceptable in the AA. There are many instances of poor word choice.

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This is not a minor problem; the misuse of words often led me to be puzzled about the meanings of particular sentences. The writing problems are sufficiently glaring that I would recommend hiring a professional copy editor. Although I regret my bluntness in such cases, it proved to be effective. Resubmissions were much better written, whether or not authors sought professional help. Mayumi and I tried hard to improve the prose in the journal. I am unable to judge whether our efforts led to pieces in AA being any more readable than those in other leading anthropology journals. I can say with confidence that published articles and reports in AA were almost always better written than authors’ initial submissions. Although the work we did on writing was invisible to readers, I regard it as being among our most important tasks.

Chapter 6

Sections AA as a Magazine

One of the things I enjoyed most about editing AA was the opportunity to oversee the various parts of the journal. In addition to the research articles, research reports, and book reviews typical of many scholarly journals, AA regularly published from-the-editor columns, obituaries, year-in-review essays, and sections on public, visual, and world anthropology. The journal also irregularly included vital topics forums, interviews, commentaries, and distinguished addresses. By publishing so many different kinds of material, AA is in some ways more like a magazine—to be sure an unusual one— than a conventional scholarly journal. Besides the from-the-editor columns, the only sections that I directly supervised were the research articles, research reports, distinguished addresses, and commentaries. The book review, obituaries, visual anthropology, public anthropology, and world anthropology sections had their own editors and, in some cases, editorial teams. The year-in-review essays were solicited and supervised by associate editors; vital topics forums and interviews were usually handled by guest editors. For the most part, I liked the near-total autonomy of the sections. Their independence allowed me to concentrate on making manuscript decisions and working with authors revising their research articles and research reports. The considerable differences among the sections in tone, writing style, and theoretical perspective gave the journal a healthy dose of diversity. The sections’ autonomy, however, could result in editorial headaches. The associate and guest editors occasionally approved essays that I thought needed considerable further work prior to publication. Some material in the non-peer-reviewed sections could be controversial.

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Regular Sections Tom Boellstorff wrote from-the-editor columns examining topics such as how to get an article accepted, open access publishing, peer review, the four-field tradition in U.S. anthropology, the niche of general anthropological journals, anthropology and science, government support of anthropological research, and the internationalization of AA. Some of my from-theeditor essays revisited subjects that Tom had discussed. Others presented quantitative data on topics such as manuscript paths and acceptance rates, changes over time in AA content, and countries of residence of authors. I also wrote three columns that used statistical methods to critically assess generalizations that had been made about AA and other journals. These essays examined assertions that women were cited less often than men (not in AA articles in this century), that peer reviewers did not agree with each other all that much (discussed in Chapter 3), and that the two-year impact factor was a good measure of a journal’s influence (not in my view). Not all of my columns were data driven. Essays addressed, for example, the conversion of AA to a primarily online publication, the place of biological anthropology in the journal, and problems associated with reviews of anthropological books intended for general audiences. My columns on biological anthropology and open access resulted in significant controversies that are discussed at length elsewhere in this book. Although the other from-the-editor columns were occasionally cited, I received feedback on only the one about gender and citations.1 Catherine Lutz wrote me asserting that the method she used in an article on this topic (Lutz 1990) was preferable to the one I had used. Lutz had collected data on how often men and women were cited in articles in four anthropology journals in the 1980s and compared these figures to the proportions of male and female authors of articles in the journals. My essay compared citations on Google Scholar of single-authored articles by men and women in AA in this century. I offered Lutz the opportunity to write a commentary using her method for recent AA articles. Perhaps because it would have been quite time-consuming to do the research needed to calculate her measure, she did not respond to my offer. Julienne Rutherford devoted one of her columns on biological anthropology in Anthropology News to making various comments about my essay that were for the most part unrelated to the relationship between the gender of authors of articles and how often articles were cited. I had noted in

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passing that in the 2000–2012 period, single-authored articles were fairly evenly divided between male authors (52 percent) and female authors (48 percent). Rutherford said that a “52/48 split is not the same as a 50/50 split,” which is certainly the case but would seem to me to meet the criteria of “fairly even division.” She went on to assert that this difference might be simply tested for statistical significance and to mention that the proportion of women writing articles in AA was smaller than the proportion of women receiving PhDs in anthropology. Whether or not such testing is as straightforward as Rutherford suggests (I do not think it is), the main point of my column was not about the proportions of men and women writing research articles and research reports in AA.2 In 2014, I was asked to participate in a roundtable on gender and citations at the annual AAA meeting. I said I would do so only if the session included data-based presentations other than mine. The roundtable took place without me. Although I had experienced considerable difficulty setting up the book review office, it ran smoothly once it was established under the editorships of Tim Smith for sociocultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology and Christina Torres-Rouff for archaeology and biological anthropology. In 2013, we were able to publish on average only twenty reviews per issue because of complications associated with the transition in the book review offices. Afterward, we averaged forty-seven reviews per issue, a significant increase over the average of twenty-two during Tom Boellstorff’s editorship. Each year we improved the timeliness of the section; most books covered were published within the two years preceding their review in AA. The well-written reviews were carefully edited by Tim, Christina, and Mayumi. The books covered came from a wide variety of presses, mostly in the United States. The subfield diversity of books reviewed was not as great as I would have liked, with about 85 percent in sociocultural anthropology. I am not sure how much we could have done to achieve a better balance. There are many more sociocultural anthropologists than archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and linguistic anthropologists. Furthermore, sociocultural anthropologists are more likely to write books than scholars in the other subfields, who present much of their most important work in journal articles. During my editorship, we ran two lengthy review essays of books that had received considerable publicity in the mass media.3 I suggested to Tim

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that we cover these books (Chagnon 2013; Diamond 2012) and gave him names of possible reviewers. Aside from these suggestions about the review essays, I was with one exception uninvolved in selecting books to be covered in the journal. Because not everyone understood this, I occasionally received requests from authors that their books be reviewed. I sent these requests to Tim—the books were all in sociocultural anthropology—and explained to the authors the autonomy of the book review section. I had some sympathy for these authors because I knew that journals often lacked clear-cut rules for deciding which books would be reviewed. When I had been one of four book review editors for American Ethnologist, our selection method had consisted of picking out whatever books that we had been sent that seemed important or might otherwise be interesting to our readers. I had personal experience with the arbitrariness of the process at AA. The journal reviewed a collection of essays I edited but not two of my singleauthored books.4 Despite my awareness of the idiosyncrasies involved in selecting books for review, I did not have any brilliant ideas about how to improve the process. The major exception to my policy of noninterference in the book review section came after the publication of A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. When I found out about this provocative, controversial book (Wade 2014), I knew that the editors of AA would have to think carefully about how to react. The author, Nicholas Wade, was a former science writer for the New York Times who for years had greatly influenced the coverage of anthropology in the media. He had antagonized sociocultural anthropologists with his undisguised disdain for much of their subfield, once urging them to leave their departments and study genetics.5 I doubted, moreover, that many biological anthropologists would be impressed by Wade’s argument that recently evolved genetic differences among distinct human races could explain much of human history. By the time I got around to thinking about how to treat Wade’s book, it had already been reviewed negatively in diverse publications, including the Washington Post, Scientific American, the Huffington Post, Slate, and the New Republic. One of the few favorable reviews was written for the Wall Street Journal by Charles Murray, notorious for arguing in The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994) that there are racial differences in intelligence. The AAA was quick to respond to the book. On May 5, 2014, the association sponsored a webinar debate between Wade and Agustı´n Fuentes, a former AA associate editor for biological anthropology. Monica Heller, the

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president of the AAA, wrote a dismissive blog entry (2014) about the book on the association’s website. Because of the slow pace of journal publication, any review of Wade’s book in AA would come out six months after it had been widely skewered. The responses to A Troublesome Inheritance by both anthropologists and nonanthropologists suggested that the book would almost certainly be unfavorably reviewed in the journal. Because I was unsure about how to treat the book, especially with the time lag between its publication and any review we might do, I decided to ask the fifty-six members of our editorial board for suggestions. I provided three options: (1) no review, (2) an ordinary review (single-authored, approximately 800 words), and (3) special treatment such as short reviews from anthropologists from different subfields. I sent my query out on a Saturday afternoon. By Monday evening, I had received twenty-seven thoughtful, often detailed responses. One editorial board member recommended ignoring the book; another provided general comments but did not choose an option. The remaining twentyfive board members were almost evenly split between having the book reviewed in an ordinary way (fourteen) and giving it special treatment (eleven). After mulling over their responses, I decided to have A Troublesome Inheritance reviewed like any other book except for a from-the-editor column I would write about how we decided to treat it. Tim and Christina convinced me that the most credible review would be written by a biological anthropologist. While we were emailing back and forth about possible reviewers, I was contacted by Rachel Caspari, our associate editor for biological anthropology. She offered to review the book herself. Rachel’s judicious, unfavorable review was published in the December 2014 AA.6 During my editorship, some staff members at the AAA decided that the book review processes at the association’s journals could be improved. They had noticed considerable time lags between the dates of publication of some books and their reviews. The staff members were also concerned that book reviews could take up considerable journal space and required a lot of work from editors and editorial assistants. In 2014, the AAA received a one-year $80,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to “develop an online platform that scholarly publishers can use to upload metadata about new titles as well as the books themselves.” What this meant in plain English was that reviewers could receive prepublication digital copies of books. This

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would in theory shorten the time between publication and review. Furthermore, reviews could be published in different and perhaps cheaper and less labor-intensive platforms than research articles. I was puzzled when I learned about this grant. I was skeptical about how much shortening could be done of the time between date of publication and review. AA was already averaging only one and a half years; most of this time was taken up by finding reviewers and waiting for them to complete their reviews. I also wondered how much money could be saved. Still, I thought the project was harmless, providing yet another good venue for reviews of books in anthropology. Given the arbitrariness of how books were selected for review at any particular journal, I favored as many outlets for such reviews as possible. Tim and Christina had stronger reactions to the project. They wondered if the AAA was planning to eventually centralize book reviews, removing them from some or all of its journals. They also worried that AA would be forbidden to review books that had been sent to the editor of the new site. This was not paranoia on their part. An AAA memo two years later about the transition from my editorship to that of my successor suggested the possibility of “renaming Anthropology Book Forum [the name of the new book review site] as ‘American Anthropologist Book Reviews.’ ” The fears of the book review editors have so far not come to pass. The Anthropology Book Forum, published through Anthropology News, has operated on a small scale, averaging about thirty reviews a year. The name of the Anthropology Book Forum has not been changed and its operations have not affected AA book reviews. The time between publication and review in the Forum seems similar to that for AA. The visual anthropology section began to appear in every issue during Tom Boellstorff’s editorship. The section included reviews of ethnographic films and museum exhibits and wide-ranging essays about aspects of visual anthropology. I understood the material in this section less than that in any other part of AA. Essays ordinarily covered topics far from my areas of expertise. I was not even sure what visual anthropology meant. Nevertheless, I liked that the kinds of writing in the section—humanistic, allusive, and creative—differed greatly from the prose in most of the rest of the journal. When John and Naomi Bishop no longer wanted to continue as editors of the visual anthropology section in early 2014, I asked my editorial board for suggestions about possible replacements. I was pleased when three

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anthropologists from the University of Pennsylvania expressed interest. Deborah Thomas and Stanton Wortham were members of the editorial board; John Jackson, a dean at Penn, was an experienced ethnographic filmmaker. After Deborah, Stanton, and John sent me a brief statement about their ideas for the section, I appointed them as the new visual anthropology editors. John Jackson became the editor most involved with the section. Even though I addressed emails about visual anthropology to all three editors, responses always came from John. The content of many of the essays in the section reflected his interests; contributors often came from his networks in the Philadelphia area. Visual anthropology became more varied under the new editors. Sections included a commentary on the popular movie Django Unchained, a review of an animated film about Noam Chomsky, an essay about the celebrated filmmaker Sebastia˜o Salgado, a description of improvement in videos on mobile phones, and a discussion by an anthropologist of her performance piece. The section also had photo essays, interviews, and book reviews. After seeing essays about podcasts and multisensorial ethnography, I asked John Jackson in early 2016 if we might consider renaming the section something other than Visual Anthropology. John responded positively but said that the name change could wait until Deborah Thomas, John’s wife, succeeded me as editor. When Deborah’s first issue came out in 2017, I saw that the section was now called Multimodal Anthropologies.7 I intervened twice in the section. One of the film reviews that the Bishops had solicited included a number of paragraphs that I thought might be offensive to some readers because of assertions about characteristics of certain ethnic groups. A few passages would not have been out of place in the diary of a stereotypical colonial officer of the British Empire in the 1930s. I wrote the author politely asking that he rewrite or remove these sections. Much to my relief, he decided to withdraw the review. I worried even more about the wording in a photo essay by Ariel Sophia Bardi that examined architectural changes after Arabs were driven out of villages in what is now Israel in 1948. John Jackson contacted me, wondering if some readers would react strongly to Bardi’s use of the terms ethnic cleansing and architectural cleansing to describe what had happened. I saw his point, particularly with respect to “ethnic cleansing” as a description of the activities of a group that in 1948 had recently undergone the genocide of the Holocaust. I thought the author could present her ideas, which I thought were reasonable, using less inflammatory language.

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Bardi agreed to change some wording but did not want to altogether abandon the term cleansing. The published essay, entitled “The ‘Architectural Cleansing’ of Palestine,” included this passage: “In just two years, Palestine’s Palestinian population—some 1.3 million people—vanished by half, and architecture played a paramount role in the region’s Judaization. While ethnic cleansing remains a perilously political term to assign to the events of the Nabka, the region was nonetheless indisputably cleansed” (Bardi 2016:169–170). In my from-the-editor column in the issue in which the essay appeared, I commented that Bardi had used “the perhaps controversial terms architectural cleansing and ethnic cleansing.”8 I did this in order to signal that I knew there might be objections to this wording. John and I turned out to have worried too much about this; we received no feedback from readers about the essay. In a column about the initiation of the public anthropology section in 2010, the three coeditors wrote that it was “intended to expose the AA readership to some of the new anthropological work, appearing in a wide variety of media and nontraditional academic formats, that aims both to communicate primarily with nonanthropological audiences and to have an impact on critical issues of wide social significance” (Checker, Vine, and Wali 2010:5). During the last three years of Tom Boellstorff’s editorship, lively public anthropology sections appeared in each issue. I liked the goals and content of the section and hoped that public anthropology under my editorship would continue to include provocative, intriguing material. During the first year of my editorship, the public anthropology section more than met my expectations. Essays addressed topics such as public responses to the Newtown massacre of schoolchildren, anthropologists’ role in the genocide trial of a former president of Guatemala, and ways in which historical archaeologists have examined labor and social justice.9 When the public anthropology editors then became slower to acquire material, I reluctantly asked if they preferred that the section appear in every other issue. Even after we agreed to this arrangement, Public Anthropology took up less space in the issues in which the section appeared than Visual Anthropology and World Anthropology. Only one public anthropology section published after June 2014 included more than two essays. In retrospect, I wish I had done more to strengthen this part of the journal. Anthropologists have long been aware that important research in their field has been carried out by scholars based in places other than the United

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States, Canada, Great Britain, and Western Europe. In 1934, British anthropologists organized the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. The congress came under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1948 and remains active, with a minor name change, today. The WennerGren Foundation, established in 1941 as the Viking Fund, has sponsored many important international symposiums. In 1959, the foundation started the journal Current Anthropology under the initial editorship of Sol Tax. The principal objective of the new journal was to foster communication among anthropologists around the world. In this century, many scholars have come to regard these praiseworthy efforts to internationalize anthropology as inadequate, persuasively arguing that certain national institutions and schools of thought have more power than others. They advocate world anthropologies that recognize and respect the diversity of intellectual styles and types of scholarship (Lins Ribeiro and Escobar 2006). The plurality of world anthropologies is an intentional political and intellectual stance that challenges the alleged commitment of anthropologists such as Sol Tax to “certain (universalizing) and political tenets of the Western tradition” (Lins Ribeiro 2014b:488). Advocates of world anthropologies emphasize “the multiple and contradictory historical, social, cultural and political locatedness of the different communities of anthropologists and their anthropologies” (Restrepo and Escobar 2005:100). The movement has taken institutional form in new groups such as the World Anthropologies Network, the World Council of Anthropological Associations, and the Committee on World Anthropologies of the AAA. The world anthropologies movement is clearly relevant to AA. In the past two decades, the number of contributors to the journal based in places other than the United States has increased substantially. In one of my last fromthe-editor essays, I compared the proportion of such contributors during 2013–2015 with the proportion during 1993–1995. During 2013–2015, 37 percent of authors of research articles and research reports were from places other than the United States, compared to 8 percent during 1993–1995.10 The figures for book reviews were 26 percent during 2013–2015 versus 11 percent in 1993–1995. The increased internationalization of AA, however, does not reflect all that much of a turn from the domination of Western anthropology in the journal. During 2013–2015, only 8 percent of authors of research articles and research reports had affiliations outside of the United States, the industrial Anglophone countries, and Western Europe.

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AA exemplifies the gatekeeping power of institutions from the industrial West. The great majority of peer reviewers of manuscripts are from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. These reviewers ordinarily expect authors to place their findings in the context of relevant anthropological literature and to write in a style typical of journals such as AA, American Antiquity, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. As a group, authors based outside of the industrial West are less likely than authors in the core countries to be familiar with the literature regarded by reviewers as relevant and less able to write in conventional journal style. This is especially so for authors who have not had graduate training in the West. It is therefore no surprise that manuscripts submitted by authors based in the periphery are accepted by AA in much lower proportions than those submitted by authors from anthropological centers. There were 967 manuscripts submitted to AA as potential research articles between June 1, 2008, and May 30, 2015. Of the 191 accepted for publication, 139 were from first authors based in the United States and 36 from seven other Western countries (13 from Great Britain, 7 from Canada, 4 from Australia, 4 from the Netherlands, 3 from Germany, 3 from Sweden, and 2 from France). Another 6 accepted articles had first authors from Israel. The acceptance rates for first authors from these countries was 24 percent. Only 10 manuscripts were accepted from first authors from the rest of the world; the acceptance rate for such manuscripts was 5 percent. Early in my editorship, I was contacted by Bela Feldman-Bianco and Carla Guerron Montero about the possibility of adding a world anthropology section to AA. Bela and Carla were at the time co-chairs of the AAA Committee on World Anthropologies. I reacted to their proposal with some ambivalence. There seemed to me to be a limit to the extent to which AA could or should be internationalized. The journal is, after all, the American Anthropologist, sponsored by the American Anthropological Association. It makes a certain amount of sense that such a journal should focus on research by authors from the United States, writing in the diverse styles characteristic of anthropology in this country. I was nonetheless for the most part receptive to Bela and Carla’s proposal because of the growing influence of the world anthropologies movement, the reasonableness of many of its critiques, and the relative lack of contributions to AA from scholars based outside the industrial West.

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When thinking about the possibility of a world anthropology section, I had a few concerns. I did not want the section to be dominated by essays railing against the hegemony of Western-based scholars and institutions. Such rhetoric, common in the world anthropologies movement, was often justified. Nevertheless, I tried to keep polemic in the journal to a minimum, preferring that authors follow the advice often given to fiction writers: show rather than tell. In addition, I knew that many essays in the section would be written by scholars whose first language was not English. Because articles written by nonnative English speakers often require considerable copy editing, I worried about the extra work that Mayumi might have to do. I therefore thought it best that the associate editor for the section be a fluent English speaker capable of doing some copy editing of essays prior to sending them to Mayumi. Finally, I wanted the section to have material that was different from what could be found in other AA sections. I did not want World Anthropology to be a place where scholars from the periphery could write pieces similar to research articles or essays in the public anthropology section. Bela and Carla prepared a proposal for a world anthropology section that suggested a flexible structure with a focus on contemporary issues and the international diversity of approaches. Essays in the section might be divided into three different types: (1) “Thematic reviews that would bring to the fore ongoing anthropological debates and challenges confronted by anthropologists around the world.” These reviews would include “close examination of global, regional, and local forms of anthropological knowledge production and debates in countries such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Japan and South Africa.” (2) “Review essays about authors whose influential works in specific countries or regions were published in languages other than English, therefore remaining unfamiliar to most AA readers.” (3) “Substantive essays based on international collaborations among anthropologists working as individuals or through organizations.” I chose Jim Weil to be the section editor. He is a multilingual anthropologist with long-term fieldwork and other experience in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Thailand, and Germany. Jim assembled an editorial board that included

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anthropologists from Brazil (Bela Feldman-Bianco), Japan, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, and the United States. Most board members were active in either the AAA Committee for World Anthropologies or the World Council of Anthropological Associations. The section was called World Anthropology in order to parallel Visual Anthropology and Public Anthropology. When this name was chosen, I was unaware of the importance placed by the world anthropologies movement on the pluralization of anthropology. I now think that the section should have been called World Anthropologies, as it is under the editorship of my successor. Jim wrote an introductory essay about the world anthropology section in the December 2013 AA. The first full section appeared in the March 2013 issue with three essays by distinguished international scholars active in the world anthropologies movement. Veena Das and Shalini Randeria examined how anthropology in India had been shaped by the country’s colonial past and internal cultural diversity. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro discussed how Brazilian anthropology has become an amalgam of the global and the local. Ulf Hannerz, a Swedish anthropologist, wrote about how his later research had been influenced by his graduate training and initial fieldwork in the United States.11 World Anthropology at first appeared in every other issue, alternating with Public Anthropology. The section appeared more frequently after Jim Weil stepped down as editor in the fall of 2014. His replacement was Virginia Dominguez, whose extensive international contacts enabled her to assemble more material than could fit easily into a twice a year section. A world anthropology section appeared in each of the last six issues of my editorship. After Virginia Dominguez became editor, most pieces in the world anthropology section were accompanied by comments from two to five international scholars. Many essays focused on anthropology in different countries and regions such as Argentina, East Asia, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, South Africa, Vietnam, and western Andalucı´a. Other contributions to the section included interviews with anthropologists from France, Iran, Korea, Nigeria, and Singapore; a discussion of Francophone anthropologies; a question-and-answer session with four forensic anthropologists; and a roundtable on tensions between “world anthropology” and “world anthropologies.”12 The creation of the world anthropology section was the most significant innovation of my editorship. My worries at the outset turned out to be

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unfounded. Jim and Virginia were excellent editors of pieces by nonnative English speakers; Emily Metzner, the World Anthropology editorial assistant for Virginia, also provided considerable help with this task. The material in the section rarely overlapped with that found in other parts of the journal. While many pieces did point out the hegemony of Western institutions in anthropology, authors for the most part avoided the kinds of polemic language I had worried about. Nevertheless, interviews in the world anthropology section in the March 2015 AA were the focus of the most serious criticism of the journal during my editorship. As part of the section’s series about anthropology in different countries, Dominguez interviewed nine past presidents of the Israel Anthropology Association.13 She asked them to respond to three questions: (1) What kind of work do you associate with Israeli anthropology? (2) What do you find most challenging in Israeli anthropology or as an anthropologist in Israel? and (3) What do you find most praiseworthy and productive in the practice of anthropology in Israel? When the section including these interviews was published in the March 2015 AA, members of the AAA were voting on a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions because of their government’s actions with respect to Palestinians living both within and outside of the disputed borders of the country. Six of the nine past presidents responded to the second question by mentioning difficulties that would be caused if the boycott resolution passed. Several emphasized that they were opposed to both the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestinian territory and the proposed boycott.14 In May 2016, Nadia Abu El-Haj, a professor at Barnard College, sent an email to AAA president Alisse Waterston and me protesting the content and timing of these interviews. She began quietly, noting that the past presidents were a skewed sample of the Israeli anthropological community. They did not, she said, represent those anthropologists in Israel most likely to support the boycott call. The rest of the email was angrier. El-Haj asserted that running the interviews at this time was an unethical abuse of power. She asked the journal to publish responses on its (nonexistent) webpage. I was taken aback by this attack on our integrity. I thought it would be totally inappropriate for AA to have an official position on the boycott or any other AAA resolution that members voted on. When the interviews had been carried out months earlier, neither Dominguez nor I had thought about the timing of their appearance in AA and the AAA vote on the boycott resolution.

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In any case, there was material in the March issue that might arguably have influenced people to vote in favor of the boycott. The issue included Bardi’s (2016) essay on the architectural cleansing of Palestine and a research article by Erica Weiss (2016), an anthropologist at Tel Aviv University, entitled “Incentivized Obedience: How a Gentler Israeli Military Prevents Organized Resistance.” Weiss makes clear in the article her sympathy for those opposing certain policies of the Israeli government. Furthermore, in the past year, AA had run several film reviews and a public anthropology year-in-review essay negatively portraying the Israeli actions that the boycott resolution condemned. The situation was complicated by the entangled personal and intellectual histories of Virginia Dominguez and Nadia El-Haj. Dominguez, a Cuban American who is not Jewish, had published a book (Dominguez 1989) based on research in Israel and taught for a year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. El-Haj, daughter of a Palestinian American father and an “Anglo” mother, wrote her doctoral thesis at Duke University under Dominguez’s supervision about ways in which archaeology in Israel had been used in the creation of the country’s historical imagination. The thesis was revised into a book (El-Haj 2001) that won an award from the Middle East Studies Association. After teaching at the University of Chicago and having a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, El-Haj took a position as an assistant professor at Barnard. In April 2006, she filed for tenure. Because El-Haj’s scholarship was greatly respected within anthropology and Middle East studies, her colleagues in the anthropology departments at Barnard and Columbia (where she had a joint appointment) thought that the tenure case would be unproblematic. The case became controversial, however, when some Barnard alumnae and others active in pro-Israel causes mounted a campaign in opposition to El-Haj’s potential tenure. The situation was so explosive that it became the subject of a lengthy article in the New Yorker (Billout 2008) that unequivocally supported El-Haj. Dominguez was one of the many scholars quoted in the piece about the merits of El-Haj’s research. I had read the New Yorker article when it came out and shared the opinion of most anthropologists that the campaign against El-Haj’s tenuring had been unscholarly, politically motivated, and unfair. When she ultimately was tenured, I was pleased. I was therefore not happy about having to respond to an anthropologist who had been the subject of such a defamatory campaign.

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Dominguez, of course, was even more upset than I was because of her longstanding relationship with El-Haj. Dominguez responded to El-Haj’s email by emphasizing that she had been trying without success to get Palestinian anthropologists to respond to a similar set of questions. I also briefly responded, noting that the world anthropology section was more or less autonomous and that AA had published numerous pieces sympathetic to the situations of Palestinians. Neither Dominguez nor I remembered to mention that AA did not have a website on which responses could be published. I later wrote to El-Haj, suggesting that she might publish her piece online in Anthropology News, which had a rapid turnaround time. I also offered her the opportunity to present her views in the December 2016 AA, observing that this might be moot because the vote would be over by then. I said that I would ask Dominguez if she would like to make a response and added that I would probably also write a short, studiously neutral note. El-Haj ultimately decided to send an open letter, coauthored with Susan Slyomovics, to Anthropology News that was somewhat milder in content and tone than the email she had sent to Alisse Waterston and me. The letter included the following: If the American Anthropologist had wanted to stay neutral on the boycott vote there were other choices the editors could have made. Most obviously . . . they should not have published this collection of essays, at least not in its current form and certainly not at this moment in time. At the very least, once these essays were received, they should have been edited to delete all references to the boycott which was not part of the remit of a scholarly assessment of the field. But the AA took neither of these two simple, obvious steps. (El-Haj and Slyomovics 2016:e39) An editor of Anthropology News contacted me on a Friday afternoon, asking for a response by Monday. My weekend was spent frantically writing multiple drafts of the response, incorporating helpful suggestions from friends. I attempted to be as straightforward and tactful as possible without making any concessions to what I regarded as unjustified criticisms. Here are some excerpts from what was published: Although I am ultimately responsible for what appears in AA, the various sections in the journal . . . are for all practical purposes

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autonomous. When Professor Dominguez suggested a section on Israeli anthropology more than a year ago, I agreed, just as I would have agreed to a proposal to have a section on anthropology from any other part of the world. Material about anthropology in particular places has been presented in diverse formats in the world anthropology section and elsewhere in the journal. The section editors and I have never suggested that the views of authors, interviewers, and interviewees represent those of all (or even most) anthropologists from the region. In this particular case, Professor Dominguez chose to interview expresidents of the Israel Anthropology Association. In response to generally phrased questions about the state of Israeli anthropology today, it is not surprising that some of them expressed their views on the proposed boycott. I have never postponed the appearance of a piece in AA because of its timing with respect to AAA business. The inclusion of the Israeli interviews and the pieces by Bardi and Weiss is consistent with this editorial policy. (El-Haj and Slyomovics 2016:e40–e41) Dominguez’s response included the following: [The] WA [World Anthropology] section often deals with power and politics on a global scale. Authors and interviewees often voice strong views on the politics of knowledge, employment in the academy, funding structures and research constraints, and language hegemonies. While many articles in WA take political positions, the AA has never endorsed these positions and should not be expected to. In fact, to assume that a journal like the AA endorses every view, or position, that its authors express would be to stifle the potential breadth of its content. (El-Haj and Slyomovics 2016:e41) The online version of Anthropology News allows readers to provide comments on articles, and I braced myself for a slew of irate criticisms of our responses. Once again, my worries were unfounded. There were only three comments, all mildly worded. Perhaps our response had succeeded in defusing criticism. Because the boycott resolution had received overwhelming support at the business meeting at the AAA convention in 2014, I expected it to pass

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easily. To my considerable surprise, the resolution was narrowly defeated. I doubt that the defeat can in any way be attributed to the interviews in the world anthropology section. I am sure that El-Haj would disagree. When Tom Boellstorff instituted year-in-review essays in archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, public anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology, he wrote that authors “had near-total latitude to shape the articles as they wished” (Boellstorff 2009b:132). He went on to say that “the goal was . . . not an encyclopedic compendium, but, rather, an analysis of some key themes and debates.” The associate editors were responsible for selecting authors and working with them as they developed their essays. My role was usually minimal, consisting of making a few minor editorial suggestions. Because of time constraints, essays ordinarily focused on publications appearing in the last quarter of one year and the first three quarters of the next year. I admired and respected the willingness of the authors of these reviews to take on what must have been a daunting assignment. Thousands of anthropological publications appear every year in books, journals, blogs, newspaper reports, and other venues. The authors of the reviews had to sift through a large volume of these materials in a relatively short time and organize their essays in a coherent fashion around themes of their choosing. The essays were affected by authors’ access to different types of publications. Articles in major journals are easier than books to find and examine; English-language publications are more accessible to Anglophone authors than those written in other languages. The reviews thus provided only a partial glimpse of anthropological work in any particular year. They could at best be regarded as useful summaries of some but far from all important trends in different subfields. The reviews ran smoothly during my first two years. My only work on them was to suggest that authors remove some subdiscipline-specific jargon. The reviews were intended to be useful not only to readers in the subfield covered by the authors but also to readers from other subfields curious about recent developments in areas of anthropology other than their own. Although my invitation letter to authors noted that “it is important to write in lucid prose avoiding language that would be difficult to understand for non-specialists,” even near-final drafts of essays often included passages that I thought might be difficult for many of our readers. Because I looked at the drafts of the year-in-review essays only after they were just about ready to be sent to Mayumi, I made fewer suggestions about cutting out jargon than I would have liked.

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In 2015, we were unable to publish two year-in-review essays as planned in the June issue. One author was very slow and did not turn in a rough first draft until early January. Another author submitted an essay that in my view was overly polemical. The authors eventually wrote good essays, and we were able to publish them in September. A third essay, which appeared in the June issue, was problematic in a different way. The author did not provide a draft to the associate editor until mid-January. The essay he sent in was well written and publishable but only half the length we had requested. After discussing these problems with the associate editors, we established procedures that made timely publication more likely. Four excellent reviews appeared in the June 2016 issue. The review of public anthropology, one of the best that we published during my editorship in any subfield, was deferred until September. When David Griffith, the associate editor for Public Anthropology, was unable to find someone willing to write a review, I asked Angelique Haugerud, who had recently finished a stint as editor of American Ethnologist, to suggest possible authors. Angelique replied that she would be happy to write a review providing that her piece be peer reviewed. (Kathryn Woolard, the associate editor for Linguistic Anthropology, had regularly sought peer reviews for year-in-review pieces, but we had not done this in the other subfields.) Because of the delays in finding someone to write the public anthropology piece, I knew that peer reviewing would make it impossible for Angelique’s essay to appear in June. We therefore agreed from the outset that her essay would appear in September.15 All in all, I was pleased with the year-in-review essays published during my editorship. Because the topics emphasized changed annually, the essays over four years provided fairly comprehensive reviews of the different subfields. I had less to do with obituaries than any other part of the journal. The obituary section had been edited since 2002 by Sydel Silverman, a prominent anthropologist who had been president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation from 1987 to 1999. Sydel had the unenviable task of deciding which recently deceased anthropologists should be given obituaries in AA. This was not easy because we ran on average only about ten obituaries each year. Sydel selected the obituary writers and edited the sometimes lengthy essays. She submitted the obituaries directly to Mayumi, simultaneously sending them to me. I never suggested changes. The obituaries were one of my favorite sections of the journal. I enjoyed reading about the lives and scholarly accomplishments of the noted anthropologists profiled. The obituaries were all well written; most were candid

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about the sometimes idiosyncratic personalities of the deceased. I was especially intrigued by the diverse pathways people had taken before going into anthropology. Many famous anthropologists seemed to have almost accidentally stumbled into the field after exploring other career possibilities.

Irregular Features Under Tom Boellstorff’s editorship, contributors to vital topics forums were given a prompt of about 500 words to stimulate comments, which were limited to 750 words. In his letter to contributors to the first of these forums, Tom said that the idea was “to foster dialogue and engage our readership . . . to better appreciate the relevance of anthropological perspectives to significant topics of our time.” A secondary goal was to encourage more participation in AA by established anthropologists. Not long after beginning at AA, I sent an email to the editorial board seeking suggestions about possible topics for vital topics forums. The email mentioned that I wanted to open this up a bit beyond the big-picture forums that had been previously published. I did not ask for prompts, thinking that guest editors could explain in introductions what the forums were about. My request resulted in two vital topics forums edited by board members. Ed Liebow edited a forum in the December 2013 issue called “On Evidence and the Public Interest.”16 Arlene Da´vila’s forum in the March 2014 AA was “On Latin@s and the Immigration Debate.”17 Despite making numerous subsequent requests to editorial board members, I received no further useful suggestions. I was nonetheless able to publish two additional forums during my editorship. Graham Jones, an anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, emailed me a proposal for a forum on anthropology and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). I was intrigued by this suggestion because MOOCs had been much in the news but wondered about their anthropological relevance. After Jones sent me a proposal that mentioned potential contributors and assuaged my concerns about connections to anthropology, I asked him to proceed. “Anthropology in and of MOOCs” appeared in the December 2014 issue. The forum included essays on online education in Ghana and Mongolia, descriptions of massive online anthropology courses, and ethnographic reflections on how learning takes place (or does not take place) in MOOCs.18

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I solicited my last forum because of my desire to increase the presence of biological anthropology in the journal. I asked Andrew Kitchen, my colleague at Iowa, if he would be willing to edit a forum that included accessible essays introducing a general anthropological audience to issues in genetic anthropology. The recent work of Drew and other genetic anthropologists has been made possible by technological developments that allow the rapid collection and analysis of relevant data. The forum appeared in the December 2015 AA. Essays examined problems in attributing health outcomes in different groups to racial differences, the epigenetic effects of stress on mothers and infants, evolutionary effects of changes in human microbiomes, primate conservation, engaging American Indians in genetic research, and presenting the results of anthropological genetic research on social media.19 I very much liked the vital topics forums. I thought that they were an important part of my efforts to provide magazinelike features differing from the content of most academic journals. Another way in which I attempted to make AA more magazinelike was to include interviews with distinguished anthropologists. Like obituaries, interviews provide important information about how the life histories and social networks of anthropologists influence their theoretical perspectives, research sites, and topical expertise. My initial impetus for publishing interviews was a suggestion from Jonathan Thomas, an advanced graduate student in my department, that we interview Sidney Mintz. Sid was well known in the general public for his writings on food and within anthropology for his biography of a Puerto Rican cane worker and important books and articles on Caribbean anthropology, markets, and trade. He was a wonderful lecturer and raconteur who had given popular introductory anthropology courses at Yale and Johns Hopkins. Because Sid was in his early nineties, it seemed that any interview we did should take place soon. While I was considering the possibility of interviewing Sid, the thought occurred to me that it would be good to have other interviews in AA. Five members of the editorial board agreed to serve on a committee to solicit interviews. Lynn Morgan, a committee member, quickly arranged and carried out an interview with the feminist archaeologist Meg Conkey that appeared in the December 2013 AA. The only other interview that resulted from the committee was with Ire`ne Bellier, a French anthropologist who has conducted research in the Peruvian Amazon and in elite European institutions. This interview required so much editing that I doubted for

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some time that it would ever get published. When Virginia Dominguez took over the world anthropology section, she was able to get the interview into publishable form with considerable help from the interviewer Susana Narotzky; another anthropologist, Margaret Buckner; and the section editorial assistant Emily Metzner. The interview appeared in the world anthropology section in the September 2015 issue.20 AA provided funds for Jonathan Thomas to travel to Baltimore to interview Sid Mintz. When Jonathan returned, he prepared a seventy-page transcription of his conversations with Sid. After handing this lengthy document to me, Jonathan understandably wanted to get back to dissertation writing. It took me two months and seven drafts to shorten the interview, eliminate repetition, arrange material into sections, and otherwise edit the transcript. I sent the resulting manuscript to Sid, who asked to make additional changes. Sid wanted to omit a section on his thoughts about contemporary anthropology, which he regarded as less than insightful. He also wanted more in the interview about his role in creating the African American studies program in Yale in 1971 and his experiences teaching introductory anthropology. Sid wrote up some questions and responses for this section. Although I wondered what this meant for the piece’s status as an “interview,” I concluded that it would be appropriate if regarded as a “conversation.” The resulting interview, which appeared in the September 2014 issue, was one of my favorite pieces published during my editorship. Sid’s lively, entertaining, intellectually provocative personality came through in his accounts of important historical events in anthropology and descriptions of famous anthropologists. I am glad that we were able to publish the interview before Sid passed away in December 2015.21 Despite the relative inactivity of the committee I had formed, numerous short interviews appeared in AA during my editorship in the world, visual, and public anthropology sections. I appreciated the hard work that I knew must have been done by the interviewers and editors. AA and other journals have for many years published revised versions of talks given by prominent anthropologists. Most of these have been presidential addresses and other distinguished lectures at the annual meeting of the AAA. I have mixed feelings about the publication of these talks. Many are scholarly and clearly worthy of publication. Others are less noteworthy. Some presenters seem to regard these talks as opportunities to make unsupported, uninteresting generalizations and uncontroversial—within a mostly

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likeminded audience—political remarks. Editors often felt obligated to publish these talks regardless of their scholarly merits. Because of my ambivalence about distinguished lectures, I did not actively solicit them for publication. I was willing, however, to consider publishing them if speakers contacted me about the possibility. Two former presidents of the AAA eventually wrote me about their addresses. Luckily, both were well written, scholarly, and about topics of interest to many of our readers. Alan Goodman’s address, given in 2007, was called “Bringing Culture into Human Biology and Biology Back into Anthropology.” Because I wanted to encourage biological anthropology in the journal, I was enthusiastic about the chance to publish his talk. After Alan made minor revisions in response to comments by Rachel Caspari and me, we were able to publish the address in the September 2013 issue. Leith Mullings’s 2013 presidential address, “Anthropology Matters,” focused on anthropological research in the United States in the context of various social movements. I made a few suggestions to Leith about how the manuscript might be revised. Her address came out in the March 2015 AA.22 The other distinguished lecture published during my editorship was given by Susan Pollock to the AAA archaeological division at the 2015 meetings of the association. She discussed how archaeologists can examine suffering, using examples from projects her research teams had carried out in Germany at the sites of former Nazi forced labor camps. Because this important topic would clearly be of interest to both archaeologists and sociocultural anthropologists, I was glad to have the opportunity to publish the talk. I decided, however, that it should undergo the normal review process for research articles and sent the manuscript to four archaeologists for comments. “The Subject of Suffering” appeared in my final issue in December 2016.23 Over the years, AA has on and off had a section called by names such as discussion and debate that consists of exchanges between anthropologists. Most of these exchanges have been about AA articles and book reviews, but some have discussed other matters. While these exchanges could be petty and mean, I thought that for the most part they were interesting and enhanced the magazinelike qualities of the journal. The discussion and debate section had been discontinued in the recent past. I decided to revive the section, writing in my initial from-the-editor column that “I . . . welcome short commentaries . . . about articles in the

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journal or other issues of anthropological interest. Comments about articles should be restricted to pieces published in the previous year. When appropriate, they will be accompanied by responses by authors.” In an effort to present an example of an exchange, I asked Francesca Merlan, an editorial board member, if she would like to respond to critical comments about her ideas made by Frances and Howard Morphy in an article published in the June 2013 AA. Merlan has employed a concept she calls the intercultural to describe certain relationships between indigenous Australians and descendants of settlers in Australia. The Morphys contend that this concept does not attribute sufficient autonomy to indigenous peoples and their ways of being. Merlan agreed to write a commentary; the Morphys were willing to provide a response. Although I thought the exchange was exemplary, it did not inspire any further commentaries.24 I did receive four informally written emails harshly criticizing the contents of certain research articles. I responded to these emails by saying that I would consider publishing a commentary that used more moderate language and presented material in a scholarly way. If I decided to publish such a commentary, I would give the criticized author an opportunity to respond. Only one of my correspondents took me up on my offer. In 2013, I received an email from James Calcagno critical of our publication of Alan Goodman’s presidential address advocating that anthropologists place increased emphasis on interactions between culture and biology. Calcagno said that similar ideas had long been around and that he had guest-edited a section in AA in 2003 focusing on how anthropologists in the past and present had examined biology-culture interactions. Calcagno eventually wrote a commentary that I was willing to publish even though I continued to think that some of his rhetoric was overblown. Goodman wrote a measured response, and the exchange was published in the June 2014 AA.25 The only two other commentaries that appeared during my editorship were not exchanges. After the acceptance of two research articles about controversies related to genetics and race in Brazil, I decided to explore the possibility of creating a special section with comments on the articles. Sections of related articles accompanied by commentaries had been a regular feature of AA for many years. Even though I realized that such special sections—called In Focus in recent years—were attractive to some readers and could be easily publicized by Wiley-Blackwell, I was not enthusiastic about them. The inclusion of such sections in AA meant less space in the journal for other papers. I also did not think that manuscripts for

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special sections should be peer reviewed as a group because this might result in them being assessed less rigorously than other submissions of potential research articles. I therefore adopted Tom Boellstorff’s policy of having manuscripts for proposed special sections reviewed like any other submission. Reviewers were not told that such manuscripts were part of proposed special sections. If two or more of these manuscripts were accepted, we would publish an In Focus section and someone—ordinarily the proposer of the section—would be asked to provide introductory comments. Although Tom was able to publish several In Focus sections, I found that this method of assessing manuscripts made them difficult to pull off. The selectivity of AA meant that most manuscripts proposed for special sections would probably be rejected. Even those manuscripts that made their way through the review process were likely to follow different pathways, resulting in articles accepted many months apart. For these reasons, I discouraged anthropologists who made inquiries about proposed special sections, suggesting that they might be better placed in other journals. The two attempts to create special sections during my editorship did not work out. Every manuscript for one proposed section was turned down; only one was accepted for the other. Both articles about race and genetics had three coauthors.26 Although the authors had not suggested that their articles be published together in an In Focus section, they were enthusiastic when I suggested the idea. I was able to find the distinguished Brazilian scholar Lilia Moritz Schwarcz to write an introduction and the well-known biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks to provide comments about anthropology and genetics. The In Focus section, the only one under my editorship, appeared in the December 2014 issue.27 Although I was pleased to publish these commentaries, my attempt to create a more-or-less regular discussion and debate section was a neartotal failure. Perhaps anthropologists nowadays are less willingly to publicly criticize their colleagues than they were in the past. Wiley-Blackwell encourages the publication of what it calls virtual issues. These are unedited, online-only collections of articles from a journal about a particular topic, usually accompanied by a brief introduction. Virtual issues are inexpensive to produce, easily publicized, and likely to attract readers interested in the topics covered. Most virtual issues from AAAsponsored journals have been short, consisting of ten to fifteen articles. The only AA virtual issue prior to my becoming editor was an exception. Tom

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Boellstorff’s virtual issue on “The Anthropology of Language” had links to eighty-four articles.28 My repeated efforts to induce editorial board members to create virtual issues met with limited success. Although four members agreed to do this, only two came through in the end. Perhaps it is relevant that the board members who produced virtual issues had both been editors of major journals and were aided by research assistants. Virginia Dominguez, a former editor of American Ethnologist, compiled “Violence: Anthropologists Engage Violence 1980–2012.” Ben Orlove, a former editor of Current Anthropology, coedited a virtual issue with Mattias Borg Rasmussen entitled “Anthropologists Exploring Water in Social and Cultural Life.” These issues followed Tom Boellstorff’s model with respect to length. The virtual issue on violence had an introduction, links to fifty-eight articles, and an appendix listing numerous book reviews; the issue on water had an introduction and links to sixty-nine articles.29 When I put together my own virtual issue on economic anthropology without research assistance, I understood why editorial board members had been reluctant to take on this task. It would not have been hard to produce an issue on this topic with links to a few relevant articles. But I found more than two hundred articles that I wanted to include. It took quite a bit of time to find these articles, organize them into sections, and write an introduction summarizing the contents of the issue. When I contacted Wiley-Blackwell about what I had done, a staff member told me that he preferred that the issue provide links to no more than fifty articles. I did this, adding to the introduction a bibliography organized by topic that included both the articles with links and those I had been unable to include in the virtual issue.30 Although I like the idea of virtual issues, they are not all that visible and perhaps not all that permanent. AA virtual issues are not listed by title on AnthroSource. To learn what topics are covered, you have to click on a link in a small font that says simply “virtual issues.” Furthermore, the section on book reviews in the virtual issue on violence had disappeared when I tried to look for it in June 2017. I wonder if these virtual issues will be findable two decades from now. AA’s inclusion of both highly structured, peer-reviewed research articles and loosely structured non-peer-reviewed sections seems to me to work well for a general journal intended to appeal to a wide audience. Because the peer-reviewed articles are of the most interest to specialists in particular

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topics and geographic areas, some readers may not look at any of them in a particular issue. The accessible essays and reviews in other parts of the journal, however, ensure that just about any anthropologist who examines an issue will find something worth reading. As AA editor, I appreciated the opportunity to provide the AAA membership with so many well-crafted articles, essays, and reviews. I accepted the occasional controversies associated with material appearing in the nonpeer-reviewed sections as an inevitable consequence of having so many contributions to the journal. However, the publication of all this material led to an unwanted, unanticipated problem. Wiley-Blackwell and the AAA place great emphasis on the impact factor, a measure of how often a journal’s articles are cited. The calculation of AA’s impact factor includes some seldom-cited non-peer-reviewed material. I discuss the effects on AA of this and other manifestations of what has been called the audit culture in the next chapter.

Chapter 7

The Bottom Line Matters AA as a Business

Journals publishing is big business. (Phillips 2014:139)

I did not think much about the economics of AA when applying for the editorship of the journal. Because I knew that AA made money for the AAA, I assumed that my principal responsibilities would be to provide good content and make sure that the journal came out on schedule. Although this assumption was right, I spent a lot of time dealing with matters related to AA’s bottom line. The reason why economics loomed so large in my work had to do with how the AAA’s publishing program is funded. The association’s journals are primarily paid for by membership dues and the revenue-sharing arrangement with Wiley-Blackwell. The only two publications that provide significant profits are American Anthropologist and American Ethnologist, with AA accounting for about three-quarters of the revenue from the agreement with the publisher. This means that the AAA depends heavily on income from AA to support most of its other journals. Reductions in library support for journal subscriptions between 2008 and 2011 made AAA staff concerned about the sustainability of the association’s publishing program. In 2012, the association hired the consulting firm Raym Crow to analyze the financial situation of its journals. After receiving a less than rosy report, the AAA decided to carry out a review of every journal in the association’s portfolio. As AA editor, I was an ex-officio

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member of the two committees in charge of the reviews and had the opportunity to observe their activities. During the committees’ brainstorming about the publishing program, ideas for radical restructuring were sometimes broached. One committee member, a self-described cyberlibrarian, urged that money could be saved by having journal editors be responsible for copy editing and merging the various publications into a single megajournal. Although I found even the mention of such ideas alarming, I was glad to see that they gained no traction. Two more plausible themes instead pervaded discussions—making the journals primarily or entirely digital and cutting the costs of editorial offices. The economics of publishing influenced discussions of access to AAA journals. Only association members and individuals affiliated with institutional libraries with AAA journal subscriptions have free access to most content of issues published within the previous thirty-five years.1 Many AAA members opposed charging other readers for access to articles. But it was unclear—to say the least—how the AAA publishing program could provide free access and remain financially stable.

The Economics of AA The finances associated with producing AA during my tenure as editor were complex, involving many people, organizations, and funding sources. Although I received no salary, my university provided course relief, an office, and access to a copy machine. Our managing editor was paid for by the AAA; funding for our editorial assistant was split between my university and the association. The AAA in addition provided small amounts of money to the editorial staff for travel and supplies. Wiley-Blackwell was responsible for the production and distribution of AA, minor copy editing, and some proofreading. The publisher also carried out a host of other AArelated functions such as maintaining a website for the journal, obtaining permissions from authors, providing publicity, giving technical support to our managing editor and editorial assistant, and providing access to our manuscript control system. AA and many other scholarly journals depend heavily on unpaid labor. Aside from my own work, such labor came from the editorial board as well as the editors of the book review and obituary sections, manuscript reviewers, and members of the world, visual, and public anthropology teams.

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Most important, it came from authors. If this work had been paid at even the minimum wage, the journal would have been massively in the red. Income from library subscriptions and membership dues enabled AA to be a moneymaker and was doubtless a major reason why WileyBlackwell agreed to the revenue-sharing arrangement. Nonetheless, the AAA was strikingly tight-fisted in its allocation of even small amounts of money to the journal’s editorial office. The association hired our managing editor freelance without benefits at what I thought was a low salary. Mayumi’s pay remained virtually unchanged even as her workload increased when the number of pages in the journal rose from 723 in 2013 to 994 in 2016. The AAA refused to provide any funds for a book review office and unsuccessfully tried to convince me to permit the use of lower-quality paper in our print edition. Staff members complained about the approximately $3,500 per year paid annually for the translation of Spanish abstracts of research articles mandated by the AAA executive board. These strict economies—in my view unnecessarily penny-pinching— were likely in part the result of earlier problems with AAA finances when the association’s journals were published by the University of California Press. Although the revenue-sharing agreement with Wiley-Blackwell had allowed sections with journals to emerge from their financial holes, the AAA was unsure if it would be able to obtain such a favorable profit-sharing arrangement with a publisher after the end of the contract. Moreover, the Raym Crow report predicted that even under the terms of the current Wiley-Blackwell agreement, the publishing program would become unsustainable in a few years. When the Raym Crow report came out, my initial reaction was that it was unduly pessimistic about future trends in library subscriptions. The report assumed that the annual drop in subscriptions between 2008 and 2011 would continue at more or less the same rate. I thought that this assumption was wrong. It is a common mistake of modelers to assume that the future will resemble the past, especially in the case of linear predictions such as the one Raym Crow made about subscriptions (Silver 2012:212– 216). The worldwide economic depression was receding. Libraries from well-off institutions were likely to retain subscriptions to AAA journals no matter what economic conditions would be in the future. At least for AA I was right. The income that the journal brought in from libraries did not change much during my editorship, primarily because of an increase in subscriptions from institutions outside the United States.

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The AAA staff nonetheless continued to expect the worst. A memo sent by Oona Schmid to members of the Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing in 2013 reflected the extent of pessimism at AAA and the association’s reliance on the Raym Crow report. After noting drops in library subscriptions and increased costs for AAA journals, Oona characterized the Crow report as “very troubling.” She mentioned the report’s prediction that the journal program would have no surplus by 2016. Oona went on to say that this was significant because the surplus was needed to help pay for the publishing staff and Anthropology News. The AAA’s worries about sustainability led the association to focus on cutting editorial costs. You might assume that the editorial office of AA would be less subject to this emphasis than other AAA publications because of the journal’s flagship status, profitability, and large numbers of library subscriptions and article downloads. This was not the case. AA’s expenditures were monitored more closely by the AAA than those of the sectionaffiliated journals, whose budgets were only indirectly overseen by the association. The sections could allocate their money from the revenue-sharing agreement to their journals in whatever ways their officers and editors deemed appropriate.

Reviews and Metrics The AAA’s concern about the economics of its publication program was the major impetus for its periodic reviews of journals. Although the various assessments emphasized finances, considerable attention was also given to measures of usage and quality. AAA members often worried that these assessments were preludes to the possible elimination or consolidation of certain journals. The first assessment that affected my work as editor was a 2012 benchmarking memo. This report, distributed to the leaders of the various AAA sections, included a color-coded chart evaluating AAA journals according to the following metrics: submissions per year, acceptance rate, downloads, cost per accepted article, net contribution to the profit share, and timeliness of publication. A color code of green meant “good compared to the portfolio as a whole,” yellow “troubling,” and red “serious jeopardy.” The codes for AA seemed at first glance to be good, with greens in all categories except for submissions, rated as yellow. In another section of the report, however, AA was described as one of three publications that “have

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historically been strong” but “whose numbers indicate they are faltering.” I was puzzled and could only assume that the comment was related to the number of submissions. I had no idea why this figure, which had risen substantially during Tom Boellstorff’s editorship (the period under consideration in the memo), was regarded as “troubling.” Furthermore, American Ethnologist, which received more submissions of potential research articles than AA, was also mysteriously rated as yellow.2 I asked the AAA staff about the yellow rating. Ed Liebow, who had recently become executive director of the association, replied that AA had not received “full credit” because the American Sociological Association’s flagship journal American Sociological Review received almost three times as many new article submissions each year. This seemed to me to be an apples and oranges comparison. Because there are many more sociologists than anthropologists in the world, American Sociological Review has a larger pool of potential authors than AA and American Ethnologist. Anthropology in the United States is a more diverse field than sociology, leading to different views in the two fields about the importance of the flagship journal. Just about all the members of the American Sociological Association are likely to regard the American Sociological Review as a prestigious venue for their work. However, many archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and linguistic anthropologists value publication in their subfield journals more highly than publication in AA. I realized that my complaint was in some ways pointless and might be regarded as whining. No AAA-sponsored journal had received overall ratings higher than AA; only American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology had received ratings as good. Furthermore, the comment about AA faltering was made in the context of possibly providing more resources for the journal. Nonetheless, I worried that the color-coded chart was evidence of an audit culture at the AAA that might lead to more reviews and assessments that I would have to deal with. The term audit culture had recently been coined by sociologists and anthropologists to describe the use of principles from financial audits in different contexts to provide measures of productivity and efficiency. Audit societies create elaborate policing methods for subjecting performance to the gaze of external experts and establish rules stipulating that every aspect of work must be ranked and assessed against bureaucratic benchmarks and economic targets (Shore 2008:281). The audit culture had become increasingly prevalent in academia, as I knew from painful experiences as chair of the anthropology department at the University of Iowa. For example, administrators at the university compared

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the time to the doctoral degree of graduate programs such as history and education even though they had vastly different requirements. Such sloppy comparisons played an important role in how the powers-that-be allocated resources and led departments to revise their programs for reasons unrelated to scholarly concerns. My department, perhaps imitating the game playing of other departments, no longer counted the time between when students entered our program with a bachelor’s degree and when they received a PhD. Instead, we counted only the time between the completion of the master’s degree and the awarding of the doctorate. (The justification was that we did not admit people to the PhD program without an MA degree.) This made it look as if we had somehow instituted programmatic changes that reduced our time to degree by two years. Perhaps the AAA was also becoming infected with this obsession with benchmarks and metrics. My fears were justified. In 2013, the AAA wrote a “strategic implementation plan” (the association resembles many other organizations in its extensive use of bureaucratic language) that included the following: “The Editor-in Chief of the AA will report by Spring 2014 to the Executive Board the average time from submission to notification and publication, and establish a recommended timeline for timely publication. . . . The Editorin-Chief [of AA] will prepare an annual report to the EB (beginning Q1 2014) including an assessment of the journal’s impact using a variety of metrics (e.g., citation counts, impact factor, H-index, downloads). This report will include a description of the various metrics and a discussion of their limitations.” Despite the language about limitations, I knew that the AAA was placing increasing emphasis on metrics that attempted to describe the impact of its journals. The AAA website provided information about two such measures—the two-year impact factor and the H-index. I had recently been the chair of a subcommittee of the AAA’s Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing that was asked to provide metrics to be used in future evaluations of the AA editor-in-chief. Although all three members of our subcommittee were opposed to an overemphasis on metrics, we agreed to recommend that periodic assessments of the AA editor should be based in part on multiple qualitative and quantitative indices. We gave fifteen examples of such indices, warning that the interpretations of such measures needed to be placed in the context of interdisciplinary and subdisciplinary differences. We urged that such comparisons should be restricted to anthropology journals and that recognition be given that articles in biological

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anthropology are cited more often and more quickly than articles in other subfields. After receiving our brief report, Oona Schmid asked if we could provide a list of the top five indices that might be used. With some reluctance, we suggested acceptance rates, downloads, timeliness of publication, the five-year impact factor, and time between submission of manuscripts and initial decision letters. I decided that the best strategy for responding to the AAA’s request was to flood the association with information. I sent the executive board a seven-page, single-spaced report with seven tables. The report compared anthropology journals with respect to six measures of impact, gave detailed information about AA’s average time to publication, and provided data on acceptance rates and submissions in recent years. It also included, as requested, a discussion of the advantages and limitations of various measures of impact. I received no acknowledgment of my report and was not asked in subsequent years for similar information. I doubt that anyone read my report carefully. As far as I can tell, my response had no effect, except perhaps to deter requests for future data-heavy reports. In 2013, the AAA asked the leaders of sections to provide five-year plans for their journals with respect to four core publishing values: quality, breadth, accessibility, and sustainability. The committee responsible for assessing the plans was the Publication Oversight Working Group, whose members were drawn primarily from the Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing. Although I was an ex-officio member of both groups, my participation in their deliberations was for the most part limited to discussing matters relevant to AA. After lengthy discussions in email exchanges and conference calls, the Publication Oversight Working Group sent the following descriptions of core publishing values to every AAA member: Quality: The value of quality assures that the contents of journals will demonstrate the intellectual strengths of the field. . . . In addition, the value of quality addresses the production of journals, including such elements as well-executed, efficient peer review and copy-editing processes and attractive, time-sensitive publication. Breadth: Breadth has two major components. Breadth of content refers to the range of perspectives, topics, issues, theories and methods considered by a journal. . . . Breadth of audience makes work

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available to academics and scholars beyond the field of anthropology and promotes interaction among subfields of anthropology. Accessibility: The Association’s publications . . . should be discoverable and affordably available to authors, and the widest range of scholars, students, and the public. Sustainability: Sustainability refers to the publishing program’s ability to fund the distribution of anthropological knowledge in the foreseeable future and to keep past content widely available. These considerations entail close consideration of the fiscal health of the association and its sections. The leaders of each section with a journal were asked to provide metrics with respect to these values. In a list of frequently asked questions and answers distributed by the Publication Oversight Working Group, the statement was made that these metrics need not be numerical. Nonetheless, the committee’s deliberations usually emphasized quantitative measures. The FAQ memo was ambivalent about the relative importance of the value of sustainability: FAQ: Why is POWG [Publication Oversight Working Group] so focused on sustainability if all four values are equally important? Response: Our goal is to support conditions that avoid tradeoff across these values. Sustainability is POWG’s focus because that is the value most immediately affected by current conditions affecting learned societies, libraries, and the publishing industry. Sustainability is the condition of possibility for the relevance of the other values. The great majority of responses to the request for five-year plans were written by section leaders, sometimes in consultation with their journal’s editors. AA was an exception. Because the journal is not affiliated with a section, there was no obvious person to write a response. The task was given to Oona Schmid. I was not altogether comfortable with this. Because Oona is not an academic, I did not think she could easily respond to the scholarly aspects of the plan. I also saw a conflict of interest between Oona’s role as AAA director of publishing and her being the sole person writing the plan for AA. However, I had no idea who else could write the response.

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Oona’s report was not much related to anything I had done or would do. The data she presented on citations, downloads, and other indicators of journal usage almost entirely predated my assuming the editorship. Predictions of the future profitability of AA were based on the models in the 2012 Raym Crow report. Recommendations about the future of AA were aimed at my as-yet-unnamed successor. In certain respects, the assessment of the AA plan was a formality. The main point of the review was to aid in policymaking with respect to the many AAA-sponsored journals that lost money and published articles that were seldom downloaded and cited. The AAA was clearly going to continue to place a high priority on a publication that was a cash cow for the organization and had as many article downloads as all the other associationsponsored journals combined. Nevertheless, income from AA was crucial to the survival of the publishing program. Oona continued to rely heavily on the Raym Crow report in her assessment of AA’s finances. She wrote that the profit from AA could be expected to drop “from an actual 2012 surplus of $345,579 to a projected 2020 surplus of only $73,399” and that “while the title is sustainable for the period of time between 2016 and 2020 without changes, it may not be sustainable for many years beyond 2020 and the diversity of the whole portfolio [of AAA-sponsored journals] may be harmed unless AAA makes changes to the costs of the title.” Oona made two major suggestions for cost reduction starting in 2016—removing book reviews from the AA’s typeset pages and replacing ScholarOne with Open Journal Software as the journal’s manuscript control system. (Neither of these suggestions was implemented.) In other parts of the report, Oona recommended various minor practices, some of which we were already doing. The parts of Oona’s response that most caught my attention were comments in the section on quality: “In the period of 2016–2020 the AAA Executive Board needs to appoint and support dynamic editors to fully overcome a series of attenuated editorships between 1994 and 2007. These disruptions led to damaging declines in submissions, published articles, and citation rates. Editors should be expressly asked to help the AAA increase impact factors (citation rates) and increase submission of research articles.” Despite my objections, the response of the Publication Oversight Working Group to the AA plan emphasized these comments: Looking forward and building on the efforts of the current editor [me], we recommend [that the] editor-in-chief take additional steps

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to further increase submission rates and to work collectively to improve the journal’s impact factor (on the downturn since 2009). [While technically correct, this comment is misleading. The twoyear impact factor was 1.21 in 2008, 1.54 in 2009, 1.80 in 2010, 1.49 in 2011, and 1.40 in 2012. By 2015, the impact factor had rebounded to 1.725.] We recognize the limitations of this metric, but universities and libraries are attentive to it. POWG recognizes that AA is seeking a new editor-in-chief and we would recommend the incoming editor-in-chief be alerted to these vulnerabilities and provide assurances that they will be addressed as a priority for the health of AA as well as the portfolio. I cannot say for sure why Oona and the Publication Oversight Working Group were so concerned about submissions and the impact factor. My guess is that they thought that these metrics would influence the kinds of revenue-sharing arrangements that the AAA could obtain from future publishing partners. In any case, I was irked by the emphasis on these two measures. The journal was already highly selective. Submissions had remained more or less stable during my term, and I was unenthusiastic about adding to the editor-in-chief’s workload with increased numbers of manuscripts that would have to be rejected. My principal objection, however, was the continued stress on the two-year impact factor, which I thought was a flawed measure. I was so unhappy that I wrote a from-theeditor column in the March 2016 issue called “Assessing the Quality of Scholarly Journals.” Much of this essay was devoted to technical issues associated with the calculation of the two-year impact factor. Although I knew that many readers would not be interested in these details, I thought that such information was an essential part of my argument that the measure is flawed.3 The impact factor is the number of citations from a journal over a given period of time divided by the number of citable items published during this period. The AA’s 2014 two-year impact factor, for example, was the average number of citations per article in that year for pieces published in the journal in 2012 and 2013. The most commonly used journal impact factor is the two-year figure calculated by the commercial firm Thomson-Reuters. Although the calculation of impact factors might seem at first glance to be straightforward, there are a number of complications. Thomson-Reuters looks at citations from only those journals (not books) selected by the firm in a nontransparent process. For many journals, including AA, only a small

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fraction of the ultimate citations of an article appear within two years of publication. The average number of citations in a year can be greatly skewed by one or two highly cited articles. For AA, the most important complication is Thomson-Reuter’s somewhat arbitrary determination of citable items, the denominator in calculations of the impact factor. In its counts of citable items from AA, ThomsonReuters includes a significant number of pieces other than research articles and research reports (for example, essays in the vital topics forums and the world, visual, and public anthropology sections). This can be seen from an examination of AA publications from 2001 to 2011. Although 370 research articles were published during this period (there were no research reports), Thomson-Reuters recorded 588 citable items. As a group, the 218 additional pieces were not cited as much as the research articles. In my column, I showed that these technical issues as a whole reduced AA’s impact factor. I pointed out—for what seemed like the zillionth time—how differing citation practices among disciplines and anthropological subfields often led to misleading comparisons of journals. The essay also discussed the advantages and limitations of other measures of usage and quality. While the essay focused on the details of these metrics, my principal objection to the overdependence of AAA and Wiley-Blackwell on the twoyear impact factor was not technical. Although I have throughout my career advocated the use of quantification in anthropology, I think that the AAA, Wiley-Blackwell, and many other institutions overemphasize metrics when assessing the performance, impact, and prestige of journals. I spent too much time responding to concerns by the AAA and Wiley-Blackwell about a few metrics only tangentially related to my editorial goals. Perhaps to the disappointment of staff at Wiley-Blackwell and the AAA, their prodding about metrics rarely influenced decisions I made about the content of the journal.

Changes in the Production of AA The AAA, Wiley-Blackwell, and I wanted to do whatever we could to improve the timeliness of article publication. It was important from a scholarly perspective to get research results out as soon as possible. Shortening publication time might also lead to increases in downloads, subscriptions, and profits by making AA more attractive to readers. In response to the request from the AAA for information about time to publication in AA,

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I examined both manuscripts that were submitted as potential research articles in 2013 and articles that had been published in the journal that year. Most published manuscripts received one revise and resubmit decision; a few received two. Time spent on authors’ revisions and peer reviews of resubmitted manuscripts meant that the average time to acceptance was almost always considerably greater than the average of seven weeks to initial decision.4 For research articles appearing in AA, the average time between initial submission and acceptance with minor revisions was seven months. Another two months elapsed on average between acceptance with minor revisions and unconditional acceptance. The time between initial submission and online publication for research articles appearing in the 2013 AA averaged eighteen months. I did not think we could do much to shorten the period between the initial submission of a manuscript and its unconditional acceptance. The period between unconditional acceptance and online publication, however, could quite possibly be reduced from the average of nine months for research articles appearing in AA in 2013. In many fields, especially in the hard sciences, great emphasis is placed on the timeliness of publication of research results. Journals in these fields often put accepted articles online as soon as possible after copy editing. Wiley-Blackwell therefore suggested that AA institute an Early View system of online publication of pieces in the journal before issues came out. I was pleased to do this, and Early View was inaugurated in 2014. Unfortunately, this did not lead to much of a change in the timeliness of publication; most pieces appeared on Early View only a month or so prior to the appearance of an issue. The major reason why Early View had little effect on production time was the workload of our managing editor. Mayumi’s meticulous editing and proofing took more time each year as the annual number of pages increased. I mildly suggested at one point that the AAA consider hiring a part-time copy editor and proofreader to help Mayumi but received no response from the association. Wiley-Blackwell was more proactive, saying that we could publish on Early View more quickly if Mayumi relinquished some of her proofreading tasks. Mayumi was proofreading pieces both before they were sent to the publisher and after they had received additional formatting and proofing from staff at Wiley-Blackwell. Mayumi was reluctant to abandon even the second proofreading. She eventually agreed to do so, but this change had little effect on time to publication.

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When Deborah Thomas became AA editor-in-chief in 2016, she selected a new managing editor. While I do not know what the current practices are with respect to proofreading, pieces are appearing on Early View not much sooner than when I was editor. My guess is that the bottleneck must still be time spent on copy editing. Starting in 2016, all AAA journals became primarily online. Readers wanting print versions had to pay extra. This change resulted in considerable savings in the costs of production and distribution. The switch to primarily digital publication was uncontroversial. Most readers already interacted with AAA journals online; few people are expected to pay for print issues. The extent to which journals were read online had become clear to me in 2012 when one of my students looked in vain in our university library for a recent copy of American Ethnologist. When I contacted the library to ask about this, I was told that the university had stopped getting print copies of American Ethnologist and AA in 2007. I sent an email to faculty and graduate students in my department asking if they cared about the absence of print copies of AA, American Ethnologist, and other journals. Not one person expressed concern about the disappearance of print copies. None of them even seemed to be aware that print versions of these journals were no longer available in the library. They learned about journal articles via online searches and looking at the references cited sections of papers. I therefore favored the transition to primarily digital publication of AA, thinking it was a painless way to save money. Nonetheless, I thought that Marshall McLuhan had been on to something when he famously remarked decades ago that “the medium is the message.” I wondered if the effects of AA becoming digital would be as insignificant as many people seemed to believe. Because AA’s magazinelike format includes diverse sections, the change might be more significant than for the other AAA journals, which consist mostly of research articles and book reviews. I worried about how readers in the future would learn about the existence of vital topics forums and essays in the sections in visual, public, and world anthropology. Nevertheless, the issue was clearly becoming an increasingly outmoded concept because of online formats such as Early View. Instead of issues, there were content streams. The following comment in 2015 by Alex Barker, a prominent anthropologist who later became AAA president, exemplifies an increasingly common view about the eventual obsolescence of issues: “I think we’re still in the transition phase between conceptions

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and expectations of use based on traditional formats and emerging practices of use. . . . For editors . . . in particular it is hard to let go of the idea of the volume [issue] because it is so bound (all puns intended) up with a title’s identity and visual branding. And that remains true even as those individuals [editors] browse for and consume scholarly content on an article-byarticle basis.”5 The primarily digital nature of AA has made its issues even less important than previously. Most readers can no longer browse through a paper copy of the journal, looking at whatever catches their eyes. Instead, they must depend more on electronic alerts when an issue comes out, accompanied by a list of contents. The AAA has sensibly increased the frequency of such alerts. AA’s move to being primarily digital made it even more essential than previously that the journal enhance its online presence. When I was editor, AA had little online content besides the seldom-used supporting information feature. Editors of some other AAA journals had been able to use volunteer labor and financial support from their sections and institutions to develop a more robust online presence with active Facebook pages and elaborate interactive websites. I was glad when Deborah Thomas later received considerable support from the AAA and her university to make long-overdue improvements in the online AA.

Open Access During the time when the AAA was assessing the financial sustainability of its journals, many members were advocating gold open access in which all content is freely available online.6 In one of his last from-the-editor columns, Tom Boellstorff (2012c:389) urged the AAA to “work creatively to make . . . [their] journals gold open access in a sustainable manner that provides sufficient resources for these publications.” Tom and others advocating gold open access say that there is an ethical obligation to make scholarship available without cost. They also often object to systems such as the partnership between AAA and Wiley-Blackwell in which commercial publishers make money using the unpaid labor of journal editors and manuscript reviewers. Perhaps the most influential advocates of gold open access in our field are members of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, especially the editors of its prestigious journal Cultural Anthropology. The journal has published numerous articles (e.g., Kelty et al. 2008; Jackson and Anderson

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2014) about the virtues of gold open access and perceived ethical problems associated with commercial publishing. In 2015, Cultural Anthropology began publishing gold open access. The widely read blog “Savage Minds” has been also a strong advocate of gold open access, with posts often harshly criticizing the placement of AAA articles behind paywalls. When I read the outpouring of articles and blog posts urging that the AAA publishing program become gold open access, I wondered how this could be financially sustainable. I thought that gold open access would be possible for smaller AAA journals that cost relatively little to produce. But I did not see how this would work for more expensive, profit-making journals such as AA and American Ethnologist. The principal ways in which gold open access for the entire AAA portfolio might be made economically feasible seemed problematic. Many open access publications are supported primarily by authors’ fees, often as much as several thousand dollars per article. In the hard sciences, such money ordinarily comes from research grants or the authors’ institutions. Because few anthropologists have access to such funds, surveys of AAA members consistently indicate strong opposition to authors’ fees. Another possibility would be charging fees to authors submitting manuscripts who are not members of their sections. Such charges must be high to raise significant amounts of money; even low fees can be onerous for some authors. The AAA could also try to make up for the loss of money from library subscriptions by raising AAA dues. Raising AAA dues sufficiently, however, would likely lead to a drop in membership. Increasing section dues is an even less promising strategy for supporting the association’s journals. AAA members can read every association-sponsored journal via AnthroSource. This means that a member can quit a section raising dues without losing access to its journal. (The AAA requires membership in at least one section. Some people try to save money by joining inexpensive sections.) The suggestion has also been made that the AAA could support open access with contributions from individuals and institutions. Soliciting contributions, however, would be a risky endeavor that would require considerable amounts of work by AAA staff. Almost all the proponents of gold open access of AAA journals dismiss the possibility of supporting publications via authors’ fees. Although they nonetheless argue that gold open access is feasible, they rarely gave specifics about how this can be done. Tom Boellstorff’s from-the editor column, for example, ended a sober discussion of the financial issues associated with

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gold open access with the optimistic remark that “anthropologists are a resourceful lot.” In an article in Cultural Anthropology, Jason Baird Jackson and Ryan Anderson comment, Publishing costs money. In a reoriented scholarly publishing system emphasizing open access, where will that money come from? . . . The money issues are real, and I do not know of any serious advocate for change in scholarly publishing who does not acknowledge the need to address them. There is so much work to be done in many domains, but no scholarly field needs to reinvent the wheel alone. There are many allies to be found and many solutions are already well under way. We now have actual gold access journals— some quite prominent—about which we can ask questions like: How are you making this work? Who is paying your bills? (Jackson and Anderson 2014:246) This is all reasonable, but it would have been nice to have seen more about what these solutions are. The advocates of gold open access for the AAA journals often cited the example of Cultural Anthropology. Here, for example, is what editors of that journal had to say a year after it went gold open access: Our experience with Cultural Anthropology has reassured us that Open Access is the future of scholarly publishing . . . we draw attention to the fact that Open Access offers perhaps the most robust model for managing the AAA’s journals in accordance with its history of collective responsibility. . . . To our surprise and concern, the memorandum [from the AAA about the Association’s history of scholarly publishing] made no mention of Open Access in general, nor of Cultural Anthropology’s decision to no longer work with Wiley-Blackwell. . . . We believe that a strong majority of AAA’s membership would prefer an Open Access portfolio were a sustainable model to be developed. Our experience at SCA [Society for Cultural Anthropology] suggests that sustainable OA models indeed exist and that they work best at larger publication scales (e.g., portfolios rather than individual journals). (Jime´nez et al. 2015) This evangelistic language obscures how Cultural Anthropology has been able to become open access. A year earlier, I had talked with Tim Elfenbein

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about the funding for the journal. Tim had been one of the key players in working out the details of open access at Cultural Anthropology. What he said convinced me that the Cultural Anthropology experiment was almost completely irrelevant to the possibility of AA becoming open access in the near future. Ironically, much of the initial funding for gold open access at Cultural Anthropology had come from the revenue-sharing agreement between the AAA and Wiley-Blackwell. Prior to becoming open access, the Society for Cultural Anthropology had been able to save about $250,000 from the costsharing arrangement, including significant amounts from revenues generated by AA, and section membership dues. The society used about $80,000 to create the website essential to its independent publishing. (A simpler website could have been created for much less money, perhaps $10,000.) Even after Cultural Anthropology went gold open access, the journal received more than $20,000 in both 2015 and 2016 from the AAA. I never have understood well why the AAA continued to provide money to the Society for Cultural Anthropology during these years. I have heard two explanations. Some members of the Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing argued that such funding helped support the open access experiment. In my view, giving money to Cultural Anthropology muddled the experiment. The Society for Cultural Anthropology said in memos that the funds were given because of the presence of current and past content of issues of Cultural Anthropology on AnthroSource. Cultural Anthropology has never used ScholarOne; instead, the journal’s editors work with an open-source manuscript control system. Technical support for their use of this system is provided by the libraries at Duke University, the institutional home of the editors of Cultural Anthropology when the journal first went gold open access. Cultural Anthropology has also benefited greatly from other kinds of support from the wealthy private institutions of its editorial teams at Duke University and Rice University. In the years after Cultural Anthropology became gold open access, the Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing requested annual reports of the journal’s finances. Although Cultural Anthropology was operating at a loss and the section was losing members, the journal was not in danger of financial collapse because of past and current funding from the AAA and Wiley-Blackwell and support from its host institutions. I had asked Tim Elfenbein how much of an increase in section dues would be needed to make the journal sustainable, assuming no significant loss in

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membership. He estimated that an increase in annual dues from $50 to $90 would work. To date, the Society for Cultural Anthropology has not raised its dues significantly. The dues were $55 in 2019. The particularities of the funding for Cultural Anthropology suggest that the journal’s experience with gold open access cannot serve as a model for AA and American Ethnologist. For the AAA to commit the financial resources necessary to make these journals gold open access would require either unacceptable hikes in dues or dramatic cutbacks elsewhere, mostly likely among other AAA-sponsored journals. My from-the-editor column in the June 2015 AA discussed difficulties in making the journal gold open access. I concluded, I cannot disagree with the rhetoric of those advocating open access for American Anthropologist. It would obviously be a good thing if the journal were freely available to readers rich and poor around the world. But we live in a world where the economics and logistics of publishing a carefully-edited, peer-reviewed journal cannot be ignored. Even if a primarily digital AA can continue to count on the unpaid labor of editors and reviewers, money will still be needed for copy editing, proofreading, manuscript processing, and online production. The obstacles to AA becoming open access in the years to come may be difficult to overcome. (Chibnik 2015c:227) This essay received by far the most circulation in social media of all my from-the-editor columns. A figure called the altmetric score has been developed to measure impact in social media. The altmetric score for this essay reached 70 at one point, much higher than the great majority of pieces in AA. None of my other from-the-editor columns ever had an altmetric score higher than 10. Unsurprisingly, much of the reaction was negative. “Savage Minds,” for example, had a blog post entitled “Open Access: What Cultural Anthropology Gets Right, and American Anthropologist Gets Wrong” (“Savage Minds” 2015). Few of these critiques had much to say about the specific economic arguments I had made. I agree with comments by Michael Brown about a later “Savage Minds” post: “Savage Minds is hammering again the AAA for failing to fall in step with OA [open access] dreamers . . . I have no objection to thoughtful OA experiments and I admire the efforts of organizations who are trying to make OA work in financial terms. But the jury is still out

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on OA’s viability in anthropology, a profession whose members have almost universally rejected the author-pays model. I’d find Savage Minds’ case for OA more persuasive if was fact-based rather than faith-based” (Brown 2015). The experiences of two anthropology journals suggest how difficult open access publication in our field can be. Hau is a European journal that abandoned an open access experiment. Anthropology of Work Review made extensive efforts to become open access after the association’s comprehensive review of its publications. After several years of seeking a way to do this, the editors reluctantly decided to remain behind the association’s paywall. Here I can only briefly sketch the complicated stories behind these failed efforts. Hau began publication in 2011 amid great fanfare with a distinguished editorial board and substantial financial support from various institutions. In 2017, however, the journal moved to a modified subscription model as part of an agreement with the University of Chicago Press. The reasons for the change seem in part related to financial concerns. The journal had become increasing reliant on article-processing charges and allegedly delayed review for authors at institutions without open access funds. There were also acrimonious, highly publicized conflicts between the editor and staff, though it is unclear to me to what extent this led to the abandonment of open access (Flaherty 2018). Anthropology of Work Review is sponsored by the Society for the Anthropology of Work, one of the sections of the American Anthropological Association. When the AAA instituted its review of publications in 2013, the society’s members supported the idea of taking the journal open access. Anthropology of Work Review seemed to be a journal for which open access would be feasible. The journal is inexpensive to produce and does not bring in revenue that the AAA depends on. Over the next several years, the society’s leaders and journal explored diverse possibilities for open access, including self-publishing and partnering with university libraries. Self-publishing was eventually ruled out because of the labor involved and “discoverability” (the ease with which potential readers can find articles). The attempted partnerships with libraries were premised on a continued relationship with the AAA, including a presence on AnthroSource. The society was unable to broker an agreement between libraries and the AAA because of disagreements about rights to

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materials if the journal’s publisher changed. Anthropology of Work Review remained within the AAA portfolio under conditions identical to those of the association’s other sponsored journals. In a column in the journal, the chagrined leaders of efforts to go open access expressed their disappointment: These words were never supposed to be stuck behind a paywall. That is, this editorial was to have welcomed you, our readers, to the first open-access issue of the Anthropology of Work Review. The fact that we cannot means that we owe you an explanation. . . . We offer it to inform advocates of open access in other disciplines of the challenges that they, too, may face be operating within the strictures of a larger scholarly society. We offer it to register our disappointment at the outcome of a four-year process that, for all the urgency that set it into motion, ended up largely reproducing the status quo. (Brown, LaFlamme, and Lyon 2018) The authors went on to say (accurately enough, though not in words I would use) that “the paywall, to put it bluntly, is a form of coercion used to extract the revenue the AAA needs to keep the lights on” (Brown et al. 2018:46).

Much Ado About Nothing? My work on matters directly or indirectly related to the economics of AA had few tangible effects. The AAA publishing program at the end of my editorship was not much different from what it had been at the beginning. Every AAA-sponsored journal except for Anthropology of Work Review provided responses to the association’s assessment that were regarded as satisfactory. Although some journals have cut editorial costs, the content, format, and economic underpinning of these journals have not changed much. The only major transformation in the AAA publishing program— the switch to primarily digital publication—might well have taken place without the review. The budget for AA was stable during my editorship. Although my successor did receive considerable support from the association for an expanded AA presence in social media, this too seemed unrelated to the review by the Publication Oversight Working Group.

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I found AAA’s close monitoring of AA’s budget, attention to the journal’s metrics, and use of bureaucratic jargon the most irksome aspects of an otherwise largely enjoyable editorial experience. I admit that I may have complained too much about this oversight. I know that the staff at the AAA and Wiley-Blackwell were less intrusive administrators than their counterparts at many other businesses and institutions.

Chapter 8

Moving On The Editorship Ends

In the spring of 2014, the AAA formed a committee to search for my successor as AA editor-in-chief. Although I knew that I would not be in the position forever, I was startled that the search had already begun. My term would not end until the summer of 2016. I soon realized that starting the search this early made sense. Before seeking applications, committee members needed to decide what they were looking for in an editor and what incentives could be offered to potential candidates. In August 2014, a call for applicants was posted on the AAA blog. Here are some excerpts from the announcement, accompanied by my bracketed comments indicating what I think the prose meant: Now in its second century of continuous publication, the American Anthropologist publishes articles, reviews, and commentaries from the diverse anthropological community. It is the most widely circulated anthropology journal published by the American Anthropological Association and showcases the breadth of the discipline. [The committee is indicating that editors should be prepared to deal with all kinds of material and should not focus too much on any one topic or geographical area.] Editorship of the journal provides a unique opportunity for an anthropologist to be a central player in anthropological scholarship shaping the discipline’s identity, impacting the future of anthropology, and initiating and participating in transnational dialogues. The

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editor is not expected to have expertise on all subfields of anthropology, but to be interested in creatively developing vital conversations within and across fields and national boundaries that will invigorate and contribute positively to the landscape for the transmission of knowledge and collaborative engagement. [This is a long-winded way to say that the editorship is an influential position that involves working with people around the world in various anthropological subfields.] Applicants are encouraged to develop innovative and creative approaches that will allow them as Editor-in-Chief to put their own stamp on the journal. Editors are encouraged to solicit articles and contributions for special sections that highlight critical topics in anthropology and in public debate. [The committee seems to be doing here what Tom Boellstorff cautioned against in his essay describing desirable characteristics of AA editors. Tom worried that search committees would place too much emphasis on innovation and not enough on bread-and-butter issues related to candidates’ abilities to do the daily work of reviewing and processing manuscripts.] As the publishing field continues to develop the editor should also embrace new digital forms for scholarly content. [This is perhaps the most important sentence in the announcement. The committee is signaling that it wants someone ready and able to increase AA’s online and social media presence.] The AAA appreciates support from candidates’ institutions and is especially aware of the importance of institutional recognition of the intellectual leadership and challenges entailed by the Editor-inChief’s position and responsibilities. Graduate assistant support and adequate space to house the journal are highly desirable with other kinds of institutional support significant for the success of operations. Candidates who are unable to get substantial institutional support, however, will also be considered with the expectation that AAA will work with the institution to insure core working needs are provided for. [The search committee is indicating that it will place great emphasis on the financial and logistic support an applicant’s institution is willing to provide. This would seem to give an advantage to a candidate from a wealthy university. Because the committee is aware of this potential criticism, the call says that candidates

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will be considered even if they cannot offer much support from their institution. But it seems clear that the AAA (understandably) would rather not appoint an editor under these circumstances.] At about the same time as the call appeared, I received an email from Janet Keller, head of the search committee and AA editor from 1990 to 1994, asking if I would be interested in applying for a second term as editor. Janet’s letter was complimentary about the work I was doing with the journal and mentioned that I was the first person the committee was contacting. I had not considered the possibility of another four years of editing. By the time my current term ended, I would be retired and unwilling to commit myself to the year-round work required by the editorship. I was looking forward to having more time for travel and my own research. In any case, I did not think that I had the knowledge and institutional resources needed to make the changes related to digital publishing and social media that AA badly needed. I wrote back to the search committee declining its invitation to apply. In my letter, I indicated that I would be willing to stay on for one additional year if this was necessary for some reason but said that it would be better if a new editor could begin in 2016. Soon after the call for applicants appeared, I was asked about the position by Deborah Thomas, an editorial board member who had recently become coeditor of the visual anthropology section. I told Deborah a few things about what the work was like and suggested that she might have resources to help with the journal at her wealthy private institution, the University of Pennsylvania, that were unavailable to me at Iowa. In my from-the-editor column in the December 2014 issue, written before the call for applicants, I mentioned the search and said that I would be glad to talk to potential candidates about the position. I received only one response, which was from someone who did not seem very interested in the position. In early July 2015, Mayumi Shimose sent me an email saying—without giving a name—that the AAA had announced that they had chosen my successor. My initial reaction was that Mayumi must have confused the AA position with a recent change in editorship at American Ethnologist. But the next day I saw in my newsfeed on Facebook a post from Alisse Waterston, incoming president of the AAA, congratulating Deborah Thomas on being named AA editor.1 Although I thought that Deborah was a good choice, I was puzzled by the timing of the announcement. I had expected that the

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association would again interview finalists for the position at the AAA meetings. I also was mildly irked that no one from the AAA had told me who my successor would be. It was odd to find about the next AA editor from Facebook more than a week after the appointment had been made. The association’s news release about Deborah Thomas’s selection as AA editor (American Anthropological Association 2015) began with the statement that “the AAA Executive Board was moved to make this appointment early to help facilitate the dynamic academic ideas that won her this distinction.” A sentence in the press release suggests what the committee had found dynamic: “Thomas’s vision for the journal . . . includes the development of a robust and multi-faceted online presence that cultivates broad awareness of the important work done by scholars in the association.” The University of Pennsylvania had likely promised the financial and academic resources needed to develop a more digitally oriented journal. The early appointment would allow Deborah to get a head start on the complex tasks associated with creating online platforms for AA.

The Transition The most pressing editorial tasks associated with the transition involved handling manuscripts that had been submitted to the journal as potential research articles and research reports. I had not heard from a number of authors whose manuscripts had received revise and resubmit decisions. I wrote to these authors in March 2016 suggesting that they resubmit their manuscripts by mid-April if possible. This would allow consistency in evaluating their papers and avoid the delays in processing manuscripts that sometimes accompanied editorial transitions. My letter was fairly successful in soliciting resubmissions, several of which resulted in articles in my final issue, December 2016. Twenty manuscripts—some new, some resubmissions—were still under review when my editorship came to an end. I sent Deborah a list of these manuscripts, in most cases providing a few details about their content and the review process. There were also some manuscripts for which we had not yet found three reviewers. Because the relevant information about the review process was in ScholarOne, it was easy to pass on the processing of these manuscripts to Negar Razavi, Deborah’s editorial assistant. Although Tom Boellstorff had spent many hours teaching me the complexities of ScholarOne, the basics of the manuscript control system were

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not difficult to learn. Brandi Janssen, my first editorial assistant, was able to work with the system after a couple of hour-long Skype sessions with Tom’s editorial assistant. Liz Newbury, my editorial assistant during the transition, also had no problems explaining the system to Negar Razavi. All in all, the transition went smoothly. While June 30 was officially my last day as editor, I still had considerably more work to do on the December issue. It was not until the end of July that I was really done with the editorship.

What I Liked and Disliked About Editing AA As my term came to an end, I sometimes thought about what I had liked and disliked about editing the journal. When asked about this, I often compared the position to my two terms (1988–1991, 2003–2006) as chair of the anthropology department at the University of Iowa. Much of my work as chair had consisted of dealing with unexpected crises. In my second term, I had also had to work hard to preserve the size and quality of the department at a time when state funding for the university was shrinking. The tired metaphors “pushing a large ball up a steep hill” and “putting out fires” characterized the position all too well. There was very little that was scholarly about most of my work as department chair; the job was in most respects a purely administrative position. This contrasted greatly with my work at AA, which resulted every three months in a tangible intellectual product that included thoughtful articles, essays, and reviews. I especially liked the two activities that took up the great majority of my work time—reading manuscripts and working with authors. Reading submissions gave me a wonderful opportunity to learn about anthropological research I otherwise would not have known about. I liked seeing improvements in articles as they went through revisions in response to my comments and those of the peer reviewers. Most authors were easy to work with as they revised their manuscripts. Of course, I cannot say that I enjoyed writing rejection letters. Still, I did not feel as strongly about this as had Tom Boellstorff. The boilerplate in his rejection letters included a sentence about how much he hated turning down manuscripts. Although I did not like disappointing authors, my regrets were tempered by the realization that most of the papers I rejected would eventually find homes in other journals.

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I also liked most of the tasks involved in putting together issues. These included writing the from-the-editor columns, starting up the world anthropology section, creating vital topics forums and virtual issues, soliciting interviews, and reading the year-in-review essays, presidential addresses, book reviews, obituaries, and the visual anthropology and public anthropology sections. While I cannot call the purely administrative aspects of editing AA enjoyable, most were unproblematic. Organizing the work flow of the journal was not hard; ScholarOne was a great help. Our managing editor, editorial assistants, associate editors, editorial board members, and the staff at Wiley-Blackwell were almost always pleasant and efficient. My feelings about my interactions with the AAA, while mostly positive, are more mixed. I greatly appreciated that the AAA never attempted to micromanage my editing. The association was extraordinarily hands-off. I received only a few comments from AAA staff about the content of the journal. These comments were all congratulations for research articles and research reports that were receiving attention in social media. No one ever said anything else to me good or bad about my performance as editor. This was okay with me. I assumed that the AAA’s silence meant that the association was reasonably satisfied with the journal. I did not need pats on the back and was happy being left alone to do my work. AAA’s hands-off attitude sometimes led to what I thought of as a certain lack of support. Given the extent to which the association’s publishing program depended on revenue brought in by AA, I was surprised and disappointed by the difficulties I encountered in my rare attempts to convince staff to allocate small amounts of money for items such as color covers. These budgetary issues, however, cannot be attributed entirely to stinginess at the AAA. I did not think it was worth the time to engage in protracted disputes about minor expenses. The AAA, moreover, almost certainly would have been willing to provide funds to enhance AA’s online presence. Although digital innovations were sorely needed, I never got around to making concrete plans even for relatively easy changes such as creating a Facebook page. I regret not having done more along these lines. On the few occasions when the journal was publicly criticized, the AAA seemed to be motivated mostly by a desire to avoid doing anything that might lead to further controversy. The staff would in such circumstances make bland statements obviously intended to be as inoffensive as possible. To be fair, I understood the association’s reluctance to provide strong support for my actions in these cases. When I was interviewed via email by the

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Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, I took care to say nothing provocative. My most tedious interactions with the AAA took place as a member of the association’s Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publication. The committee had an important job to do and communications among its members were always courteous. However, I found that I no longer had the patience for what seem to be inevitable features of academic bureaucracies. The lengthy conference calls and email exchanges about issues that took forever to be resolved mirrored many of my experiences as department chair. Although I appreciated having been invited to join the group, I am not sure that I ever contributed anything useful to its deliberations. When I was a department chair, I had disliked most the unexpected crises. Many were nobody’s fault. When a refrigerator in an archaeology laboratory failed, the smell of a caribou carcass permeated the halls of our building. Faculty members and teaching assistants became ill or resigned and classes had to be rearranged. Other crises, however, were the result of bad behavior. Students plagiarized, professors took vacations in the middle of semesters, and search committee members asked inappropriate questions of prospective hires. Although I encountered similar difficulties as AA editor, I had fewer such problems than I had anticipated. Only four were serious—the controversy about my comments about writing problems of biological anthropologists, the criticisms of the interviews with Israeli anthropologists, and two personnel issues. (I have not written about these personnel issues out of respect for the privacy of the individuals involved. I will say that I was not happy about the AAA’s actions in both cases.) All these incidents were resolved relatively untraumatically. Still, I would rather not have dealt with any of them.

Recent Developments at AA AA issues under Deborah Thomas’s editorship do not look very different from those I had responsibility for. The number and types of research articles are similar. The journal continues to include from-the-editor columns, year-in-review essays, book reviews, obituaries, and a section on world anthropology (now world anthropologies). Although the former visual anthropology section is now called multimodal anthropologies, the new

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title reflects changes in content that had already occurred during my editorship. The only significant change in issue content is the section on public anthropologies, which now appears primarily on a new website. The annual public anthropology review essays have apparently been discontinued. The journal has changed in a few other important ways. The active, fastgrowing website includes supplementary material—mostly photographs —to many AA research articles. Deborah has been more successful than I was in persuading authors to add such supplementary information, perhaps in part because this material is more visible and accessible on the journal’s website than it was on the somewhat confusing links at the end of articles provided during my editorship. The website also includes interesting podcasts and blogs, which often include content that would not be out of place in Anthropology News. The composition of the editorial board has changed. Although the proportion of international scholars is similar to that under my editorship, there has been a marked increase in the number of members of underrepresented minorities from the United States.2 From an outside perspective, it is difficult to know how, if at all, this has affected the content of the journal. In February 2016, the AAA issued a request for proposals for a publishing agreement to four university presses and four commercial presses. The AAA announced a year later that the association had decided to extend its contract with Wiley-Blackwell. In an email sent to AAA members, Ed Liebow, executive director of the association, and Alisse Waterston, AAA president, said that Wiley-Blackwell’s proposal was best aligned with the publishing program’s core values: quality, breadth, accessibility, and sustainability. Although the contract is multifaceted, a key feature is that the new agreement provides approximately 20 percent more in royalties to the AAA than the previous arrangement. The association had issued many statements over the preceding five years suggesting that future agreements with publishers would be less lucrative than the existing contract with Wiley-Blackwell. This pessimism was a major reason why the AAA had carried out the time-consuming and costly review of the finances and scholarly impact of its journals. The AAA’s prognostications had been wrong, even if staff members rarely if ever publicly acknowledged their mistake. The new agreement is good news for the editors of AAA-sponsored journals. There will likely be less pressure to cut editorial costs and consolidate journals and more money available for innovations such as AA’s website.

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Despite considerable pressure from advocates of open access, AAA staff clearly continue to think that making most of the content of associationsponsored journals free to all is not a practical possibility. Under the new agreement with Wiley-Blackwell, the great majority of articles in these journals will continue to be behind a paywall for thirty-five years after publication. Unless the economics of publishing change drastically in the next decade or two, the prospects of AA going open access any time soon seem negligible.

The Future of AA I would be amazed if AA ceased to exist in the foreseeable future. The AAA has had a flagship journal for more than a century, and the association is likely to want to have one in the years to come. AA is the economic mainstay of the AAA’s publishing program and provides a unifying role in the association by including material from all four anthropology subfields. Nevertheless, the niche of AA among anthropological journals may well change. In September 2017, I gave a talk about journal publishing in the United States at Kyoto University in Japan. A Japanese anthropologist in the audience with considerable international experience remarked that she did not think of AA as a place to publish cutting-edge articles. I had mixed feelings about this comment, thinking that at least in sociocultural anthropology, many articles regarded as cutting-edge use fashionable, often incomprehensible jargon that will not stand the test of time. Still, the point she made was a good one. Many anthropologists regard certain subfield journals as better places than AA for their most important articles. AA may have once been the most prestigious anthropological journal in the United States—and arguably the world—but this has not been the case for many years. The place of biological anthropology in AA may continue to be problematic. In March 2019, the new co-associate editors for biological anthropology in the journal wrote an essay (Van Arsdale and Shenk 2019) that they called an “editorial provocation.” Adam Van Arsdale and Mary Shenk observed that many of their colleagues in biological anthropology hesitated to submit work to AA because of a fear that their work would be misreviewed by colleagues outside of their subdiscipline, who might be hostile to at least some biological, evolutionary, and scientific views. They noted that some senior colleagues in biological anthropology felt they were driven out of the

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journal by an antiscience editorial bias in the 1980s and 1990s. Ironically, Russell Bernard, Janet Keller, and Robert Sussman, AA editors during much of this period, were often thought to be overly proscience. Clearly, the brief editorship of Barbara and Dennis Tedlock in the mid-1990s had a lasting influence on the perception of the journal by many biological anthropologists. The new editors promised that pieces in biological anthropology would be reviewed by colleagues with appropriate expertise (I doubt that this is much of a change) and said that “American Anthropologist can and should . . . [be] a place that biological anthropologists feel comfortable calling their own shared residence” (Van Arsdale and Shenk 2019:12). Achieving such a comfort level among most biological anthropologists will not be easy. The AAA’s 2014 position announcement for the editorship emphasized that the AA was the most widely circulated of its journals. While this is technically correct, the difference in accessibility between AA and the other association journals is much less than it used to be. If AA no longer stands out because of its prestige and circulation, what then can or should its niche be? I would argue that recent editors of AA have maintained the journal’s distinctiveness through its mix of scholarly and more popular features. AA is one of several anthropological journals (e.g., American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, American Antiquity, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) that include high-quality research articles and book reviews. AA is also not the only anthropological journal that publishes forums, interviews, obituaries, and readable informal essays. Publications such as Anthropology News, Anthropology Today, and Sapiens specialize in this kind of material. But AA is alone among the best-known anthropological journals in its inclusion of substantial amounts of both scholarly articles and more popularly oriented essays. The recent digital expansion of AA has emphasized readable essays, photographs, and podcasts. Although AA will continue to be an important venue for scholarly research, my guess is that the journal in the future will become even more magazinelike than it currently is. I am also sure that the digital and social media presences of the journal will grow substantially. In 2018, the AAA put out a call for applications for the next AA editorin-chief for a four-year term beginning in July 2020. As can be seen in this excerpt from the call, the AAA does not appear to have major plans for changes in the journal. The position of AA Editor-in-Chief (EIC) offers a unique opportunity for shaping the discipline’s identity and future. Each EIC has

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been encouraged to put their own stamp on the journal. The EIC is not expected to have expertise in all subfields of anthropology, but must be interested in creatively developing vital conversations within and across fields and forms of practice and engagement and in contributing collaboratively to the global construction and circulation of anthropological knowledge. We expect this to include engagement with critical scholarly topics and public debate, as well as with new developments in digital publishing and use of media. Above all, the AAA Executive Board seeks an EIC who will maintain the journal at the cutting edge of the field. This wording resembles the discourse in the previous two calls by the AAA for an AA editor-in-chief. The only significant difference is the insistence that the journal remain at the “cutting edge of the field.” I am not sure what the search committee means by this.

The Future of Academic Journals During my editorship of AA, many libraries were cutting journal subscriptions. Libraries were under financial pressures in part because of the cost of influential scientific journals published by commercial firms. In addition, the worldwide recession starting in 2007 had led librarians to be cautious about expenditures even during the partial economic recovery. Technological developments were also affecting journals. The increasing importance of digital publishing had resulted in new ways to present information, with text often being accompanied by video, sound, and massive amounts of raw data. Academic journals do not operate in isolation from intellectual and political currents. An audit culture has led to more emphasis by publishers and university administrators on measures of journal impact. The influential open access movement has tried to eliminate paywalls that limit the availability of journals to the general public and independent scholars. Scholars in some scientific fields have bypassed journals in their rush to get research results out quickly. In the preceding pages, I have discussed the impact of these changes in academic publishing on my experiences with AA. The AAA’s decisions to work with a commercial press and to keep most articles behind a paywall were largely based on financial considerations. The association’s extensive

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review of its sponsored journals emphasized financial sustainability and measures of impact. In order to increase the speed in which research results could be reported, AA instituted an early view system in which readers could see articles prior to their appearance in issues. The journal became primarily online with only a few subscribers receiving the print version. These changes had little to do with my day-to-day work at AA. I spent most of my time assessing manuscripts, writing decision letters, overseeing the journal’s sections, and ensuring that each issue had enough material and came out on schedule. While editing AA—and before that Anthropology of Work Review—I therefore only occasionally pondered the future of academic publishing writ large. I knew, in any case, that more knowledgeable people had written thoughtful books and articles on this topic (for example, Cope and Phillips 2014; Fitzpatrick 2011). Nonetheless, my editing experiences have left me with a couple of ideas about what may happen to academic journals in the years to come. First, journals are likely to continue to be of central importance in academic publishing. Second, the effects of changes in scholarly publishing will vary in journals of different types. Academic journals have for centuries provided a key role in the dissemination and assessment of scholarship. They provide a semipermanent record of research results, theoretical developments, and controversies. The more selective journals are also gatekeepers, in principle publishing only the best-argued and best-documented submissions. Even less-than-ideal gatekeeping influences the direction of scholarship. Despite pressures to get research results out quickly in mathematics and some of the sciences, I cannot think—at least in the humanities and social sciences—of substitutes for academic journals. What, for example, would be useful replacements for AA, American Ethnologist, and Current Anthropology? The formats of journals in all disciplines, of course, will change in ways enabled by new technologies and constrained by economic considerations. Innovative ways to present online information will develop; open access may well be feasible for some journals. But academic journals will not disappear any time soon. The effects of changes in academic publishing will not be the same for all journals. AA is a medium-cost, profitable, prominent journal with a large circulation and strong support from both its publisher and sponsoring scholarly society. Anthropology is a field where—with a few exceptions such as genetic anthropology and paleoanthropology—scholars do not ordinarily feel an urgent need to publish their research findings rapidly.

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Few institutional, economic, and intellectual pressures make a drastic rethinking of AA likely. AA’s economic basis is similar to that of other major journals sponsored by scholarly societies in the humanities and the social sciences. This resemblance suggests that such journals are likely to see only modest changes such as those at AA. The economic and institutional situations of many journals are not at all like those at AA. Anthropology of Work Review has a small circulation, is not profitable, and is not considered prominent enough to have its impact factor measured. For such a journal, significant changes in format—and perhaps also in content—are likely. Although initial attempts to make Anthropology of Work Review open access with library support have been unsuccessful, changes of this sort seem much more feasible for this journal than for AA. There are many more small, specialized journals such as Anthropology of Work Review than larger, generalist journals such as AA. These specialized publications are perhaps the most likely types of journals to be significantly affected by the changing economics of academic publishing. Some will morph; others will go under. Many academic journals are quite different from both AA and Anthropology of Work Review. These include expensive, prestigious scientific journals published by commercial firms and journals in fields in which speed of reporting research results is essential. I am not competent to even begin to speculate about how such journals are likely to change. I am sure, however, that variability in types of publications warrants caution in attempts to make sweeping generalizations about the future fate of academic journals.

Final Thoughts During my term as AA editor-in-chief, I occasionally thought about which skills and actions were essential to the position. I also wondered from time to time what I was learning about editing that I had not known before taking on the job. When thinking about these questions, I seldom considered the assessment of manuscripts submitted for potential publication. I took it for granted that editors need to be able to understand the main points of submissions, form preliminary assessments of their quality, and interpret the sometimes opaque comments of peer reviewers. Instead, I focused on mundane—and arguably more learnable—managerial aspects of editing.

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Some of the most important—though least glamorous—tasks involved in editing AA involve record keeping. Most basically, editors have to keep track of manuscripts. Although I was ultimately responsible for overseeing submissions, I found that much of the day-to-day work in monitoring the flow of submissions could either be carried out by the journal’s editorial assistant or done automatically by ScholarOne, our online manuscript control system. Nevertheless, I had to ensure that the journal came out on schedule, maintain a reasonable average review time for manuscripts, see that no submission languished too long without all the necessary peer reviews, and compile enough material for each issue. Another of my editorial responsibilities was to attempt to have diversity in the journal with respect to authors, anthropological subfields, geographic areas, and topical specializations. I therefore created a database for every submission of a potential research article. This enabled me to provide quantitative information about, for example, the percentage of articles accepted in each subfield, the proportions of male and female authors, and the numbers of submissions and acceptances from authors living in different parts of the world. Although maintaining this database was time-consuming, I found it extremely helpful. I also had to monitor AA’s costs and revenues. The most difficult aspect of budgeting was learning what the AAA and my university were willing to pay for. After I more or less figured this out during my first year at the journal, it was not hard to submit a budget and keep monetary outlays within reason. However, I had no control over the journal’s income from library subscriptions and the profit-sharing arrangement between the AAA and Wiley-Blackwell. Although the association and the publisher for obvious reasons were very interested in AA’s bottom line, it was unclear to me what editorial actions might result in greater income from the journal. AA did reasonably well financially during my editorship. Nonetheless, I could only hope that judgments of my editorial ability did not place too much emphasis on the journal’s revenues. Perhaps because of my anthropological background, I think that ethnography is an important, underrated aspect of editorial work. I spent large amounts of time attempting to learn about the organizations and people involved in overseeing, publishing, and critiquing AA. Although my informal ethnography focused on staff at the AAA and Wiley-Blackwell, to do my work well I had to be in touch with many other groups and individuals.

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These included administrators and staff at my university, the journal’s editorial board, peer reviewers, the AAA membership and its elected committees, open access advocates, and most crucially authors submitting manuscripts. I had to learn where to go when problems arose, which individuals were helpful (or not helpful), and what were common difficulties encountered by authors, reviewers, and my editorial assistant and managing editor. In my interactions with individuals and groups, I needed to find out what they considered important and what they paid less attention to. Some rules were hard and fast; others were negotiable. Editors of academic journals must work closely with many individuals. I had to be careful in choosing associate editors, the editors in charge of different sections of the journal, my editorial assistant, and my managing editor. When contemplating who to pick for these positions, I found it important to consider their personalities (what is sometimes called “collegiality”) as well as their ability to carry out their responsibilities. Such considerations were less important in selecting the editorial board. Because there were so many board members, individual idiosyncrasies had little effect on the operations of the journal. Like all administrators, editors must be both tactful and persistent when pursuing their goals. I was sometimes more persistent than tactful. Although I was almost always tactful in my interactions with authors, reviewers, editorial assistants, the managing editor, the associate editors, the editorial board, and our publisher, I did less well in communicating with staff at the AAA and members of the Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publication. While I do not think that my occasional bluntness had much effect on the journal, I know that the tone of certain emails could have been better. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned was not to worry too much about matters I could not control. I found that there was not much I could do about some aspects of the journal that Wiley-Blackwell, the AAA, or I considered important. These included the topics and subfields covered in manuscripts submitted for potential publication as research articles, the international composition of authors, measures of impact, and the journal’s digital presence. When pressed about such matters, all I could do was to explain complexities and give noncommittal responses. I was familiar with quite a bit about editing before taking the position at AA. I knew that I would have to be thoughtful in organizing tasks and

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choosing staff and that most of my work time would consist of reading manuscripts and composing decision letters. Nonetheless, I underestimated the salience of three aspects of the position. Most important, I did not anticipate the extent to which the audit culture had penetrated the AAA and Wiley-Blackwell. I knew of course that the publisher and the association would be concerned about revenues and costs. But I was surprised by their emphasis on measures of impact. Second, I had not fully recognized the alienation of many biological anthropologists from the AAA and the journal. Although anthropologists in other subfields seemed for the most part satisfied with AA policies and content, biological anthropologists as a group were consistently more critical. Finally, I naively had hoped to keep the journal largely apart from the political partisanship so characteristic of our time. This did not mean avoiding articles and essays about pressing issues of the day such as globalization, immigration, and climate change. I welcomed and encouraged such contributions if they were ethnographic and data based. But I very much wanted to avoid polemics and unpleasant disputes. I was therefore disappointed when the journal was criticized for publishing interviews with presidents of the Israeli anthropological association during a time when the AAA was voting on a resolution to boycott academic institutions in their country. I also found myself occasionally asking authors to tone down politically charged rhetoric. When editing AA, I sometimes wondered about the extent to which my experiences were similar to my counterparts at other academic journals. Some anthropology-specific issues I dealt with would not be relevant for editors of journals in other fields, especially the hard sciences. AA has certain characteristics—broad coverage of the field, informal essays—that make it quite different from even other journals in anthropology. Furthermore, my work was affected by my personal characteristics and historical circumstances. Not all editors of academic journals share my concerns with readability, my love of statistics, and my resistance to bureaucracy. Few editors of major journals sponsored by professional associations have held their positions during a time when the association’s entire publishing program was being comprehensively reviewed. Nevertheless, in most respects, my experiences editing AA were far from unique. Editors of all academic journals must assess manuscripts, correspond with authors, think about their readers, organize their work, and cope with the pressures associated with changes in the publishing landscape. I would guess that much of what I have said here will be familiar to

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not only other editors of academic journals but also to editors at university and commercial presses and popular and trade magazines. When writing about my time at AA, I often wished to have access to other detailed personal accounts of editing. I hope to see more such accounts in the years to come.

Notes

Introduction 1. Discussions of these topics and useful bibliographies can be found in the many books about scholarly publishing (e.g., Abel and Newlin 2002; Cope and Phillips 2014; Craig et al. 2014; Greco 2009; Hartley 2008; Milardo 2015; Murray 2013; Paltridge 2017; Regazzi 2015; Weller 2001). 2. “Orchestrating Care” (Coe 2016), “Circulation as Placemaking” (Halperin 2014), “Contemporary Primatology” (Riley 2013), and “Storytelling, Language Shift” (Falconi 2013). 3. Luckily for me, this was not the case at my university when I got tenure in 1984. At the time, I had a number of articles in respected journals but no book. My three singleauthored books written before retirement were all published posttenure.

Chapter 1 1. “Remarks” (Hoffman 1890), “Note on the Turtle-Back” (Proudfit 1888), “Some Interesting” (Fowke 1892), “Notes on the Cemaukan” (Boas 1892), “From Barbarism” (Powell 1888), “The Development of Sculpture” (McGuire 1894), “Similarities in Culture” (Mason 1895), “The Beginning of Agriculture” (McGee 1895), “The Rural School Problem” (Blodgett 1893), “The Deadly Microbe” (Lamb 1893), and “Simplified Spelling” (March 1893). 2. Constitution of AAA (McGee 1903:189). 3. Information about the data sets I used in estimating the percentages of AA articles of different types can be found in an article in Field Methods (Chibnik 1999) and a from-theeditor essay in AA (Chibnik 2014c). 4. “Mind and Matter” (Mason 1908), “Some Problems” (Holmes 1910), and “Some Ethnological” (Babcock 1918). 5. “Shawnee Musical Instruments” (Vogelin 1942), “A Sioux Medicine Bundle” (Thomas 1941), and “Games of the Mountain Tarascans” (Beals and Carrasco 1944). 6. “The Problem of the Incest Tabu” (Hsu 1940) and “A Problem in Kinship Terminology” (White 1939). 7. “A ‘Sumo’ Tournament” (Opler 1945). 8. Tax editorial in first issue (1953). 9. Goldschmidt on review process (1956a:iii–iv) and on acceptance rates (1957:vi). 10. Percentages add to more than 100 because of rounding. 11. The terms for various ethnic and racial groups in the United States are matters of dispute and change over time. Although I use the terms African American, American Indian,

176 Notes to Pages 23–69 and Latinx in this book, I could arguably have used instead alternative terms such as AfroAmerican, Native American, Latin@, and Latino/a. During the period under discussion, the people now usually called African Americans were referred to as Negroes. At the time, there were no generally agreed-upon encompassing terms for people now often called Asian American and Latinx. 12. AAA budget and AA (Woodbury 1995:4). 13. Drop in General Anthropology Division membership (Lurie 1987:1). 14. Recommendations and requirements of AAA with respect to AA (Manners 1973:1). 15. Belshaw (1977) on international anthropology and Olmsted (1981:887) on language in AA. 16. Keller response to letter by Silverman and Parezo (Keller 1993:2). 17. Olmsted (1981:885) on blind reviewing and Bernard (1982:777, 1985:7) on acceptance rates. 18. Editorial encouraging articles on certain topics (Keller 1990:585), “The Power of” (Chavez 1994), and “Global Integration” (Nash 1994). 19. Poem (Rothenberg 1994), “The Anthropological Unconscious” (Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 1994), “Embodying Colonial Memories” (Stoller 1994), and “From Olmecs to Zapatistas” (Gossen 1994). 20. “Transportation Innovation” (Arnold 1995) and “Biocultural Interaction” (Brace 1995). 21. Focus on world issues (Sussman 1997:57). 22. Tedlocks’ reaction to Sussman (Tedlock and Tedlock 2000:13–14). 23. Commitment in vision statement (Mascia-Lees and Lees 2001:9). 24. Few unsolicited manuscripts in biological anthropology (Mascia-Lees 2006). 25. Vital topics forums—“On Nature and the Human” (Fuentes 2010), “On Happiness” (Johnston 2012), and “What Is Science in Anthropology?” (Peregrine 2012)—and a virtual issue on linguistic anthropology (Boellstorff 2012d). 26. The number of articles written by members of underrepresented minorities remained low during my editorship. 27. Time to review (Mascia-Lees and Lees 2001:9; Tedlock and Tedlock 1995:8).

Chapter 2 1. The AA editorship would end on June 30, 2016. The course reduction would be irrelevant during academic year 2015–2016 because I would be retired. 2. Here and elsewhere in the book, I use the word gender rather than sex. Most contemporary sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists prefer gender, stressing the cultural construction of one’s identity. Although I am not sure that I always agree in particular cases, I have somewhat reluctantly decided to consistently use gender. 3. Not long after finishing her dissertation, Brandi became a coeditor of the AAAsponsored journal Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment.

Chapter 3 1. From-the-editor column (Chibnik 2016b). 2. Calculation of 8 percent better than chance (Chibnik 2016b:240). 3. Some authors receiving revise and resubmit decisions never resubmitted their manuscripts. These were technically rejections.

Notes to Pages 86–118

177

Chapter 4 1. Article about Mosuo (Mattison, Schelza, and Blumenfeld 2014). 2. Examples of articles about science and technology in AA during my editorship (Candea 2013; Roosth 2013; Roscoe 2014). 3. U.S.-Mexico border (McGuire 2013), reconciliation efforts in Rwanda (Doughty 2014), conservation in Wyoming (Gewertz and Errington 2015), informed consent (Bell 2014), climate change (Roscoe 2014), epigenetics (Thayer and Non 2015), cross-cultural prevalence of “romantic-sexual” kissing (Jankowski, Volsche, and Garcia 2015), kinship studies (Wilson 2016), anthropologists in film (Weston et al. 2015), and bumbling ethnographer (Taylor 2014).

Chapter 5 1. Examples of stylish pieces in AA (Burde 2014; Taylor 2014). 2. Presidential address (Goodman 2013) and articles on biological anthropology (Reilly 2013; Gasperetti and Sheridan 2013; Riley 2013). 3. Previous column (Chibnik 2013b). 4. Article about khipus (Hyland 2014). 5. Article about handshakes (Hillewaert 2016). 6. AA now has a color cover in the print version, which can be seen online on AnthroSource.

Chapter 6 1. Boellstorff columns—how to get an article accepted (2008b, 2010b), open access (2009a, 2012c), peer review (2010d), four-field tradition (2010a), niche of general anthropology journals (2010c), anthropology and science (2011b), government support (2012b), and internationalization of AA (2012a). Chibnik columns—open access (2015c), niche of AA (2015d), tips about article writing (2015a), manuscript paths and acceptance rates (2013c), changes over time in AA content (2014c), countries of residence of authors (2016c), gender and citations (2014a), peer reviewer agreement (2016b), impact factor (2016a), online publication of AA (2015b), biological anthropology (2013a), and reviewing popular anthropology books (2014b). 2. Rutherford column (2014). 3. Book review essays (Conklin 2013; Wilk 2013). 4. A third single-authored book that came out in 2011 could not be reviewed in AA because of my editing the journal. 5. Wade on sociocultural anthropology (Dvoskin 2007). 6. Caspari review (2014). 7. Visual anthropology essays—Django Unchained (Ralph 2015), Chomsky (Osband 2014), Salgado (Ball 2016), videos on mobile phones (Thornburg 2016), performance piece (Khabeer 2016), podcasts (Durrani, Gotkin, and Laughlin 2015), and multisensorial anthropology (Spitulnik Vidali 2016). 8. From-the-editor column (Chibnik 2016a:10). 9. Public anthropology essays—Newtown massacre (Lende 2013), genocide trial (Stuesse 2013), and historical archaeology (Shackel 2013). 10. Authors’ nationalities were ordinarily determined by their institutional affiliation. This could be problematic when authors from one country were temporarily affiliated with

178 Notes to Pages 121–132 institutions from another country. Moreover, authors may move during their lives, sometimes residing over time in several countries. Nevertheless, I do not think that my somewhat arbitrary classification of nationality significantly affected my analysis. When articles had multiple authors, I assigned fractional nationalities. For example, suppose there were four authors of an article, one each from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Germany. In such a case, I would record the nationality as .25 from the United States, .5 from other industrial Anglophone countries, and .25 from Western Europe. 11. World anthropology essays—introduction (Weil 2013), anthropology in India (Das and Renderia 2014), Brazilian anthropology (Lins Ribeiro 2014a), and influence on research by training and fieldwork in the United States (Hannerz 2014). 12. World anthropology pieces on regions—Argentina (Perelman 2015), East Asia (Mathews 2015), Germany (Bierschenk, Krings, and Lentz 2016), Ireland (Egan and Murphy 2015), Mexico (Lo´pez Varela 2015), South Africa (Spiegel and Becker 2015), Vietnam (Hoa`ng 2016), and western Andalucı´a (Roca and Martı´n-Diaz 2016). World anthropology interviews—France, Ire`ne Bellier (Narotzky 2015); Iran, Soheila Shahshahani (Dominguez and Metzner 2016b); Korea, Hyang Jin Jung (Dominguez and Metzner 2016b); Nigeria, Olumide Abimbola (Dominguez 2015a); and Singapore, Goh Beng Lan (Dominguez 2015b). Francophone anthropologies (Saillant 2015), forensic anthropology (Dominguez and Ross 2016), and world anthropology and world anthropologies (Narotzky 2016). 13. In academic articles and books, most people are referred to by their surnames. In memoirs and other kinds of informal writing, authors ordinarily use first names when referring to people they know well. This posed a problem for my hybrid ethnography and memoir. Although I know some of the people mentioned well, others are acquaintances or strangers. The solution might at first glance seem easy: use first names for those I know well and surnames for others. But what then should I do when I refer to both a friend and a stranger in the same paragraph? This dilemma was most acute in this part of the book. As will be seen, Nadia El-Haj, a distinguished anthropologist at Barnard College, objected to these interviews. In earlier chapters, I frequently refer to Virginia Dominguez by her first name. Because I have never met Nadia El-Haj, it seemed clearly inappropriate to refer to her by first name. But I also thought that I should not in this context refer to Virginia Dominguez by first name and Nadia El-Haj by last name. My less-than-ideal resolution was to refer to both of them here by last names. 14. Interviews with Israeli anthropologists (Dominguez 2016). 15. Review essay on public anthropology (Haugerud 2016). 16. By the time the forum was published, Ed Liebow had resigned from the editorial board because he had become executive director of the AAA. 17. Vital topics forums (Liebow 2013; Da´vila 2014). 18. Vital topics forum on MOOCs (Jones 2014). 19. Vital topics forum on genetic anthropology (Kitchen 2015). 20. Interviews—Meg Conkey (Morgan 2013) and Ire`ne Bellier (Narotzky 2015). 21. Interview of Sidney Mintz (Thomas 2014). 22. Presidential lectures (Goodman 2013; Mullings 2015). 23. Archaeology distinguished lecture (Pollock 2016). 24. Article about Australia (Morphy and Morphy 2013a) and commentary and response (Merlan 2013; Morphy and Morphy 2013b).

Notes to Pages 132–164 179 25. Exchange about biological anthropology (Calcagno 2014; Goodman 2014). 26. Ricardo Ventura Santos is a coauthor of both articles. 27. In Focus section (Moritz Schwarcz 2014; Kent, Ventura Santos, and Wade 2014; Ventura Santos, Lindee, and Sebastia˜o de Souza 2014; Marks 2014). 28. Virtual issue on language (Boellstorff 2012d). 29. Virtual issues—violence (Dominguez 2013) and water (Rasmussen and Orlove 2014). 30. Virtual issue on economics (Chibnik 2015e).

Chapter 7 1. The AAA occasionally provides free access to a few recent journal articles. Although such access is usually temporary, it is sometimes permanent. The AAA has also arranged with Wiley-Blackwell for free access for “Historically Black Colleges and Universities” and “Tribal Colleges” in the United States and certain institutions in “less developed” countries. 2. American Ethnologist publishes on average about fifteen more research articles per year than AA. This may be one reason why American Ethnologist receives more submissions for potential research articles. AA has overall more submissions than American Ethnologist because AA publishes many more pieces that are not research articles. 3. “Assessing the Quality of Scholarly Journals” (Chibnik 2016a). 4. The average times reported here are medians. The mean times were in all cases close to the medians. 5. Barker comment (Chibnik 2015b:637). 6. There are several different types of open access. In green open access, authors are allowed to put certain versions of their articles in a place where they can be freely read. AAA journals are regarded as green open access because authors have the right to post manuscript drafts or uncorrected page proofs in free, discipline-specific public servers. Some journals, including those sponsored by the AAA, allow published versions of articles to be freely available if authors pay a fee. Very few AA authors have paid the $3,000 charged for AA articles. All scholarly journals are being affected by regulations concerning open access by agencies in the United States and elsewhere. The Department of Energy in the United States requires that open access be given to publications resulting from their grants. Plan S, a proposal supported by the European Research Council and major national research agencies and funders from twelve countries, would make a similar requirement. In both cases, green open access is regarded as satisfactory.

Chapter 8 1. I am not alone in finding the operations of Facebook something of a mystery. Alisse Waterston is a Facebook friend; Deborah Thomas is not. For some reason, my Facebook newsfeed showed a message from Alisse congratulating Deborah on her appointment. I assume that Deborah and Alisse are Facebook friends. 2. Although the term underrepresented minority is often used in discussions of diversity, its definition varies in different circumstances. The key issues are (1) determining what underrepresentation means in a particular context, (2) defining what is a minority in this context, and (3) determining who counts as a member of the underrepresented minority. In this particular case, underrepresentation refers to the percentage of members of particular minorities among professional anthropologists in the United States compared to the percentage of members of these minorities among the population of the country.

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Index

AA. See American Anthropologist (AA) AAA. See American Anthropological Association (AAA) Abbott, Andrew: Department & Discipline, 7–8 actor-network theory, 88 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 114 altmetric score, 5, 153 American Anthropological Association (AAA), 1, 15, 19, 23; access to its journals, 137, 149–56, 165, 166, 167, 179 n.1 (chap. 7), 179 n.6; assessment of its journals, 136–37, 139–46, 154, 164, 167–68; assessment of journals’ book review sections, 114–15; audit culture of, 11, 45, 53, 103, 135, 139–46, 156, 172; benchmarking report, 139–40; conflicts within, 16–17, 43–44, 100, 101; Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing, 139, 141, 142, 152, 163, 171; Committee on World Anthropologies, 118, 121; core publishing values, 142–43; dues, 150, 152–53; financial support for journals, 35, 45, 137, 138–39, 149, 152, 155; five-year plans of journals, 142–44; General Anthropology Division, 23; goals, 43, 90; involvement in AA editorial management, 162–63; journal covers, 105, 106, 162, 177 n.6 (chap. 5); journals, 1, 11, 45, 136–37, 139–40; Labor Relations Committee, 46; management of journal publishing, 12, 23, 31–32, 37, 45–46, 50, 114–15, 136–46, 150, 164, 167–68; membership, 19, 136,

138; profit-making journals, 136, 144; Publication Oversight Working Group (POWG), 142, 144–45, 155; recruitment of manuscript reviewers, 58; reorganization, 23; response to controversies, 162–63; response to Wade book, 113–14; revenue-sharing with Wiley-Blackwell, 12, 32, 35, 45, 136, 138, 138, 149, 152, 164; sections and their journals, 45, 50, 139, 143, 152, 154–55; selection process for AA editor-in-chief, 37–44, 157–60, 166–67; strategic implementation plan, 141; sustainability of journals, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144; tensions between editors and, 36, 46, 50, 54, 106, 156, 171 American Anthropologist (AA), 1, 8, 10–12, 14–35, 37, 45, 53, 163–67; assessment of, 139–45; conflicts within, 17, 28–31, 39, 43; covers, 105, 106, 162, 177 n.6 (chap. 5); debates about, 24–25, 122, 124–25; demographics of authors and reviewers, 22, 24, 27, 32, 111, 118, 119; diversity, 43, 44, 46–47, 48, 110, 164, 170, 179 n.2 (chap.8); five-year plan, 142–44; flagship designation, 10–11, 140; future of, 165–67; gender issues, 27, 29, 32, 111–12; history, 14–35; internationalization, 39, 40–41, 57, 90, 118–25; Israeli boycott resolution controversy, 122–26; as a magazine, 110, 129, 131, 148, 166; masthead, 30–31; metrics, 11, 45, 53, 139–46, 156; number of pages, 15, 19, 23, 31, 32, 36, 49; paper quality of print edition, 138; recent developments, 163–65; subject specialization,

198 Index American Anthropologist (AA) (continued ) 21, 25–26, 33, 91–92, 165–66; subscriptions (library), 11, 12, 35, 136, 138; subscriptions (member), 15, 19, 23, 31; sustainability, 138, 139, 142, 143–44, 165–67; virtual issues, 133–34; Western domination within, 118–19, 122 —articles: AAA mandate for interdisciplinarity, 24; abstracts, 80, 138; by underrepresented minorities, 32, 43, 176 n.25, 177n.10; citations of, 53, 89, 92, 103, 111, 144, 145–46; data sets about, 175 n.3 (chap. 1); downloads, 11, 45; four subfields, distribution of, 10, 18, 20, 22, 27, 112; humanistic approaches, 27–28, 29, 74–75; prepublication, 147–48, 168; readability, 21–22, 24, 28, 29, 34, 40, 63, 64, 77, 91–102, 126; responses to, 39; word count, 56, 76, 107–8; world issues, 18–19, 22, 27–31, 33, 117, 131 —articles, topics of, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22–23, 24; archaeology, 19, 89, 98; biological anthropology, 31, 32, 43, 58, 86–87, 89, 98, 99–102, 111, 131, 141–42, 165–66; ethnographic, 15, 16, 17–18; general interest, 25–26, 32, 33, 53, 89–90; linguistic anthropology, 32, 90, 98; North American Indians, 15, 16, 17, 22; public anthropology, 32, 49, 127; research reports, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32, 41, 56, 59, 78, 110; science and technology, 18, 26, 28, 29, 30, 56, 63, 74, 85, 88, 98–102, 165–66; sociocultural anthropology, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 26, 27, 32, 75, 89–90; theory and method, 17, 40, 56, 63, 85–89, 90 —digital edition, 105, 106, 111, 147, 148, 158, 164, 168; electronic alerts, 149; social media, 39, 53, 149, 153–54, 158, 160, 162, 166; technology, 39, 41, 160, 166; use of online capabilities, 41, 106–7, 164 —editorial management: copy editing, 102, 104, 108–9, 137, 120, 129–30, 147, 148; editorial visions, 23, 25–26, 28–29, 32, 33, 38–42; editorships (see specific editors); proofreading, 147; selection process for

editor, 37–44, 157–60, 166–67; support of editor-in-chief, 37–38; transition of editorship, 160–61. See also manuscripts, decision making about; peer review; ScholarOne, Wiley-Blackwell, production of AA by —editorial positions, 23–24, 45, 46–49, 56, 103, 162, 171; associate editors, 20, 24, 46, 48, 50, 62, 110, 120, 126; book review editor, 49, 50–51, 137; editorial assistant, 37, 46, 58–59, 60–61, 137; editorial board, 20, 30, 32, 37, 43, 46–47, 53, 58, 62, 107, 114, 129, 134, 137, 164, 171, 179 n.2 (chap. 8); editorial offices, 137, 138; guest editors, 110, 128; managing editor, 37, 45, 46, 104, 137, 138, 147; obituary editor, 25, 49, 127, 137; paid positions, 37, 137, 138; unpaid labor, 37, 55, 137–38, 149 —financial management, 12, 23, 36–38, 45–46, 49–50, 136–55, 164, 170; book review office, 49–51, 112, 138; budgeting for AA, 45–46, 50–51, 155, 162, 170; cost cutting recommendations, 137, 144; institutional support for AA, 38, 46, 49, 137, 158–59 —sections, 31, 111–28; autonomy, 110, 124–25, 126; book reviews, 23, 32, 50–51, 112–15, 118, 144; commentaries, 20, 23, 24–25, 28, 30, 32, 41, 111, 131–32; Contemporary Issues Forum, 30; film reviews, 116, 123; Forum, 28; from-theeditor columns, vii, 20 (see also under Boellstorff; Chibnik); In Focus, 31, 32, 132–33; interviews, 110, 122, 126, 129–30; non-peer-reviewed, 110, 127, 134, 135; obituaries, 24, 25, 30, 49, 127–28; photo essays, 116, 117; public anthropology, 32, 49, 117, 123, 137, 163; talks, addresses, and lectures, 130–31; visual anthropology, 32, 49, 115–17, 137, 163–64; vital topics forums, 32, 102, 110, 128; world anthropology, 119–26, 137; year-in-review essays, 32, 46, 78, 110, 123, 126–27 American Antiquity, 11, 18 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 15

Index 199 American Ethnological Society, 15, 50 American Ethnologist: book reviews, 113; covers, 106; impact measure, 140; manuscript acceptance rate, 78; manuscript reviewing, 56–57, 61, 68; online reading of, 148; open access and, 153; profitmaking, 136, 150; social media, use of, 39; submissions, 140, 179 n.2 (chap.7); support for book review office, 50; word count of articles, 108; writing, 92 American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 11, 18 American Journal of Sociology, 7–8 American Sociological Association, 140 American Sociological Review, 140 Ames, Edwin, 24–25 Anderson, Ryan, 151 Anthropological Quarterly, 11 Anthropological Society of Washington, D.C., 14, 15 “Anthropologists Exploring Water in Social and Cultural Life” (virtual issue), 134 anthropology, 8–10, 19, 21, 140; internationalization of, 117–19, 121–25; Israel, 122, 125; media coverage of, 113; science wars within, 43–44, 101, 102. See also archaeology; biological anthropology; Boasian anthropology; genetic anthropology; humanistic anthropology; linguistic anthropology; sociocultural anthropology Anthropology Book Forum, 115 Anthropology News, 45, 115, 139; on AA and the AAA Israeli boycott vote, 124–26; on biological anthropology, 100–101; on gender and citations in AA, 111; on lack of AA submissions in biological anthropology, 31; Tedlocks’ essay criticizing AA, 30–31 Anthropology Newsletter, 24–25, 29, 30 “Anthropology of Language, The” (virtual issue), 134 Anthropology of Work Review, 2, 40–41, 45, 58, 67; open access and, 154–55, 169 AnthroSource, 11, 45, 134, 150, 152, 154, 177 n.6 (chap. 5)

archaeology, 8, 9, 11, 18, 90, 131 architectural cleansing: use of term, 116–17 articles: acceptance rates, 5, 119; citable, 145–46; citations of, 5, 103; downloads of, 5, 45; placement of, 11 audit culture, 140, 167, 172 authors: citation of female, 111; fees charged to, 150, 154, 179 n.6; male, 29, 84; nationalities, 177 n.10; unpaid labor of, 138; working with, 161 Baker, Lee, 43, 47 Bardi, Ariel Sophia, 116–17, 123, 125 Barker, Alex, 148–49 behavioral ecology. See evolutionary psychology Bellier, Ire`ne, 129–30 Belshaw, Cyril, 24 Bernard, H. Russell, 24, 25–26, 166 biological anthropologists, alienation from AAA and AA, 165–66, 172 biological anthropology, 8, 9, 11, 18, 44, 86, 99–102, 111 biology-culture interactions, 131, 132 Bishop, John, 49, 115, 116 Bishop, Naomi, 49, 115, 116 blind reviewing, 21, 25, 67–68, 70 Blount, Ben, 31, 33, 37 Boas, Franz, 16–17 Boasian anthropology, 16 Boellstorff, Tom: AA content during editorship, 112, 126, 128, 133; on AA article types, 33; on articles’ readability, 34; decision letters, 52, 78, 161; decision making, 56, 57, 78–79, 82; editorial board of, 46; editorship, 1, 31–32, 37–38, 41, 43, 51, 115, 117; from-the-editor columns, vii, 2–3, 32, 111, 149, 150–51; on open access, 149, 150–51; peer review and, 58–59, 61, 63–64, 68; policy on review of special sections, 133; on qualifications for editorin-chief, 2–3, 44, 158; submissions during editorship, 52, 140; support received, 37–38, 46, 49; virtual issues during editorship, 133–34 Bohannan, Laura, 22

200 Index Bohannan, Paul, 16, 17 book publication, 11–12, 112, 114–15 Brenneis, Don, 31 Brown, Michael, 153–54 Buckner, Margaret, 130 Calcagno, James, 132 Caspari, Rachel, 48, 58, 114, 131 Chibnik, Michael: book review section and, 112–14; comments to authors, 72–77, 88–89, 97, 108–9; controversies during editorship, 99–102, 122–25, 135, 163; criticism of four-subfield division, 9–10; datadriven columns, 111; on editing and editorial policies, 4, 52–53, 169–70; Editor-in-Chief assessment report, 141, 142; on editorship, 38–42, 161–63, 172; editorship, selection process for, 37, 42–44; ethnic and racial terminology, use of, 175 n.11; from-the-editor columns, 65–67, 68, 99–100, 111, 114, 117, 118, 145, 153, 159; lessons learned, 169–72; names, use of, 178 n.13; personal preferences and their effects, 84–89; qualifications for editorship, 2, 3, 37, 44; reasons for declining to apply for second term, 159; response to El-Haj, 122, 124; study of interviewer agreement, 65–67, 68; support from University of Iowa, 38, 137; temperament, 3–4; virtual issue on economic anthropology, 134; vision statement, 38–42; work plans, 1–2, 42, 159 Chronicle of Higher Education, 29, 44, 164 citations, 53, 89, 92, 103, 111, 144, 145–46; gender and, 111–12 Cohen, Eugene, 24–25 Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi, 38, 48, 62 Conkey, Meg, 129 Cope, Bill, 7 critical anthropology. See humanistic anthropology Cultural Anthropology, 11, 39, 78, 92, 140; financial and institutional support for, 152; open access and, 149–53 Current Anthropology, 11, 85–86, 107, 108, 118

Das, Veena, 121 data collection, 74–75 Da´vila, Arlene, 127, 128 De Laguna, Frederica, 16 Dominguez, Virginia, 37, 42, 44, 121, 122–24, 125, 130, 134 Duke University, 152 Early View system, 147–48, 168 editors, academic: ethnographies of their work, vii, 7–8, 170–71 Elfenbein, Tim, 151, 152–53 El-Haj, Nadia Abu, 122–24, 126 Enloe, Jim, 38 ethnic cleansing: use of term, 116–17 ethnographies, vii, 7–8, 94, 170–71 European Research Council, 179 n.6 evolutionary psychology, 85, 86 experimental economics, 85–86 Facebook, 159, 179 n.1 (chap. 8) Feldman-Bianco, Bela, 119, 121 Fuentes, Agustı´n, 113 gatekeeping, scholarly, 84, 119, 168 gender, 27, 29, 32, 111–12, 176 n.2 (chap. 2) genetic anthropology, 102, 129 genetics, 102 Ghodsee, Kristen, From Notes to Narrative, 94 Goldschmidt, Walter, vii, 20 Golub, Alex, 70 Goodman, Alan, 99, 131, 132 Google Scholar, 111 Graham, Laura, 1, 37, 42 Griffith, David, 48–49, 127 Guerron Montero, Carla, 119 Guevara, Emilia, 37 Guyara, Consuelo, 80 Hannerz, Ulf, 121 Harris, Marvin, 9–10 Hau, 154 Haugerud, Angelique, 127 Heller, Monica, 113–14 H-index, 141

Index 201 Hodge, Frederick Webb, 15 Human Organization, 11, 38 humanistic anthropology, 27–28, 44, 92, 94 impact factor, 11, 53, 89, 92, 111, 141, 144–46 inclusive fitness, 86, 87 Inside Higher Education, 101, 102 intercultural (concept), 132 International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, 118 Israel, 122, 123; anthropology, 122, 125; boycott resolution of its academic institutions, 122 Israel Anthropology Association, 122, 125 Jackson, Jason Baird, 151 Jackson, John, 116, 117 Janssen, Brandi, 46, 50, 69, 162, 176 n.3 (chap. 2) jargon, 40, 93, 94–98, 126, 156, 165 Jaschik, Scott, 101, 102 “Je Est un Autre” (poem), 28 Jones, Graham, 128 Journal des Sc¸avans, Le, 4 Journal of Anthropological Research, 11 Journal of Experts, The. See Journal des Sc¸avans, Le Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11 journals, academic, 4–8, 167–69, 172–73; articles vs. issues, 148–49; audiences, 5; audit culture and, 167; financial structure of publishing, 36–37, 137; flagship, 1, 5; metrics, 5, 11, 140, 146, 167; online, 5–6, 148–49; open access, 6, 111, 167; readability, 92; subscription costs (online vs. print), 5; subscriptions, 6–7, 138; timeliness, 6; unpaid labor, 137, 149 journals, anthropology, 119, 168–69; impact factor, 53, 89, 92, 103, 111, 144, 145–46; manuscript rejection rates, 56–57; open access, 149–55, 164; subdiscipline specific, 11, 18, 45, 112, 140, 165 Joyce, Rosemary, 49

Kalantzis, Mary, 7 Keller, Janet, 24–27, 159, 166 kinship, 86–87 Kitchen, Andrew, 102, 129 Kroeber, Alfred, 16 Lamphere, Louise, 31 Lees, Susan, 31, 33, 34, 36 Lesser, Alexander, 17 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 91 Lewin, Ellen, 38 libraries, journal subscriptions, 6, 136, 138, 167 Liebow, Ed, 102, 128, 140, 164, 178 n.16 linguistic anthropology, 8, 9 Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo, 121 Lowie, Robert, 17 Lutz, Catherine, 111 Mahmud, Lilith, 49, 50, 51 Manners, Robert, 23 manuscripts: abstracts, 103; ancillary material, 102–7; appendices, 106; archaeological sketches, 105; authorship of articles, male vs. female, 112; endnotes, 103, 106; graphs and tables, 104; illustrations, 105–6; introductions, 75; logic of arguments, 63, 64, 88–89; maps, 104; methodology, 64, 74–75; organization, 75–76, 80, 83, 92; photographs, 105, 164; presentation of arguments, 72–74, 75, 80, 88–89; presentation of background information, 76–77; presentation of comparable cases, 73–74, 77, 83; presentation of relevant literature, 72–73, 80, 87; prose in, 21–22, 24, 28, 29, 34, 40, 63, 64, 77, 91–102, 108–9, 119, 126; references cited, 103–4, 107; specialized, 80; titles, 103. See also jargon; technical terminology —decision making about, 71–90, 161; acceptance rate of research articles, 5, 21, 25, 34, 78, 89–90, 119; acceptances, 66, 68, 79, 80, 83, 119, 147; authors’ responses, 64, 81; decision letters, 52, 79, 80–84, 161; editor’s vs. reviewer recommendations, 70, 77–78, 85, 88–89; initial decisions, 147; non-resubmissions, 79, 176 n.3 (chap. 3);

202 Index manuscripts (continued ) recusals from, 52–53; rejection rates, 56–58, 79–80; rejections, 56–57, 66–69, 80, 82–83, 107–8, 176 n.3 (chap. 3); resubmissions to other journals, 67, 68, 83, 80, 84, 89, 107, 161; revise and resubmit, 21, 52, 61, 66–69, 76, 79, 85, 87, 88–89, 104, 105, 107, 147, 160; revise and resubmit, second, 81–82, 107; selectivity of acceptances, 78, 79, 80; submissions, 12, 18, 19, 30, 31, 34, 39–41, 56, 61, 78, 107, 109, 139–40, 144–45, 179 n.2 (chap.7); timeliness, 25, 34, 57, 61–62. See also peer review manuscript control systems, open-source, 152. See also ScholarOne Marks, Jonathan, 133 Mascia-Lees, Frances, 31, 33, 34, 36 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), 128 Maxson, Linda, 38 McGinty, Stephen, Gatekeepers of Knowledge, 7 McLuhan, Marshall, 148 Merlan, Francesca, 132 metrics, 11, 45, 53, 139–46, 156 Metzner, Emily, 122, 130 Mintz, Sidney, 129, 130 MOOCs. See Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Moran, Erin, 50 Morgan, Lynn, 129 Morphy, Frances, 132 Morphy, Howard, 132 Mullings, Leith, 44, 131 Murray, Charles, 113 Narotzky, Susana, 130 Nation, The, 16–17 National Science Foundation: Cultural Anthropology Program, 85 Newbury, Liz, 161 North American Indians, 15, 16, 17, 22 objects, inanimate, agency of, 88 Olmsted, David, 24, 25 ontology (term), 95–96

open access, 6, 103, 111; gold, 149–55, 165; green, 179 n.6 Open Journal Software, 144 Opler, Marvin, 19 Orlove, Ben, 134 Palestine, 116–17, 122 Parezo, Nancy, 25 paywalls, 150, 155 peer review, 4, 55–70, 134–35, 137; blind, 21, 26, 67–68, 70; conflicts of interest, 60; editor’s decisions vs. reviewer recommendations, 70, 77–78, 85, 88–89; feedback to reviewers, 69–70; interreviewer agreement within, 65–67, 77, 111; guidelines, 63–65; privacy, 60, 70; recommendations for publication, 68–70; refusals to review manuscripts, 60–61; review process, 20–21, 25, 37, 47, 52, 55–70; reviewer requesting identity revealed to author, 65, 68; reviews of biological anthropology articles, 165; reviews of resubmissions, 81, 82; unsatisfactory, 64–65, 70, 81; year-inreview sections and, 127. See also manuscripts, decision making about Philosophical Transactions, 4 physical anthropology. See biological anthropology Plan S, 179 n.6 polemics, 40, 120, 122, 127, 132, 172 political partisanship, 172 Pollock, Susan, 131 positionality, 74, 75 positivism, 18, 30–31 postmodern anthropology. See humanistic anthropology publishing, 6–7; digital, 5–6, 25, 137, 167; economics of, 6, 137, 149–55; open access, 6, 111, 149–55, 167 qualitative research, 30–31 Randeria, Shalini, 121 Rasmussen, Mattias Borg, 134 Raym Crow report, 136, 138, 139 Razavi, Negar, 160, 161

Index 203 Rice University, 152 Rutherford, Julienne, 100–101, 111

Thomson-Reuters, 145–46 Torres-Rouff, Christina, 51, 112, 114, 115

sampling, 74, 75 Savage Minds (blog), 70, 150, 153 Schmid, Oona, 45, 50, 139, 142; authorship of AA’s five-year plan, 143–44 ScholarOne, 34, 35, 51–52, 144, 160–61, 162, 170; red flagging, 60–61, 62; reviewer database, 60–61; reviewer features, 61–62, 69 Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz, 133 Shenk, Mary, 165 Shimose, Mayumi, 45, 46, 104, 106, 120, 127, 138, 147, 159 Silverman, Sydel, 25, 49, 127 Slyomovics, Susan, 124 Smith, Tim, 51, 112, 114, 115 Society for Cultural Anthropology, 149–50, 152 Society for the Anthropology of Work, 45, 58, 154–55 sociocultural anthropology, 8, 9, 11–12, 86 sociology, 140 Spier, Leslie, 17 Stark, Miriam, 48 Stern, Gwen, 16 Steward, Julian, 18 Stocking, George, 17, 18 Sussman, Robert, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 166 Swanton, John, 17 Sword, Helen, 93

University of California, Irvine, support of editorship for AA, 46, 49 University of California Press, 12, 32, 138 University of Chicago Press, 154 University of Iowa: audit culture at, 140–41; journal holdings, 148; support for editorship for AA, 38, 137 University of Pennsylvania, 159, 160 university presses, 6 U.S. Department of Energy, 179 n.6

Tax, Sol, vii, 20, 22, 118 technical terminology, 76–77, 84, 88–89, 92, 94–95, 98–102 Tedlock, Barbara, 28, 166 Tedlock, Dennis, 28, 166 Tedlocks: criticisms of editorship, 29–30; reaction to Sussman’s editorship, 30; vision statement, 28, 34 tenure, 11–12, 175 n.3 (intro.); controversy over El-Haj’s, 123 Thomas, Deborah, 116, 148, 149, 159, 179 n.1 (chap.8) Thomas, Jonathan, 129, 130

Van Arsdale, Adam, 165 “Violence: Anthropologists Engage Violence 1980–2012” (virtual issue), 134 Wade, Nicholas, 113; Troublesome Inheritance, 113–14 Waterson, Alisse, 122, 124, 159, 164, 179 n.1 (chap. 8) Weil, Jim, 120–21 Weiss, Erica, “Incentivized Obedience,” 123, 125 Wenner-Gren Foundation, 9–10, 118 Wiley-Blackwell, 53–54, 164; covers of AA and, 106, 177 n.6 (chap. 5); Cultural Anthropology and, 152; emphasis on metrics, 53, 103, 135, 146, 172; production of AA by, 37, 41, 52, 104, 137, 147, 52, 104; proofreading, 147; revenue-sharing with AAA, 12, 32, 35, 45, 136, 138, 138, 149, 152, 164; virtual issues, 133, 134. See also Early View system; ScholarOne women: citation of articles by, 111; number of authors, 112 Woodbury, Richard, 24, 25 Woolard, Kathryn, 48, 127 world anthropologies movement, 118, 121 World Anthropologies Network, 118 World Council of Anthropological Associations, 118, 121 Wortham, Stanton, 116 writing: clarity, 21–22, 28, 29, 34, 40, 63, 64, 77, 91–109; experimental, 92

Acknowledgments

This book would not exist without my having had the opportunity to edit American Anthropologist from 2012 to 2016. Laura Graham first suggested the possibility and gave useful advice when I began the process of applying for the position. Tom Boellstorff, my predecessor, was extraordinarily generous with his time during the editorial transition. He showed me how to use AA’s manuscript control system, sent me extensive files related to the journal, and responded at length to my many email queries. The Department of Anthropology and the Graduate College at the University of Iowa provided an office for the journal, administrative help, and partial funding for an editorial assistant. The American Anthropological Association and Wiley-Blackwell publishers gave financial and logistical support throughout my editorship. I worked closely with Ed Liebow, Oona Schmid, Kathy Ano, and the late Suzanne Mattingly at the AAA and with Mike O’Riordan, Muhammad Haider Bin Md Sahle, Chelmin Lin, and Johnny Siever at Wiley-Blackwell. Producing AA was a complex process that required the help of many individuals. Their hard work, often volunteered, is not always sufficiently recognized. The more than fifty members of our editorial board sent useful suggestions for potential manuscript reviewers and gave detailed advice when I asked their views about policy matters and potential innovations and the journal. I am especially grateful for the service of the associate editors and the section editors: John Bishop, Naomi Bishop, Rachel Caspari, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, Virginia Dominguez, David Griffith, John Jackson, Sydel Silverman, Tim Smith, Miriam Stark, Deborah Thomas, Christina Torres-Rouff, Jim Weil, Kathryn Woolard, and Stanton Wortham. Mayumi Shimose was managing editor of AA for over a decade. When I became the journal’s editor-in-chief, I knew that her experience and

206 Acknowledgments

expertise would be of great help in the years to come. Although most readers of journals are only vaguely aware of the work of managing editors, the authors of our articles knew the importance of Mayumi’s contribution to AA. When Mayumi took maternity leave at the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016, Holly Carver was a terrific interim replacement. I also greatly appreciate the support I received while editing AA from people at the University of Iowa. My talented editorial assistants Brandi Janssen, Misha Quill, and Liz Newbury efficiently processed manuscripts and courteously responded to queries from authors and reviewers. Consuelo Guyara Sa´nchez carefully translated article abstracts into Spanish. Beverly Poduska, the administrative assistant for the Department of Anthropology, patiently handled the bureaucratic challenges that went with hosting the journal. I wrote most of this book in an office in the anthropology department at Iowa. When I finished editing AA in 2016, I had already retired from the university. Jim Enloe, the department chair, permitted me to move into the former office of the journal. As professor emeritus, I continued to have access to the university’s library and computer services. The department permitted me to use its copier, which included a scanner. I was able to print draft after draft of chapters on this multipurpose machine. I did much of the editing of these drafts in the coffee shop in Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, conveniently located a couple of blocks away from my office. I thank Jim Harris, the former owner, and Jan Weissmuller, the current owner, for creating and maintaining this wonderful space. I am lucky to have friends who have worked in publishing. Holly Carver, Catherine Cocks, Lain Adkins, Mary Curran, Sara Sauers, and Karen Copp helped me understand the work of designers and copy editors and the economics and production of academic books and articles. Holly, in particular, gave extensive help and generous advice. Her perceptive comments on two drafts of this manuscript prevented me from going off the rails in unfortunate directions in several places. Steve Hendrix, Drew Kitchen, and Michael Lewis-Beck, faculty at Iowa, told me about the editorial practices of journals in ecology, biological anthropology, genetics, and political science. Thanks also to my friends in Iowa City and elsewhere for listening to me talk about the book-in-progress and asking sensible questions about its content and audience. Aside from those already mentioned, these friends include Beth Conklin, Arthur Goldhammer, Peter Griswold, Lourdes Gutierrez, Richard Sindall, and Woody Watson.

Acknowledgments 207

Thanks also to the staff at the University of Pennsylvania Press, the copy editor, and the indexer who worked on the editing, production, and marketing of this book. As a former journal editor, I know well the importance of such work. Peter Agree’s enthusiasm for the project and attention to my varied queries eased my submission of the manuscript and my preparation of a response to the thoughtful comments of two anonymous reviewers. Erica Ginsburg carefully oversaw the copy editing; Zoe Kovacs and Gavi Fried assisted with manuscript formatting and marketing. Gillian Dickens was a wonderful copy editor who caught numerous typos, inconsistencies, and punctuation mishaps. I happen to have a librarian sister who is a skilled indexer. Although I was a bit hesitant to ask her to do my index, Katharine Chibnik cheerfully volunteered to take on the task.