In principle, our ideas don’t stop being right if they’re spelled wrong. In practice, academics get incredibly freaked out if you don’t adhere to the bizarre and illogical orthographical conventions of English. Copyediting is an indispensable part of creating open access anthropology, and it requires highly skilled people — our usual strategy of creating open source software to replace the Big Content’s technical infrastructure won’t work here.

This is the biggest challenge we face, and there isn’t a good solution: copyediting requires time, concentration, and training in a unique way of looking at texts. Open access works by leveraging the human resources of academy, but academics often lack the unique skill of copyediting. Given the amount of attention the rest of the publication process requires, we lack the time as well. Where are we going to get a cadre of cheap, high quality copy editors?

I see a couple of possible solutions.

The first and perhaps least likely solution would be to expand our existing model of copyediting. All over the country in little nooks and crannies universities, presses and professors have go-to people who they give copyediting work to: graduate students who have dropped out and support themselves on odd jobs, secretaries who have copyediting superpowers, and others who are in the margins of the academic system. With the Internet there might be a way to find these people and hook them up with work. If pooled the needs of several projects, perhaps that would be enough to clothe and feed a pool of copyeditors? If there was such a network it might attract work that we don’t even know is out there yet.

This approach could be combined with other means to encourage copyediting: making it a legitimate destination for subventions, combining it with lectureships or perhaps other quasi-academic positions like lab management or webpage design, and so forth. In addition to making it more explicitly part of the administrative work of the academy, we need to work to change our culture and to legitimate — indeed, to celebrate! — the incredible work that copyeditors do.

The second option is similar to the first: crowdsourcing. Break the job into many small pieces, use some technology to make it easy to collaborate, and then get many volunteers to do it. If the costs were very low — in the DIY range that homebrew open access projects usually run in — we could even pay people. In fact, this might be a way to help people discover their inner copyeditor and thus stimulate interest in solution #1.

Key to the second option would be to partner with groups that are working on existing solutions to this problem. For scanning OA documents and proofreading the OCR Ye olde and noble house of distributed proofreaders comes to mind as an example here of a great success we could latch on to: they want content and volunteers, we want an infrastructure to copyedit our work. I would say it’s a match made in heaven, but the devil is in the details on this one and we’d need a test run to see how it would work in practice. Another possible solution is Soylent, which I know less about but which looks promising and might very well be bent to our evil purposes if we wanted to actually copyedit, say, journal articles.

Going this route could be a way to turn average academics into copyeditors. It would require asking existing copyeditors to get used to a new and potentially less controlled system — something that might not appeal to the unique blend of selflessness and control-obsession that copyediting seems to instill in its adherents. It would be great to find a few, very small projects to get our feet wet in this area.

AF: Sherry Ortner sent me a link to her article on neoliberalism that opens the online journal you founded and edit, Anthropology of this Century (AOTC), which debuted in 2011. It’s got an awesome title. There are 88 more years in ‘this century.’ This is different from a journal with the same title coming out in 1988, which would necessarily be diachronically focused. So how do you conceptualize AOTC’s predictive focus on the emergent? Do you see its status as an online and open journal in terms of this predictive and emergent capacities?

CS: I find myself wondering what anthropology is going to do THIS century, by contrast with the interesting things it did in the last one. Anthropological theory has been stuck for a while, in my view. We need iconoclasts like Edmund Leach – who said that accumulating cultural descriptions for the sake of it isn’t good enough. Obviously, a handful of articles in AOTC won’t sort out the future of the discipline. But I’m hoping we might help a few colleagues think more clearly about some important questions. As for the open/online format, the main advantage is that AOTC is there for anybody to read, including the many anthropologists who lack easy access to journals and other publications. Our latest issue, which went live last week, has already been looked at by people in 84 countries.

AF: AOTC is mainly composed of reviews of anthropological work. Is this because you’ve found this an important component lacking in the anthropological journalistic sphere or because it lends itself nicely to the online format?

CS: It’s easy to find reviews of anthropology books. Having said this, you’ll almost never find them in London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, etc. And the ones at the back of anthropology journals tend to be short, and are written for specialists. Our reviews are longer than average, a bit more reflective, and we’re basically saying that ANY of them should, in theory, be of interest to ANY anthropologist – as well as to scholars and students from other disciplines. So, for example, you might not especially care about Mongolian shamans, but in the latest AOTC there’s a fascinating article by James Laidlaw (a review of Morten Pedersen’s new book) that should, I think, convince you that they are worth thinking about.

AF: I am probably overdetermining the journal as a form of critique but to me AOTC represents the application of much of our theoretical antagonism against closed and privatized journals. Am I overdetermining this analysis? What is the ideological origins of AOTC in relationship to the present state of academic publishing?

CS: The current academic publishing model doesn’t work very well for anthropology, in my view. Obviously things are going to change in the next few years – perhaps dramatically – because of the internet. Having said this, there are costs involved in supplying outstanding content to readers, regardless of the delivery method. So I think some degree of commercialization or subsidization (which is really hidden commercialization) is inevitable in academic publishing.

AF: I noticed on your online list of publication that you cite your written work at AOTC. You are considering it a legitimate location for publishing. How would you like AOTC to develop as a space for publication for the professionalization of anthropologists?

CS: We are not going to start publishing large numbers of peer reviewed research articles on AOTC, if that’s what you mean. That is a huge amount of work, and we don’t have the institutional backup for it. Our niche, at least for now, is just to comment on research published elsewhere. So to an aspiring anthropologist I would say: you should try to write an important and ambitious book so that we can publish a glowing review of it on ANTHROPOLOGY OF THIS CENTURY.

AF: AOTC’s design is vivid with its playfully bricolaged nomeclature set against its stark black background. It’s an excellent and simple example of stylistic possibilities available for journals online. You must have an excellent team on the design side of things. What’s AOTC’s style logic?

CS: All of the design ideas in AOTC come from one person, the art director, Ed Linfoot. Luckily, he is very, very good at what he does.  The logic is in his brain.

AF: Its a simple one but one of the affordances that internet publishing has over hardcopy publishing is the capacity for fast dialogic commentary and the modeling of a virtual public sphere. As one of the moderators of this blog Savage Minds, I understand the work entailed in moderating commentary but I still find it a necessary component of online writing. Considering this, why don’t you allow comments on the articles?

CS: The question you ask is one that I anticipated. Not only does AOTC not have serious interactivity (e.g. readers’ forums etc.), we don’t even have a letters page! This may seem odd for an online open access journal. But if people want to respond to our articles my advice is that they should stop – think carefully – and then publish a response elsewhere, either on a blog (such as yours), or in an article, or a book. The instant response is in some ways antithetical to scholarship. I’m not a big fan of it, except in the context of research seminars, such as the anthropology seminar we hold on Friday mornings at the LSE. There I can be extremely critical of someone’s ideas but this is followed by us having a drink together, and then lunch, which obviously transforms the whole interaction.

AF: I am sure others might like to replicate your experiment with AOTC. In terms of cultural and social capital what does it take to pull off a journal like this?

CS: You need a lot of friends.

We at the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), along with our colleagues at the American Anthropological Association and other learned societies, have taken a stand against open access. Here at the AIA, we particularly object to having such a scheme imposed on us from the outside when, in fact, during the AIA’s more than 130-year history, we have energetically supported the broad dissemination of knowledge, and do so through our extensive program of events and lectures for the general public and through our publications. Our mission statement explicitly says, “Believing that greater understanding of the past enhances our shared sense of humanity and enriches our existence, the AIA seeks to educate people of all ages about the significance of archaeological discovery.” We have long practiced “open access.”

Really? No. Really? But wait, there’s more:

While it may be true that the government finances research, it does not fund the arduous peer-review process that lies at the heart of journal and scholarly publication, nor the considerable effort beyond that step that goes into preparing articles for publication. Those efforts are not without cost. When an archaeologist publishes his or her work, the final product has typically been significantly improved by the contributions of other professionals such as peer reviewers, editors, copywriters, photo editors, and designers. This is the context in which the work should appear. (Almost all scholarly books and many articles lead off with a lengthy list that acknowledges these individuals.)

And then there is this:

We fear that this legislation would prove damaging to the traditional venues in which scientific information is presented by offering, for no cost, something that has considerable costs associated with producing it. It would undermine, and ultimately dismantle, by offering for no charge, what subscribers actually support financially—a rigorous publication process that does serve the public, because it results in superior work.

I was going to write a really scathing response about how evil this is. But really, I don’t think i can do it. President Bartman and the archaeologists are running scared, just as the AAA is. The issue comes down to something much more fundamental than open access, and I direct this at faculty, students and other members of scholarly societies:

Do you want your scholarly society to survive?

I mean this honestly. I, for instance, do not. I no longer give a flute about the AAA. I’ve tried my hardest to make the error of their ways visible to them, but failed. I’ll miss the meetings and the swag, but they now do nothing else but suck money out of my university library and give it to Wiley Blackwell. Game over.

But I undestand if you don’t feel that way, and if you don’t then it really is a problem that our scholarly societies can only exist by making our research *less* accessible and available. We need to find another way.

Here are some issues to consider if you are an archaeologist (or belong to any scholarly society):

1) No one is imposing anything on anyone yet. AIA is writing this in opposition to the recently re-introduced FRPPA legislation that would extend public access to federally funded research at all agencies, not just the NIH (which currently requires that published research funded by taxpayers be available to taxpayers 12 months after it is published). They owe it to their membership to explain this, rather than spreading fear and uncertainty by being vague and threatening. But instead, it falls to me to clarify it. If there are in fact any archaeologists who do their work with taxpayer money, and if that legislation passes, then yes, those faculty members would be required to make a *version* of their research publicly accessible. It does not force publishers to do anything at all, and it certainly does not affect the quality they claim to create.

2) Holding public lectures and events, and publishing journals, while laudable, is not the same thing “open access”. It is disingenuous and misleading to confuse the issue this way. Open access, as it is used by the other 99.9% of people who use the term, refers to nothing more than whether or not academic research publications are openly available to the public. Having a mission statement that says “we intend to educate people” is also not the same as open access.

3) It is absolutely, 100%, totally and completely correct that high-quality publishing is expensive. BUT THIS IS NOT THE POINT OF OPEN ACCESS. If I could make my letters more all-caps I would. No one is saying that open access makes publishing cheaper. This is also misleading.

4) Follow the money. Where does all that money come from that makes AIA’s publications so fantastic? From university libraries. It is libraries who buy subscriptions to academic journals, not individuals, not businesses, not people at Barnes and Noble, or people passing a news-stand in Kinchasa. Elite university libraries pay for those articles to be great. Who writes and reviews those articles? University researchers. Not independently wealthy archaeology connoisseurs, not well-paid corporate researchers, but university researchers. Add it up: the content is produced and reviewed (and read) by university researchers. The subscription fees are paid by university libraries. Scholarly societies publication programs are 99% dependent on universities for their revenue. What they make in dues and other fundraising, especially in the case of something like AIA and AAA, is dwarfed by this publication program. Now ask your local librarians how much more money they have to support scholarly societies whose publications are getting more expensive, more difficult to access, and more tedious to negotiate… you’ll get an earful.

5) What’s the solution? Maybe the solution is for faculty to work with their universities to find ways to support a scholarly society without the condition being the restriction of research availability. There is enough money in the system to be creative about this, but not so long as our scholarly societies are extracting it from our libraries and giving it to for profit publishers who, unlike the AIA, do not make our work superior.

It’s unfortunate that scholarly societies are in this position, but it is evil that they are opposing something that only enriches the already super-rich for-profit publishers who are busy buying up scholarly society publications. It may already be too late to save our scholarly societies and the publications they offer. I hope not.

One reader suggested that “section groups” within the AAA might organize in order to jointly fund a new OA venue. Unfortunately the section groups have an uneven track record when it comes to cooperation, especially when money is involved. If you’ve witnessed factionalism play out in your home department then you’re no doubt aware that academics are all too willing to collectively poke themselves in the eye instead of cooperating.

But what really nixes the deal is that section groups do not have direct control of their finances. Of course they may set dues for their membership and their executive boards oversee the allocation of those funds for various objectives such as awards, publications, and section conferences. However, the sections do not keep their own bank accounts separate from the AAA. The parent organization holds the section group’s money for them. If funds are needed they must request that the AAA write checks on their behalf.

This passage, 4(h), from the AAA bylaws on the permissible actions of sections is also illuminating. A section, “May engage in publishing and program activities appropriate to its purposes; it may appoint editors and other agents of the Section and set publication and program policies for the Section, so long as the policies are not inimical to the interests of the Association” (my emphasis). Are we so sure that the Executive Board does not perceive OA as inimical to the interests of the Association?

Interest groups offer another way for AAA members to organize themselves and may prove helpful to our cause, at least in the near term. Interest groups differ from sections in terms of their size (minimum membership for a section is 225, for an interest group 25). Interest groups may not set dues, so any AAA member may join one at no cost – although the interest group can charge fees for services provided if the AAA Executive Board okays it. Whereas sections are required to have elected offices and a President, there are no hierarchical political structures imposed on the interest groups. Sections must compose a charter that defines their governance, but interest groups do not.

The major difference in terms of the two is that sections have more political clout within the Association because each of the sections send a representative, usually the President, to a council of sections. Although it is an uneven playing field (the larger, more prestigious sections have more clout) this committee does send a representative that reports directly to the Executive Board. Interest groups do not participate in this.

Sections also have the ability to sponsor conference panels, another way in which they can steer intellectual debate and communicate new knowledge. Interest groups cannot do this on their own, although I see no reason why an interest group could not collaborate with or otherwise persuade a section group to sponsor a panel or roundtable on their behalf. For example, after 9-11 there was a Justice Action Network of Anthropologists that (I think) overlapped with the leadership of the Society for the Anthropology of North America.

Are there 25 people out there interested in forming an OA interest group within the AAA?

The purpose of such a group, at least according to its description in the bylaws, is “networking and/or informal exchanges of information.” So we could hang out together, basically. It could be a way to meet others who are into OA too. We could submit an abstract for a roundtable at an annual meeting of the AAA. Certainly the fact that its free and without an organized leadership is in sympathy with the principles of OA.

Who knows, maybe if we really rocked this interest group thing it could be a stepping stone to a section group somewhere down the line?

And really, what’s the worst that could happen? A flash in the pan that is unable to sustain itself as a lasting organization? If its the case that we can’t effectively organize ourselves in meatspace, then we just go back online and blog. No worries.

I bring up the idea of forming an interest group because at this point I’m still searching for an answer to the underlying question of what to do next. Are we better off pushing for OA within the AAA, or should we seek to promote OA independent of our professional association? We could, for example, seek to build alliances with someone else, the SFAA or CASCA perhaps, and continue to support existing OA venues or start new ones.

But if we visualize a day when American Anthropologist and Cultural Anthropology are free and open to everyone we’re going to need a way to get our foot in the door at the AAA and try to turn, however slowly, that big ship around.

You can read the AAA bylaws here.

The time is gone when anthropologists could find solace in the claim that our main civic duty–and the justification for our public support–was the constant reaffirmation that the Bongobongo are “humans just like us.” Every single term of that phrase is now publicly contested terrain, caught between the politics of identity and the turbulence of global flows. Too many of the Bongobongo are now living next door, and a few of them may even be anthropologists presenting their own vision of their home societies, or studying their North Atlantic neighbors. The North Atlantic natives who reject them do so with a passion. Those who do accept them do not need anthropologists in the welcoming committee.
–Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations (2003:137)

Trouillot is then outlining a vision of anthropological duties and risks, include making native voices more full interlocutors, identifying the ultimate targets of anthropological discourse, and publicizing the stakes of anthropological exchange.

To what degree do Open Access efforts–specifically Hau–move us in that direction?

Allow me to first state that I am very encouraged by Hau and its potential. I also do not want to take away from the many interesting comments. However, from that discussion, I am left wondering:

1. As Rex identified in his initial post, “I don’t see a role for indigenous anthropology (i.e. by and for indigenous anthropologists) in this program at all.” David Graeber challenged this, but Rex challenged back–and so it seems the question is still on the table: To what degree might open access also be a place where indigenous anthropologists, native voices, and internal others have a chance to become more full interlocutors in anthropological conversations?

2. Are we “identifying clearly the ultimate listeners,” those Trouillot called “the Sepulvedas of our times” (2003:136)? Hau admirably aims to make “anthropology itself relevant again far beyond its own borders” (2011:viii) and is specifically launched against insularity and triviality. At the same time, the observation of “parochial irrelevance” is followed by lamenting that the Deleuzians, Speculative Realists, Lacanians, and Foucauldians are not taking classic anthropology into account, “a colossal failure of nerve” (2011:x). But are these the Sepulvedas of our times?

3. Trouillot was not talking about Open Access, but he did discuss accessibility: “Media claims notwithstanding, the influence of academic research that could be labeled politically ‘progressive’ has decreased–if only because these works are increasingly inaccessible to lay readers” (2003:137). And so I here wonder–even if every article in American Anthropologist were declared Open Access today–to what degree would it make a difference for the Bongobongo and the Sepulvedas of our times? I do not mean to be too harsh–Trouillot recognized the need for “a technical vocabulary to which research contributes and without which it cannot be sustained” (2003:137, and of course Trouillot’s Global Transformations is rather out-of-reach for many lay readers)–but it is worth thinking about how Open Acess and accessibility could and should interact.

This also seems related to Rex’s analogy to Academia as Music Industry. “Platinum hits” may be rarer, but the irrepentant Sepulvedas of our times keep churning out multi-nationally financed blockbusters.

But what happens when mp3 proliferate, multiple indie labels spring up, and the center falls out of genres like, for instance, hip hop, as they fragment into multiple different audiences and communities? Revenues drop, for one thing, and the publishing industry attempts to litigate or legislate away the new-found freedom that these communities have, attempting to make sharing illegal so that they can continue to profit from the scarcity they are architecting into what was formerly an open system.

For music listeners, rather than publishers, an issue of ‘importance’ arises — how can you tell that the assistant musician in your department is ‘important’ and deserves tenure in an era when platinum hits are getting rarer and rarer? What counts as importance is itself shifting. I can see a number of ways out of this dilemma but whatever route departments chose will require a choice. And standing up and deciding for yourself how to handle something as important as the professional credentialing of the professoriate is a big challenge which requires a lot of confidence in one’s own academic judgement. Which means, of course, that it is the sort of decision that the vast majority of us will hope is made by someone else! But at the end of the day, that is the sort of decision will have to be made.

A quick look at the bios of the contributors and editors to HAU will reveal that it is in many ways a Chicago-Oxbridge production, but with a continental twist. In many ways, HAU represents what people at some of the most prestigious institutions of anthropology have been thinking for some time, but the journal ‘opens up’ that thought to the public by making their work open access. The result is something unique: a journal with a strong, almost parochial character which is also transparent to a fault.

As someone in this network (but not really involved in the production of HAU) I recognize this take on ‘ethnographic theory’ as a species of what they call in France the ‘sciences humaines’: an approach to knowing the human that is rigorous, humanistic, and often places anthropology in conversation with philosophy rather than, say, evolutionary biology. At least this is how it seems to me.

What Ethnographic Theory Is, afaik

So what is ethnographic theory? According to da Col and Graeber “a conversion of stranger-concepts [that entails]… the destruction of any firm sense of place that can only be resolved by the imaginative forumulation of novel worldviews” (vii-viii).

The goal of anthropology on this account (afaik) is to take alien concepts, understand them, and then see the way they sort of make sense from our point of view, but don’t quite. Another kind of anthropology might try to slot alien concepts into a broader conceptual system, to say “this is a variety of exchange” or “this is a kind of taboo”. Ethnographic theory, on the other hand, wants to resist this easy assimilation. It wants to find the part of a concept which is untranslatable and use it as a jumping-off point for our own theoretical innovation. Instead of asking “how can we best translate this concept into our own system” it asks “how can we change our system so that it can understand this concept which resists classification”.

That’s why the journal is called HAU — Mauss’s analysis of the Maori concept of the ‘spirit of the gift’ is the paradigmatic example of this sort of ethnographic theory. And the reason that they called the ‘HAU’ instead of ‘SPIRIT OF THE GIFT’ is that the original Maori word includes meaning and resonances that the English translation doesn’t. And those resonances and meanings are what are productive, what produce innovation in us. Or better, what elicit it or pull it out of us by their foreigness.

It’s an interesting idea, no? To me the idea is very attractive, and as a Chicago-trained anthropologist I will now do the greatest honor I can to something I appreciate and enjoy: attempt to destroy it. Sorry Giovanni — it’s what they trained me to do!

Some Questions and Concerns

Part of what is appealing about the notion of ethnographic theory is the way that it cunningly reverses what many anthropologists think our discipline is supposed to do: make the strange familiar. Instead, the goal is to make the strange as strange as possible — to honor, welcome, embrace, and perhaps even emphasize its strangeness. In America, this smacks of ‘orientalism’ which we all automatically know is ‘bad’. But here, intriguingly, othering involves moral validation.

This stance is familiar to those of us who remember the bad old days of the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate. That debate was basically about how best to honor indigenous people: Sahlins argued we should do it by emphasizing and validating their legitimate difference, while Obeyesekere argued this task was best accomplished by emphasizing our common humanity.

Both, in other words, represented the two moments of recognition that Charles Taylor talks about in his essay on “The Politics of Recognition”. Contrary to what you might expect from the subject positions of the two authors (Obeyesekere the third world elite, Sahlins the first world working-class intellectual) it is Sahlins who pursues a politics of difference and Obeyesekere who pursues a politics of universalism.

In many ways, this emphasis on recognizing otherness is akin to certain flavors of poststructural politics, such as a politics of performance a la Judith Butler, where the goal is to destablize hegemonic norms by revealing the excess which they must elide in order to make themselves taken for granted. It is for this reason that I — and probably I alone — see Butler and Sahlins as kindred spirits. But that is a topic for another day.

Many influences by Sahlins (such as Ira Bashkow and Rupert Stasch) have continued to pursue a way to recuperate a morally positive recognition of difference, and I see HAU as operating within this genealogy, even if it lacks the Yankee obsession with politics and relevance.

Looking ethnographic theory with Manoa eyes (eyes keenly focused on the politics of Pacific and Indigenous scholarship) I have my doubts as well. In an extremely obvious way, this is a project that engages indigenous ideas, not actual indigenous people (much less indigenous scholars). Some might object that the authors clearly state that they are “speaking of alien concepts, which are by no means limited to those drawn from strange and romantic places” (vii). But, to be frank, does anybody actually buy this?

I don’t see a role for indigenous anthropology (i.e. by and for indigenous anthropologists) in this program at all. Nor do I see — as one would expect if the program was committed to ethnography everywhere and not just ‘exotic’ spaces — any account of how one could do ethnography of their own first-world location. Here again HAU’s title is telling: cultural difference seems necessary, not incidental, to the program. When we see a piece on standard average european concepts made strange, maybe I will change my tune — if, that is, that piece doesn’t fall into the familiar trap of making the first-world working class ‘the other’. An essay on how the concept of ‘monster trucks’ expands our anthropological imagination will not cut it.

I feel clichéd saying this, but the concept of ethnographic theory also seems to ignore the real and enduring fact of colonialism, and the political economic processes that make the kinds of subjects like ‘ethnographers’ and ‘informants’ who in fact are commensurable with each other because of shared (colonial) world-historical experience. Just how alien are we from one another? And if the political effects of eliding the colonialism inside of white anthropologists are palatable, what do we think of an approach that, in some variations, decries Pacific islanders as inauthentic for not conforming to the lifeways described in books written a century ago?

The negative stereotype is this: ‘Ethnographic theory’ as a parlor game in which elite academic weave ever more obscurantist essays for each other inspired by their brush with ‘the exotic’ in the name of a project of getting intellectually high. I don’t think ethnographic theory does this all the time, or necessarily will do this (although frankly, sometimes at conferences I can’t help but get this feeling as people invoke white holes, quantum physics, and Papuan longhouses). Indeed, one of the best parts about HAU is that it might broaden the horizons of those who are used to doing ethnographic theory inside the ivory tower, thus opening it up not only to ‘us’ but opening ‘them’ up by exposure to ‘us’.

What Ethnographic Theory Doesn’t Do

The authors of HAU are not interested in many things that social scientists could do or aspire to do — indeed, some of their project was formulated specifically in reaction to these aspirations. For the sake of giving Michael E. Smith the opportunity to remind us once again that he has resigned from the AAA, I offer a list of some things Ethnographic theory can’t or doesn’t want to do:

Generalize in the Name of Science: This is not generalizing social science. It doesn’t seek to explain anything.

Intervene: Ethnographic theory does not aim to be ‘useful’ in either the lefty applied/emancipatory fight the power kind of way, or the right-wing Project Camelot/HTS kind of way. It doesn’t seem to be ‘good’ for anything except possibly expanding your consciousness, which some may claim has some sort of broad effect.

Be Public: Let’s face it, the style of much of this writing can be off-putting even for academics. This is not something intended for a general audience.

Collaborate: Fieldwork may involve a deep appreciation of local communities, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of cowriting with them.

Of course, few people want an anthropology that does all of these things, and there’s nothing wrong with not doing them. I include this list only to describe some of the desiderata that people might want in anthropology and how they are situated in relation to the project of ethnographic theory.

Further Reading

The foreward to HAU is very, very short and I chose it to publicize the journal as well as provide something that is a bite-sized chunk of this school of thought. Fuller treatments are abound, and many of them are open access. Tony Crook and Justin Schaffner’s article in HAU “Roy Wagner’s ‘Chess of Kinship’: An Opening Gambit” is a great overview of this school of thought (I thought about assigning it), especially if you know anything about Melanesia. Frankly, you will probably get more out of it than Roy’s article itself. Over at Tipití, another great open access journal, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation” is a great over view of VdC’s thought, which directly influenced the forward to HAU. Let’s face it — although open access anthropology can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look, some of the best and most cutting-edge stuff is out there, as HAU well demonstrates.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, I think the idea of ethnographic theory is exciting, coherent, and offers a way forward for anthropology — and when was the last time you said that about something published in American Ethnologist? But at the same time I feel a little ambivalent, and I’m not completely sold. I’d be interested in hearing your comments and feedback. I’ve tried to be critical but gracious, and I hope that I’ve been successful. So please do the same and keep the tone constructive — remember, the authors are listening, and even well-meaning criticism can come across the wrong way on Teh Internetz, so let’s try to encourage some collegiality here.

I’ll keep this post up until Wednesday, when I’ll make another reading suggestion based on how the conversation in the comments goes. Thanks for reading and thanks for discussing!

As an up and coming academic, I’m willing to put my career on the line and promise to only publish in open access journals. Putting my career on the line is a very real threat, since many departments look for publications in key (generally not open access) journals such as American Anthropologist when hiring. However, I’m confident that the people who will be evaluating me will overlook those issues if they understand why I made this choice, and will evaluate my work on its own merits and not on the journal that publishes it.

I wish I could do the same, but unfortunately I can’t and I wish to share the reason why. The fact is that in much of the world (and in the US as well) there has been a move towards quantification in determining academic promotion and tenure. Taiwan, where I live and work, is has been particularly bad in this regard, as they struggle to raise the number of Taiwanese universities listed in international university rankings.

Taiwan does not have tenure, but one has a series of mandatory reviews as one proceeds from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor. The guidelines for these reviews are mandated in a very top-down way from the Ministry of Education (MoE) and there is little leeway in how these rules are interpreted at the university level. (One of the legacies of the martial law period in Taiwan is that the personnel office reports directly to the MoE, not the university president.) However, one way in which universities do vary with the official rules is in the informal requirement that professors have a minimum number of publications in SSCI listed journals (or SCI for the sciences). Universities thus compete to make the official rules stricter rather than more flexible.

On a side note, these requirements are interesting because SSCI journals are mostly in English, so Taiwan has created a separate Chinese-language TSSCI list, but they are counted less than the SSCI journals (even though they are often harder to get published in). Taiwan is somewhat unique in having the TSSCI list—universities in Hong Kong and Singapore focus more on SSCI. (Taiwanese academic Albert Tzeng has done some research on this.)

In any case, the problem I face is that I already struggle under the burden that my documentary filmmaking garners me zero points under this quantitative regime. Even book chapters count for very little here. And if the top journals in your field are not SSCI, tough luck. Moreover I don’t know of any SSCI listed Open Access journals in anthropology. I know there are some in other fields, but none that I know of in anthropology. My hope is that HAU will eventually earn this distinction, but that will take some time. Till then, I’m afraid I can’t follow Jeremey’s brave example. To keep my job I have to strive to publish a certain minimum of articles in SSCI publications, after which I will have the freedom to publish elsewhere if I please. I’m sharing this so that OA advocates can be more aware of some of the constraints scholars in other countries might face in submitting work to their journals.

Where is our discipline going? The good news is that because we can’t currently answer this question, we have a chance to try to do so in open and transparent forums.

In other words, we need to not just notice open access publications, and just resolve to cite them, we need to read them and talk about them: the key activity that comes between these two moments. The key to publicizing open access scholarship is to make it part of the conversation.

I’d like to get the ball rolling by trying an experiment. Every week for the foreseeable future I will (if all goes well) point to a piece of open access scholarship and suggest that everyone read it, say on Wednesday. On Friday I’ll post an entry saying what I think of it, and ask you all to comment. I’ll let the comments run until Wednesday, when I’ll post another piece. Sound easy enough, eh?

There’s no better place to start than HAU, which as come out of the gate so strongly. In particular, David Graeber and Giovanni Da Col’s introduction to the first volume is well worth reading for the vivid prose and possibly-groundbreaking paradigm of ‘ethnographic theory’. Best of all, the presentation is very brief, only three pages long. Are you telling me you can’t read three pages before Friday? So come on and grab an OA PDF of the introduction, read the first three pages (and of course as much of the rest as you want) and stop by the blog on Friday afternoon (Honolulu time) to tell me what you think. Who knows, it could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

People have suggested some concrete steps to take in the mean time, some positive and some negative. On the whole, I think the positive ones will be more successful (although boycotting peer review duties for AAA publications sounds like a good idea), even if the enormity of their task — reformatting the entire communication system for our discipline — is almost ridiculously daunting.

I’ve talked in the past about some of the things that need to be put into place — for instance, a ‘civil service’ of people to produce journals, a way to alert people when new articles are published. A lot more needs to take place, but today I want to focus on just two of them: open access needs to acquire some cultural capital, and it needs to demonstrate that its production values are as high as those provided by Wiley.

(that shouldn’t be too hard — once again, the latest issue of Cultural Anthropology is available on Wiley’s site, but not on AnthroSource. I pointed out this problem ten months ago and it’s still not fixed. So much for ‘access to content’.)

It’s for this reason that I think we need to revisit and pay close attention to the inaugural issue of HAU. Compared to other disciplines, anthropology has not had much trouble taking Open Access seriously. Many of the au courant theorists embrace the new and made their names with genre experimentation. I remember how gratified I was by Paul Rabinow’s attendance at an early open access gathering at AAAs, and I remain gratified by Michael Fischer’s continued interest in the movement. But crazy-ass postmodernists are one thing, HAU is another. This is a journal that includes pieces by Marshall Sahlins (who has supported copyright reform for ages) and Laura Nader. HAU is so important because it represents the way the opposite end of anthropology also embraces open access. Think about this for a second: when was the last time Marshall Sahlins and Michael Fischer agreed on anything? At this point I really think that it is safe to say that the only people who firmly oppose open access are not anthropologists, but the employees at the American Anthropological Association who are hanging on to an ever-more unsustainable business model which drives them into the arms of for-profit publishers.

HAU is not perfect — yes, I’ve found a few typos here and there — but there is no doubt that it has all of the polish and shine of a professional journal. And the occasional typos it does have just make us ask: how much do we really care about typos? Are we willing to ransom our discipline’s future to the need to make sure Wiley pays someone to copy edit our publications? Personally, I’m not. But that’s because I’m one of the worst spellers on the planet. So cracking the nut of copy editing is something to add to the to-do list. Or rather, HAU get’s to add to the to-do list, since they are the trailblazers in this respect.

Beyond the journal articles, HAU’s archival section is a third important aspect of the journal. Most of the time when we free up classic content we put it in a repository and then people hear about it…. how? By getting the rights to classic material and publishing it open access in a journal, HAU combines the best of repository building with the alerting and discovery functions of a serial. Instead of “we now have 10,000 articles in our repository” they can say “this month, why not read this classic article by Leach?” It’s a great way to bring stuff to people’s attention — read: shove it in their PDF libraries — even if they don’t have the time to read it right away.

HAU has been received great fanfare because it is the first “high-end” (as the editors put it) open access general journal of anthropology. Is it all it’s cracked up to be? The answer, as far as I can tell, is: yes. Of course, I can’t really say my endorsement is made with a great deal of objectivity. True, I’ve only been peripherally involved in the journal: I wrote a blurb for them (which makes me a member of the ‘editorial board’, apparently) and I’ve had lunch with one of the editors. But my connection lies deeper, because many of the authors involved are in my personal network.

So rather than take my word for it, why don’t you see for yourself and check out the journal today?

We’ve tried to explain why it is important.

We’ve written a lot about it.

But nothing seems to have changed.

What can we do to make anthropologists care about open access? To make them care what the AAA says about open access?

[This is an open thread for constructive suggestions about how mobilize for open access, not a place to rehash old debates about the merits of open access. Thanks!]

But, in case you don’t feel like scrolling right now, how about a couple of nice selections from the AAA response:

We write today to make the case that while we share the mutual objective of enhancing the public understanding of scientific enterprise and support the wide dissemination of materials that can reach those in the public who would benefit from such knowledge (consistent with our association’s mission), broad public access to information currently exists, and no federal government intervention is currently necessary.

Also:

We know of no research that demonstrates a problem with the existing system for making the content of scholarly journals available to those who might benefit from it.

Emphasis mine in both cases.  Take the time to check out the comments, which you can download as a PDF and share with your friends and colleagues (just an idea).  Comments?  Thoughts?

Update: Here is the direct link to the PDF of the AAA comment.

Update II: A few reactions from around the web:

Daniel Lende: American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand Against Open Access

Dienekes Pontikos: The American Anthropological Association opposes open science

Michael E. Smith: American Anthropological Association joins the dark side of the force (with appropriate imagery)

Update III: For some background on what’s wrong with the RWA, check out this post by Barbara Fister

Update IV: Kristina Killgrove makes an excellent point about grad students who find themselves outside of the system, here.

Carr starts off the post by expressing his concern that academia is using practices like peer review as a way to segregate itself from wider audiences.  He argues that peer review is, at heart, not a bad thing, since it provides a way of vetting ideas in an important way.  But, he writes:

the practice of peer review in contemporary academia has turned really problematic. Most respected journals are more expensive than ever, making access to them the near-sole province of academics with access to libraries willing to purchase such journals. The pressure to publish increases all the time, both in rising demands on individual researchers (my requirements for tenure were much tougher than most requirements from a generation before) and in terms of an ever-expanding academic community.

One of the deeper issues, Carr argues, is that peer review can be riddled with politics that end up “slowing the flow of innovative ideas into academia” because those ideas may “run contrary to previously-accepted ideas upon which many reviewers might have done their work.”  Ultimately, Carr writes, these issues with peer review certainly don’t do much to help with the public image of academia (although he is speaking more specifically to geographers here, this applies to academics in general).

Here’s Carr’s solution, or, at least, his ideas for a way to start digging out of this trench:

So, a modest proposal: senior colleagues of mine in Geography – yes, those of you who are full professors at the top of the profession, who have nothing to lose from a change in the status quo at this point – who will get together and identify a couple of open-access, very low-cost journals and more or less pronounce them valid (probably in part by blessing them with a few of your own papers to start). Don’t pick the ones that want to charge $1500 in publishing fees – those are absurd. But pick something different . . .

Again, although he is speaking directly to other geographers here, I think this proposal applies to and should resonate with the anthropological crowd as well.  For Carr, such a move would be a critical step for opening up academic publishing to wider possibilities, conversations, and collaborations.  I agree, and I think he is right that certain established faculty members are in an important position for inciting and promoting change.  It’s a matter of interest and desire.

At the same time, coming from the position of a graduate student, I can’t help but wonder how those of us on the, well, lower rungs of the academic ladder, can do to actively foster these kinds of changes.  Since we are all encouraged to publish publish publish, maybe it would be a good idea to start thinking more strategically about how and why we are publishing, and more importantly WHO we decide to publish with.  If every graduate student and new professor is constantly upholding the current regime by basically giving up the fruits of their labor (and effectively providing certain publishers with a never-ending stream of valuable products), why WOULD anything change?  So, in the end, I think that Carr is definitely right, but that many of these changes are going to have to start taking place on multiple fronts as well.

On that note, check this out.

The other side of the ‘can’ question is one of publicity: behind closed doors someone somewhere within the AAA may be giving the nod to whatever lobbiest we are allied with to oppose (or support) the AAA. Do they have the integrity to tell their membership what they are doing in our name? I am guessing that the answer is ‘no’, simply because any sort of public statement of this sort of back room dealing would immediately raise questions about proper procedure at AAA, which is exactly the topic these informal dealings are attempting  to avoid.

So: can the AAA successfully, publicly, and in a timely fashion announce a policy decision it has made or will we have to wait 8 months for the next AAA meetings and a DOA panel entitled something like ‘HR 3699:  An Important Topic Having To Do With $This_Year’s_Conference_Theme_Branding”?

I’m hopeful, but I’m not holding my breath.

They haven’t yet, but they are supporting SOPA, a bill that attempts to roll back Web 2.0 by making it easy to shut down entire sites like wikipedia and craigslist if they contain any user-submitted infringing material. (Here is a hypothetical airline-oriented version of SOPA, with only a little hyperbole about planes in the air.)

I think that appealing to Elsevier’s love of open scientific discourse is misguided. Individual employees there might be civic-minded, but ultimately they have $10 billion worth of reasons not to let the internet drive the costs of scientific publishing down to zero. Fortunately, their business model relies on the help of governments and academics. We can do our part to stop them by not publishing in, or refereeing for, their journals (the link describes other unethical Elsevier practices). Of course, this is easy to say in physics, harder in computer science, and a lot harder in fields like medicine.

That was via this post (thanks to Paul Manning on FB).  Michael E. Smith over at Publishing Archaeology is on it with news about related issues as well.  Now, some words from John Hawks about the NIH, public funded research, and open access:

Today’s NIH repository and the data access provisions of NSF grants were established by acts of Congress in the late 1990s. In my opinion, the agencies have in many areas gotten away with the bare minimum of compliance with these regulations. Worse, far from strengthening open access to publications and data, some in Congress want to reverse them. The current effort owes much to lobbying by academic publishers, and large campaign donations from officers and employees of those publishers to key Congressmen.

Read the rest of Hawks’ post here.  Just a few days ago, Rex wrote a post here on SM called “Why HR 3699 Sucks.”  Oh, and it does suck.  If you haven’t read it, then read it now.  He uses a nice analogy to explain what’s going on with academia and publishing, comparing the fruits of academic labor with public works like roads and highways.  Imagine if we all had to pay tolls to actually use highways and roads that are funded by public money.  Get it?  Ya, that’s what’s going on.  Here’s where Rex really lays down what’s what when it comes to the current state of open access affairs:

I can see why Big Content is afraid: we, the construction workers, engineers, and planners, are all willing to work for free to make roads for whoever wants to use them, and we have free software that basically will run all the back office stuff. Do you see the beauty of this situation? It’s the executives, not the workers, who are afraid of being laid off once people realize that 90% of the people actually building the roads can do it without the help of the guys in suits.

Now it might be true that the small amount of work that these back office types do is of a higher caliber than that done by our automated software. But it might not be — and they are working hard to make sure that we don’t find out which way the cookie crumbles.

In case you haven’t gotten the punchline yet: academic publishing is highway robbery, and academic publishers make Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist.

Now, go back and read the rest.  Be sure to read the other links too.  Then feel free to provide your own responses, thoughts, and links in the comments section here.  As John Hawks reminds us: “public comment on access to federally funded research ends this Thursday, January 12.”  From Michael E. Smith: “For more information about the bill and about WHAT U.S. CITIZENS CAN DO about this, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.”  Thoughts?