(This email from Laurence Dousset has been making the rounds. The idea of there being no anthropology at CNRS is shocking to me. The petition is here (in both French and English—my English translation is abysmal but there you go) and you can mail it anthropologie@mmsh.univ-aix.fr )

Dear All,
I thought you might be interested to know that Anthropology currently has a hard lif in France. Indeed, since end of last year, the CNRS [National Center For Scientific Research], our major research institution employing nation-wide about 150 anthropologists (about 50% of all institutionally employed anthropologists in France) is considering eliminating the discipline from its research topics. The strategy is to incorporate anthropologists within the history section in a first step, where they will become a minority, and where, in a second step, they will progressively disappear from the scene.

Pushed by stereotypical views of anthropology as being only “contemporary history”, neglecting our theoretical apparatus and what makes us particularly different – long term fieldwork – anthropology is seen as having no proper object of research anymore (everything is globalised, they tend to say, forgetting local persisting or emergent identities), and as being too much divided among its own “troops”.

As you can imagine, there is strong resistance to this movement in France, and many institutions, such as the EHESS where I am employed, have not yet taken up these points of view (and will hopefully not in the near future). But in the long run, if the CNRS simply deletes an entire discipline from its scope, other institutions will follow.

We are asking social scientists to participate as widely as possible in our protest movement. I have therefore enclosed a petition that circulates in France and now internationally. We would greatly appreciate if you would consider filling the petition and sending it back as quickly as possible.

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Memories of its fifty years of Japanese colonial rule are very complex in Taiwan. When the Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist (KMT) party took over the island after World War II they used the term “retrocession,” emphasizing the return of Taiwan to China. “Retrocession day” is still a national holiday. However, since the eighties there has been a revisionist historiography which seeks to emphasize the unique history of Taiwan as distinct from that of China. Central to this unique history are three things: Taiwan’s Aborigine population, its long history of resistance to imperial Chinese rule, and the important role of Japan in modernizing the island. You can usually figure out what political party a Taiwanese person supports simply by asking them about the Japanese era. This is more complicated, however, with Taiwan’s Aborigine population.

The Japanese wanted to prove that they could govern Taiwan more efficiently than the British ruled in India or the Americans in the Philippines. As a result, the Japanese colonial experience in Taiwan was much milder than that in Korea or Mainland China … for the Han Chinese. It is thus possible for many Taiwanese to romanticize this era, as one sees in the rampant Japanese-era nostalgia that is consuming Taiwan. For the Aborigines, however, it was a different story. At the dawn of the twentieth century the mountainous parts of the island where still largely under the control of the Aborigines. The Japanese forcibly took over those areas in a genocidal campaign of violence. There is no record of the number of Aborigine lives lost, but the Japanese recorded 10,000 Japanese dead as a result of what was a largely one-sided battle. Once under Japanese rule, however, schools were set up throughout the region and many Aborigines first gained literacy at schools run by the Japanese police. When missionaries later came into the region (under the KMT), they found it easy to use Japanese language bibles. In the end, Aborigines became some of the most loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor, many even volunteering to serve in the Japanese armed forces during World War II.

All this is the background for a curious political event which took place earlier this year: (more…)

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Man, the beginning of classes has resulted in me being unbelievably swamped. However, I will break radio silence to point out one new article that I found when rennovating my syllabus: Untangling Oceanic Settlement: The Edge Of The Knowable is the best short summary of the state of the art in Pacific prehistory that I have come across. Although Pacific prehistory is not my area of speciality by any means, as someone who has to teach it I am keenly aware how valuable a piece like this is, especially because of its interdisciplinary scope and concision.

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As is well known, during the past couple of decades the anthropology of the body has been very big in the discipline. AAAs sessions organized around this theme reliably signalled prestigious institutional affiliations, funky eyewear, and willfully peculiar shoes that manage silently to show up other choices of footwear as hopelessly plebeian. Were there, across this time, AAA sessions devoted to the anthropology of the spirit, it is not impossible to suppose they were marked by para-academic institutional affiliations, ethnic apparel of indeterminate origin, applause at odd moments, and a general air of obstreperous befuddlement.

My impression is that things have now changed, mostly in response to the rise of discourses of “spirituality” (be they fundamentalist or New Age) in the contemporary context. In class today I gave a “Magic, Science, and Religion” lecture that I self-consciously designed to not risk trodding on any pious/conservative toes, only to have a heated dispute break out in the western quadrant of the lecture hall about the relationship of neopaganism and Wicca to science. It wouldn’t give me so much pause if it weren’t the second time in my short teaching career it has happened; the first being in an intro anthro course when a scheduled “discussion of witchcraft” was taken by some students to mean a discussion of witchcraft: black, white, and how to tell the difference. What I felt, in both contexts, was utterly unprepared to do anything with the turn of events other than to ask that we bracket the debate and return to “what anthropology has to say about this topic”.

At any rate, I’ve found myself pondering the fact that one of the most appealing aspects of the “anthropology of the body” framework is that it enjoins a kind of critical engagement that includes the critical-engager: everybody’s got a body, and it is surprising and interesting to learn about how the taken-for-grantedness of that body is historically/socially/culturally constructed. But not everybody has a spirit. Certainly the critical literature with which I am familiar more or less moves from the stance “people who think they have spirits do so in the following historically/socially/culturally constructed ways”.

The most inclusive stance possible within this framework is a kind of agnostic addendum: “people who think they have spirits (and maybe they do) do so…”

I don’t know. It feels like a problem but maybe it’s just yet another sign that I belong in the “obstreperous befuddlement” rather than the “cool shoes” camp of the discipline.

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The University of Calgary issued a press release about a linguistics researcher, Dr. Darin Howe, who is using hip hop to study African American vernacular English [AAVE]. The press release states, in part:

It’s rare to use the words ‘hip hop’ and ‘serious academic research’ in the same sentence…

Howe is believed to be the only academic in Canada and one of the few in the world to take a scholarly look at the language of hip hop.

A simple Google search for “hip hop” on academic web sites produces over a million hits. Right at the top is this bibliography. And a Google search for linguistics and hip hop produces 27,500 hits. Of those, 725 hits are from Canada! (Linguists seem to be doing more hip hop research than anthropologists. AnthroSource has only 101 hits.)

But what really bothers me about this press release isn’t so much the wildly inaccurate nature of its claims, but the notion that there is something intellectually daring about doing research on popular culture in this day and age. I mean, we are talking about a 1.5 billion dollar industry!

(via Nomadic Thoughts)

UPDATE: For some serious hip hop linguistics fact checking, see Benjamin Zimmer’s post over at Language Log.

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One of the colleges that I adjunct at recently had an external reviewer come through to help them get some advice about how to structure (among other things) their intro course. On the one hand, the department wants to attempt to standardize their introduction to cultural anthropology course so students will all be on the same page when they arrive in upper level classes. On the other hand each professor teaches the course differently and is unwilling to change—in particular, no one is willing to adopt a singe textbook. The reviewer suggested that one way to split the difference would be to come up with a core set of articles which all professors could pick and chose from. I find the idea of developing a core set of ‘the articles every intro student should read’ a fascinating project.

I’m having trouble coming up with good answers about what should be on it, however, and have mostly come up with things that are either canonical or just good and deserving of more attention. But this is what I’ve got so far (remember, I live in Polynesia, and this affects my list):

“Haole Girl: Identity and White Privilege in Hawai’i” Judy Rohrter (being white in Hawaii)

“100% American” Ralph Linton (a two page handout on the ubiquity of diffused culture traits in the US)

“Empathy, or, Seeing From Within” Robert Lowie (nice overview of the concept of cultural relativism)

“Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism” by Vilsoni Hereniko (the politics of studying Pacific culture)

“Our Sea of Islands” Epeli Hau’ofa (key text about how to envision the Pacific)

“Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women” by Susan Moller Okin and the two responses “My Culture Made Me Do It” (Bonnie Honnig) and “Is Western Feminism Good For Third World Women?” (Azizah Al-Hibri) a good dialogue about the tension between relativism and activism. Also good for teaching arguments.

“Growth and Decay: Bedamini Notions of Sexuality” by Arve Sorum (if you want one article on male homosexual initiation to get the ball rolling on gender issues, this is for you)

“Once a knight is quite enough,” Edmund Leach (a nice informal piece on how ritual works)

“ Science and Race ” Jonathan Marks (good potted version of the anthropological critique of race)

“Abominations of Leviticus,” by Mary Douglas (classic paper on taboo and pollution)

What would you put on your list? Please note: we already know about the Nacirema, Shakespeare in the Bush, and Balinese Cockfights.

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Many moons ago, I asked for help with a course I was putting together on Alternative Economies and many SM readers and contributors responded with terrific suggestions. I promised I’d post the syllabus shortly thereafter, but instead it lumped along, half-written, for months. Well, the semester began a few weeks ago, at which point I was obviously done with writing the syllabus, but then I had to learn how to post documents (thanks Kerim and Rex!), and then I had to, ahem, put theory and practice together in re: posting documents. Anyway… here it is at long last.

Special thanks to Rex for mentioning the Sunstein review of Freakonomics (and for those of you worried about my students’ tender sensibilities, my teaching persona is rather different from my blogter-ego: I don’t have a princessy moniker, for one thing, and I don’t rip apart assigned material, for another) and to Timothy Burke for recommending Congo/Paris which became a suggested text. The Keith Hart was already on my syllabus before Rex mentioned it here, but anything else you see on here that came up in the discussion (or that might have been on syllabi SMers shared with me) is almost certainly courtesy of the Savage Minds reading and writing public. Many thanks.

As a bonus for interested folks, I also append here the syllabus for the Anthro of Science, Technology, and the Environment mega-course I’m leading at the same time. Happy winter semester, everybody.

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Dan Segal has posted an excellent response and explanation of how sections work in the AAA. He makes several important points. First is that there is an accounting weirdness in distinguishing between Member Dues and Journal Subscriptions—because some people buy memberships in order to get the journal, but sections have no way of knowing how many do that—or how many people join multiple sections to get multiple journals. Second, that the switch to AnthroSource is distinct from, but happened at the same time as, the outsourcing of journal production to UC Press. According to Dan, neither of these things appear to have created greater costs for the sections.

The problem he sees is in the fact of bundling. If it is now possible for all members to get access to all journals, then what incentive does anyone have to join a section? And if Anthrosource revenue can be seen as a flat fee for access to all section journals, then how should it be re-distributed? If some journals are more desirable than others, should they get more of the pie, and how should that be determined? Worse, in some ways, he notes, is that one journal is getting distinct treatment: American Anthropologist. So membership in AAA subsidizes AA, not AA that drives membership in AAA.

From my perspective, this confirms my suspicion that the AAA, and the sections, need to enumerate, carefully and explicitly, the services and value they provide members beyond journal subscriptions. If a section provides nothing more than access to a journal, then this is simply reliance on copyright and exclusivity of access in order to extract rent from members. I have little sympathy, even though I would be angry and frustrated if we lost more quality publishing outlets. On the other hand, I think sections do provide other values and services that are worth paying for… and I think it would behoove the sections to make that clear to members when they take their money.

It also raises a very interesting and politically charged question about income re-distribution in the AAA. If the AAA wants to remain as ecumenical as it has been in the past with respect to the enormous range of research interests in Anthropology, I would think that a strict system of equal re-distribution of income to all journal-producing sections would be the only way to avoid a knock-down drag-out fight about which publications are more popular and the criteria by which re-distribution should or shouldn’t reflect that.

Thanks to Dan for such a clear and detailed explanation.

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In September, I blogged about the decline of Easter Island, citing Benny Peiser’s critique of Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Although I cited the article approvingly, comments by Russil Wvong led me to reevaluate it. There were some errors regarding Diamond’s argument, and the journal in which it was published seems to have an anti-environmentalist axe to grind.

While not defending his article, Benny Peiser wrote an e-mail to alert me to a new study which casts doubt on Diamond’s thesis. USA Today reports that “rats and Europeans are likely to blame for the mysterious demise of Easter Island,” not simply deforestation and warfare as suggested by Diamond.

anthropologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii at Manoa first blames the Polynesian rat. The rats probably deforested the 66-square-mile island’s 16 million palm trees. “Palm tree seeds are filet mignon to rats,” Hunt says.

While USA Today focuses on rats, another article describes Hunt’s analysis of the European impact:

While tribal warfare likely reduced the population of Easter Islanders, Hunt suggests that most of the decline probably was resulted from early 18th-century Dutch traders, who brought diseases and took slaves from the island. Research elsewhere indicates that “first contact” diseases—like typhus, influenza and smallpox—carry extremely high mortality rates, often exceeding 90%. The first traders to reach the island likely carried such diseases which would have rapidly spread among the islanders and decimated the population.

My own prejudices lead me to blame rats and Europeans for just about everything, so I’m inclined to trust Hunt’s research, but I’m sure this isn’t over…

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Welcome to the third installment of Wild Thoughts, your sporadic round-up of whatever I haven’t found time to flesh out into a full post. I haven’t been as active as I’d like the last month or so, not least because I’ve been preparing a new class (at a new school) in Women’s Studies. Entitled “Gender, Race, and Class”, the course meets two separate general ed. requirements, so it is quite popular across the spectrum of students. In preparing for the class, I’ve been collecting quite a few stories that deal with gender (as well as race and class, of course, but those will have to wait—or you can just follow Karen Brodkin’s assertion that race, class, and gender are always imbrecated and consider that these links necessarily deal with race and class because they deal with gender). In the interest of clearing my Firefox tabs, and as a follow-up of sorts to Kerim’s recent post, I present the Gender Edition:

• The Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, has proposed legalizing polygamy (he means polygyny), a suggestion that has been endorsed by the Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma, who plans to introduce legislation to legalize multiple marriages across Russia. The reasoning behind these suggestions should be familiar to anthropologists: the ongoing conflict in Chechnya has decimated the male population and left millions of women widowed or unmarried, with no available, unmarried men to take on the job of supporting these “surplus” women—a textbook case, really. Left unquestioned, of course, are the various factors that leave unmarried women without adequate resources to survive—for example, the dismantling of the Soviet-era system that, whatever its faults, integrated men and women somewhat equally into the labor force, affording unmarried women some degree of autonomy. At work, too, may be a kind of population panic, as increasing numbers of women flee Russia for work—often sex work—in Western Europe or North America.

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In the latest issue of the New Left Review, Jack Goody has a review of Maurice Godelier’s Métamorphoses de la Parenté, about which he says:

There has never been a book that adequately covers the range of human kinship and domestic organization. This is as near as anyone has got.

Those of us who struggle over French will have to wait for an English translation. Till then, however, Goody’s review gives us a taste of things to come, while taking Godelier to task on a number of issues.

Of particular interest is Godelier’s discussion of primate societies, which he uses to critique his former teacher, Lévi-Strauss, who argued that the “the prohibition of incest … saw the original passage from nature to culture defining human society as such.” (more…)

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The above question needs to be split into (at least) three. First: What is good writing? Second: What is good nonfiction writing? (I discard, at least for now, a distinction between ‘nonfiction’ and ‘academic’.) Third: What is peculiar about good anthropological nonfiction writing?

We each have our answers to these questions. So why not make it personal: Which were the texts that made an indelible impression on you, and why? Any answer to this question has to be biographical. Many of the people I’ve asked over the years, usually in casual conversation over a drink, talk about books they read in their teens or early twenties. At this age, we are intellectually mature but emotionally volatile, and there is still plenty of free space on our internal hard drives. Anything relevant that comes our way is therefore likely to find a privileged place in our memory.

My unscientific findings can be summmarised roughly like this. The lit crit type would be likely to wax lyrical about the great Russians, Joyce or Proust. The natural scientist type might unashamedly speak about Tolkien or Arthur C. Clarke (very fine authors both in my book, by the way), or even a minor Russian like Ayn Rand (but as you know, those types, if unrepentant, are usually beyond salvation) ... but what about the crossover, intellectually hybrid anthropologist type? Hmm… as always, it is impossible to generalise about one’s own people – we are so familiar with each individual tree that we fail to see the forest. It would be interesting to conduct an informal survey among the readers of Savage Minds. Q1: What were the books that changed your life? Q2: Which books (or films) turned you on to anthropology? Give short justifications for each answer, and be honest, it’s not a competition.

Uncritically but voraciously, I read all kinds of trash until my late teens, sometimes stumbling over something good without realising it. At that time, emerging from puberty with an audible sigh of relief, I turned to books on anarchism and green fundamentalism, pessimistic philosophy and novelists/essayists like Orwell, Huxley and Koestler, adding Greene and Naipaul as I ran out, as well as the mandatory bit of Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus (you haven’t lived until you’ve read The Stranger as an eighteen-year old!). There was little art for art’s sake in my life at that time. However, come to think of it, I did have a literary hero in my early twenties. Nowadays considered almost a minor novelist and nearly forgotten in practice, Anthony Burgess represented for me the quintessence of the great writer. His language was exuberant and powerful, his plots were clever and often extremely effective, and he was extremely knowledgeable in a casual way. He wrote pageturners about fascinating subjects such as ancient Christianity and colonial Malaya. It was only when I read Ulysses (on fieldwork in Mauritius) that I realised that Burgess somehow orchestrated a meeting between James Joyce and Harold Robbins. I still think that Burgess’ best books contain everything we try to achieve as writers: to enlighten without being boring, to make the world a larger and more interesting place, and to moralise without creating unproductive guilt-traps.

You may well disagree, and you have your own personal favourites. I no longer read Burgess, but I’m glad I spent formative years doing it. When it comes to nonfiction in general, the most important books for me as a twenty-year old were clearly those which followed Marx’ famous dictum about understanding the world in order to change it. In our first-year curriculum in anthropology back in 1982, I liked Roger Keesing’s textbook for this reason; the feeling was that he had his heart in the right place. There is a linear plot in Keesing which I didn’t see at the time – moving from the simple to the complex as the book progresses – which is epistemologically problematic but efficient as a way of organising a narrative: you know how he begins his book with a few chapters on human evolution (which we were not asked to read, by the way; anthropology is not a four-field subject in Norway), ending with horror stories of colonialism and capitalist oppression.

But then, in my second year, I discovered Gregory Bateson, and it was love at first sight. His convoluted style, his oblique way of discerning patterns of regularity and similarity, his strong metaphors and surprising perspectives got me hooked, then and probably forever. Bateson was like a Socrates in search of his Plato (or, better, Platos), stimulating his readers to finish the argument and to fill in the blank spaces. Bateson presented riddles and limited himself to suggesting the answer (unlike someone like Marvin Harris, about whom Sahlins once remarked, drily, that he told riddles, but the answer was always protein).

Yet the kind of irreducible complexity presented explicitly and implicitly in Bateson’s texts do not stand for typical good writing; it’s untypical good writing. (I have similar feelings, by the way, about Edwin Ardener’s intellectual pyrotechnics.) Most of the really memorable texts, in anthropology as in other nonfiction, are those that have a clear message or a potent metaphor somewhere. If something appears to be complex but lacks the beauty of simplicity, it is bogus: it is then merely complicated rather than truly complex. So there is a reason why we return again and again to Geertz’ cockfight, Evans-Pritchard’s poison oracle, Leach’s gumsa-gumlao dichotomy, Douglas’ anomalies and so on. The narrative thread in these texts may be weak, but their symbolism is persuasive, seductive and contagious, indexical of huge problematics. – Why is it that Anderson’s Imagined Communities is the most popular book on nationalism? Because of its powerful central metaphor.

As a writer, you can engage your audience in many ways (and I’ve described some of them in Engaging Anthropology – I’m not going to repeat myself here), but let us say that the most important ones are metaphor and narrative. Anthropologists are generally good at creating metaphors, but bad when it comes to narrative. (With historians, it is the other way around.) At some point in our profession’s history, we chose analysis over narrative. It may be time to reconsider that choice. For one can have it both ways.

As academics, we tend to write for a select audience: people who are either paid to read what we write, or who are forced to because it is on the reading list. I think these two categories of readers would be grateful if we began to have other kinds of readers in mind as well. And it would not necessarily mean losing complexity.

Now this is a slippery slope. A colleague at the University of Oslo, admired for his crystal-clear, simple style, says that if your auntie can’t read it, it is probably not any good. Yet we know from experience that some texts that offer solid resistance give ample rewards at the end – from Aristotle to Foucault and Derrida, not to mention Strathern. On a more mundane note, as an undergraduate, I struggled with Culture and Practical Reason, and never regretted it later. So simplicity is not always the answer. Voluntary readers are perfectly capable of absorbing considerable complexity as long as it is presented in an inviting way. Whatever my feelings about Richard Dawkins’ worldview, few will deny that he is a great nonfiction writer, and he invites you as a reader to join him. He appears to care about his readers. Someone said about Dawkins that he makes the reader feel like a genius. Far too many of us seem to try to make our readers feel like idiots instead. Anthropology is usually not technical in such a way as to exclude, by default, readers who lack a training in the subject. We have an unrivalled supply of metaphors, through our own fieldwork and that of others. But we also have narratives. The puzzling thing is why we don’t use them to better effect. Could it be that the ghost of Evans-Pritchard’s nasty depiction of Mead as representing a ‘rustling-of-the-wind-in-the-palm-trees kind of anthropology, for which Malinowski set the fashion’, is still hovering in the corridors?

Certain texts stick with us, change our world and make our own lives slightly richer and more bearable, not to say meaningful. They have a few things in common, notably strong narrative and/or powerful metaphors, and an active interest in the reader also helps – but what nearly all of them have in common, is that they are not written by anthropologists. Here’s a challenge to all of us!

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  My postings on this site are so lengthy, I am ashamed to discover, that I fancy you’ve got your fill of Eriksen’s ruminations for now. It has been really interesting to experiment with the blog genre, enjoyable to oscillate between the loose and the tight, and it may well turn out that I’m hooked now, converted as it were from the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Berners-Lee Bonanza [Tim Berners-Lee: The inventor of the World Wide Web] – in which case you’ll hear from me again on Savage Minds. Thanks everybody!

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I have just successfully managed to make it through the first chapter of Mutual Life, Limited by Bill Maurer, entitled “Lateral reasons for a post-reflexive anthropology.” Maurer’s books represents one of the most recent statements of one school of thought trying to recover an anthropological program after the critiques of the 1980s (the I mentioned other, ‘unnew’ approach a while back). Maurer’s argument is (very) complex, but at a general level we might want to say that it involves an attempt to rethink anthropology as a program of adequation—of creating representations of life that are adequate (or resemble) the empirical world. His alternate conception is important (to me, anyway) because it might allow us to escape some of the problems with the existing I-say you-say dynamics of anthropological explanation I mentioned earlier.

His approach—a “nonempirical modality of ethnographic inquiry” attempts not to explain the world but to ride alongside the explanations offered by other people (to be ‘lateral’ to them) rather than to find “a new Archimedean point for critical analysis.” Thus at one point he is discussion Marilyn Strathern’s analysis of Maurice Leenhardt’s Do Kamo. Strathern takes issue with an aspect of Leenhardt’s work at one point, but Maurer, in his modality of mutual laterality, writes on page 19 of the book: “Refusing the structure of error, I would simply add that his [Leenhardt’s] language lies alongside others, where mistakes can be made and where the very idea of a mistake can be obviated by multiple and polyvalent emergences.”

Not surprisingly, Maurer writes in the conclusion of his chapter that he worries about being “taken as too metatheoretical… and having no politics besides.” Apparently its a bad thing to have no politics, especially when you study, as he does, Islamic banking and are writing your ethnography, as he notes on pg 22, “in a world in which oil companies are awarded lucrative contracts after a war in Iraq over weapons that simply did not exist.”

So much for ‘refusing the structure of error!’ I’m not sure what happened between page 19 and page 22 that kept Maurer from noting that George Bush’s claims about WMDs were language which lies alongside other uses of language, and that the very idea of Bush being incorrect can be obviated by multiple and polyvalent emergences. Except, perhaps, that it is difficult to maintain a state of laterality when the time comes to vote with your feet. Perhaps I am unfair in noting the performative contradiction of Maurer’s book, and perhaps as I continue reading things will make more sense to me and such a reading will seem uncharitable. But the differences between these two passages really leapt out at me.

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Robert O’Brien has posted the first update to the AAA-UNITE web site since July. In it he addresses several labor-related issues affecting the AAA. These include, banning Coke from being served at AAA events, supporting the rights of graduate employees, and protesting the decision to use Gannett presses to print Anthropology News. He urges discussion either in the comments to his post, or on the AAA-UNITE e-mail list. Please read the whole thing for more details.

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I’ve been posting about how the finances and politics of the sections of the American Anthropological Association affects its publication model. After some initial entries I ended up faced with a paradox—the AAA budget made it look like running publications was a loosing proposition financially, and that publications were underwritten by membership dues in the AAA. At the same time, it appeared that sections relied on revenue from journals (in the shape of sectional membership dues ) to fund their activities. Since then I’ve acquired the fuller version of the 2004 AAA budget, which provides a little more data.

Here’s the deal with the sections:

To a first approximation, it looks like there are 35 sections of the AAA, 21 of which published a journal and 14 of which did not (I include here newsletters, but not occasional papers or monograph series). 11 sections reported loosing money in 2004, and of these 6 had journals. Unfortunately the section budgets are not broken done any further than this, so I don’t know how much of their total revenue derives from membership fees as opposed to subscriptions to their journal from institutional subscribers. However I can make some intelligent guesses: in their 2004 report, for instance, the Society for Cultural Anthropology reported that 2003 subscription fees for Cultural Anthropology were US$37,006. The AAA budget reports that their total revenue for 2004 was US$53,377 (versus US$27,351 in expenses). Modulo some huge shift between 2003-2004, it looks like if you are publishing a well-known journal like Cultural Anthropology yes, it does make a lot of money for the section. The overall picture, then, is that (very) roughly one-third of AAA sections ran a deficit in 2004, two-thirds of them are publishing regularly, and there isn’t an obvious correlation between the doing the later and risking the former.

More interesting, however, is the AAA-wide budget for publications:

According to the AAA 2004 annual report, in 2003 the AAA made US$696,894 selling its journals but spent US$794,164 producing them. According to John Willinsky’s Access Principle in 2000 the AAA made US$637,950 of which came from publication revenue (I’m not counting royalties here, which are negligible). However, it cost US$790,113 to produce AAA journals. Although this data is pretty fragmentary, it suggests that prior to 2004 the AAA was running its journals at a small loss and was subsidizing, say, 15% of production costs from membership dues and other sources of revenue. This is not unusual for a scholarly society (I still don’t know how to reconcile this to the budgets for the sections, though).

According to the AAA 2004 budget, however, journal revenue in 2004 was US$1,301,954 and expenses were US$1,859,346. In other words, the cost of producing journals more than doubled but revenue did not rise to match, and the publication deficit broadened out to US$557,392.

Now: the full AAA budget has a breakdown of expenses (although not, alas, of revenues). The costs of printing (US$256,890) and postage (US$13,146). This might be described as the ‘paper penalty’—the price we pay for physical copies of our journal. At US$270,036 it’s a significant amount of the budget, but still less than half of overall expenses, although to be sure it may be more, since other categories of expenditure that I don’t understand what they are could count towards the paper penalty. Now, John Willinsky urges us in The Access Principle to give up paper journals and go digital in order to shed costs. But this data suggests that, in the case of the AAA, such a move would only be a partial fix. It would help balance the books, but at considerable cost—after all, paper is an affordance (it is easier to browse paper versions of new journals than digital ones, at least for me) and AAA members probably value it and are not ready to just give up the idea of there being a physical incarnation of AE. But most critically, giving up paper only makes sense if the cost of going digital is less than the paper penalty, and it is not clear to me that, in the AAAs case, it actually is.

How much does it cost to go digital? Chris Kelty previously guessed that the tremendous increase in production costs we see in the 2004 budget is due to AnthroSource appears to be correct. He appears to have been right. The full 2004 AAA budget indicates that US$569,717 was spent on “UCP Management Fees” and US$85,109 in “UCP copyediting and composition.” “UCP” here is obviously the University of California Press, the technical partner the AAA paid to create AnthroSource. Add to this US$654,826 going to UC Press the line item “online operating expense” which cost US$159,478 and it appears that the AAA spent US$814,304 in 2004 on digital publishing.

What was all this money spent on? I have no idea. It could be that this was a one-time cost used to get all the back-issues of AAA journals digitized, or it could be that the AAA is going to may US$800,000 dollars a year to do digital publishing. The truth is probably somewhere in-bewtween. I suspect that it tends close to US$160,000 than US$800,000. But if costs remain even half of what they were in 2004, then it looks like going digital will prove to be more costly than staying in paper. Even if we eliminate paper journals and costs of digital distribution are minimal, the AAA will only reach about the break-even point financially, and at the cost of loosing paper journals entirely. And, of course, doing both paper and digital will be even more costly than doing just one or the other.

What this discussion of expenses reveals is how incredibly expensive it has been to shift to AnthroSource. The cost of the AAA gong digital bring to the foreground one of John Willinsky’s other main suggestions for cutting costs—using open source software to produce and publish digital journals. I am sure that getting AnthroSource off the ground would be an expensive proposition regardless of who was doing it. But I do have to wonder whether the proprietary system UC Press built the AAA was the cheapest option available.

I have no idea whether the AAA considered open source solutions when creating AnthroSource. I don’t know what the recurrent budget for AnthroSource is, if anything. I even don’t know what the future is for income for AnthroSource. It may, for instance, be more expensive than paper but also more proftable if AnthroSource attracts more subscribers and/or charges more. As a result of this uncertainty it is difficult to figure out what is going on. As a member of the AnthroSource Steering Cmmittee I think I can (and plan on) getting some more information about this. But I will probably not be allowed to share it with you here on SavageMinds since not all the stuff discussed in the committee is meant for public consumption. And, unfortunately, AnthroSource has not provided much information to AAA members about what it is and what it does. The 2004 report of the AnthroSource Steering Committee is pretty abstract, and the repot of the AnthroSource Working Group is downright gnomic. I hope that this will change, since my (incredibly brief) time on the committee has made me realize that the people working on AnthroSource are very smart and clued in, and that the problems they are grappling with are much more complex than I had initially anticipated. So I and will encourage the committee to be more forthcoming—the data from the budget is not that encouraging, but I suspect that if AnthroSource opened up more then we’d all see it was hiding its light under a bushel.

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