One day at work I decided to abstain from my usual time wasting behaviors of Facebook and reading the comments section of the Washington Post, and instead invest my downtime in reading the Naledi piece. Look at me! I’m reading an article for fun! Truly this is one of the most liberating experiences of being outside the academy: now I read scholarship for pleasure.

I was proud of myself for making it all the way to the end, feeling like I got it. Okay, so I skimmed over some of the anatomy stuff, but not all of it. Nothing I can’t handle with a dictionary nearby. With no one to impress with my studiousness except my fellow librarians (who are all, of course, very studious), I looked forward to sharing a bottle of wine with my wife (a biologist and “real” scientist) and telling her all about the findings. We frequently have animated discussions about human evolution, so it came as a surprise when she didn’t want to talk about Homo Naledi rather what grabbed her attention first was that the authors had chosen to go OA.

Jessica has established herself an open access skeptic in our previous kitchen conversations, which unfolded something like…

Her: So where did they publish? Didn’t you say it was the cover of Nature?

Me: No. Cover of National Geographic. Lee Berger had a NGS Explorer grant.

Her: Where then? Science?

Me: No, they went open access. Something called eLife.

Her: Really?! Wow. But why? *gives side eye*

Me: I don’t know if they’ve stated a reason.

Her: Faster to press maybe? That is one thing that the open access journals have over traditional venues.

Me: IDK, but I think it shows how OA is really mainstreaming in anthropology.

Her: Who makes that call? Like, do you think the post-docs and assistant professors on that pub were like, “Hey man, this could be the cover of Science. This could be Nature.”

Me: IDK. Do you think if you’re the sixth or seventh author on the discovery of the decade it really matters? You’re on the discovery of the decade!

Her: Maybe… But then getting on those pubs is how people get jobs. it could make a difference in whether or not someone gets tenure. Some administrator could be like, “Eh, I’ve never heard of eLife” and you get denied.

Me: But how often does that really happen? People getting denied tenure by administrators once they get past their departments.

Her: It happens all the time. Every year. All the denials (at her uni) come from administrators because everyone gets past their departments.

Me: But do people get denied tenure because of which venue they choose to publish in, or because of some bizarre, internecine political struggle?

Her: Probably more likely the latter.

Me: You are correct that accumulating the right kind of publications is all about economies of prestige, but that’s an artifact of academic culture. And culture being learned behavior is something we can change. That’s why they say “Only the Senior Faculty Can Save Us Now”. We need the senior faculty to publish OA, bringing their prestige with them to burnish these new titles to get people to change their attitudes.

Her: *looks skeptical*

-=-

The following day I’m back at work, checking out what’s on tap over at my favorite NPR talk show when lo and behold its blogger extraordinaire and Fedora model John Hawks (who is also known in some circles as being pretty good at this anthropology thing) with several of his colleagues talking about Naledi. I start thinking that what I need to do is call in to the radio show and pitch him an open access question so he can knock it out of the park.

@drshow For the study authors, you could have had a cover at Nature or Science, why did you choose an online open access journal to publish?

— Matt Thompson (@M4ttTh0mps0n) September 14, 2015

Much to my delight (and to the surprise of my co-workers as I started pumping my fists in the air) the host read my tweet.

John, who was on the phone from South Africa, had to go before the host read my question (which came second-to-last in the show), but as Jamie Shreeve, who wrote the National Geographic cover story, made clear time to publication was a major factor in the decision to go with an open access publisher. The authors did have Nature in mind. But the scale of the study, which included some 1,500 individual fossils, contributed to the complexity of navigating traditional scholarly communication venues.

h/t to the Wife, for getting it right.

-=-

One final note. As one who uses an information science framework to research open access I am often struck with how OA activists will sometimes claim that once the toll-gates come down that, naturally, articles will reach wider audiences and receive more citations. Seldom is this demonstrated empirically, which is a shame because it would be easy to do. Take something like Cultural Anthropology which was formerly toll-gated and is now OA. How did the downloads circulate before and how do they circulate now? What were citation rates like previously, what are they like now? Let’s do some good ol’ Compare and Contrast.

What is more typical is for OA advocates to merely make the assertion and not back-up their statements, and I think: If I an anthropologist was making a knowledge claim like this in their own area of expertise, this would never fly.

Almost 160000 page views &16000 downloads of our article in @eLife. Very proud of #openaccess science #homonaledi http://t.co/cl4UhLeGx5

— Lee Berger (@LeeRberger) September 15, 2015

So its cool to see Lee Berger tweeting about the success of his team’s decision to go OA with numbers to back it up. You catch a scent of the enthusiasm and excitement, which probably motivated this tweet more so than a desire to satisfy LIS bean-counters like myself, and its hard not to get wrapped in the moment too.

This is indeed a proud moment for open access science. Here’s to many more!

But the challenges here are manifold. First, cultural analysis largely remains predicated upon countering notions of the natural, as in this recent piece by Port and Mol in JRAI, which seeks “to interfere with the naturalization of ‘eating’ by comparing two modes of engaging with fruits in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.” Such accounts seem animated by a drive to disallow evolution as a reference frame for modern humans. Second, evolutionary narratives, particularly from behavioral psychologists, represent that which we often struggle against—biologically reductionist accounts of social dynamics. For that matter, the biological sciences are faring so much better than the social sciences or humanities that it seems defeatist to incorporate such modes of thinking into our accounts of the world.

But this all may be changing quickly, partly because how we understand culture is shifting, most clearly from within anthropology. Greg Downey summarizes this nicely: “Whereas anthropologists may have once thought that culture and technology buffered our species from evolutionary processes, repealing the laws of natural selection, we now are much more ambivalent.” This new found uncertainty about the buffers between culture and evolution arises partly because cultural accounts are identifying and detailing the way rapid change in our environment—in this case, endocrine disrupting chemicals affecting human reproductive dynamics—is creating new selective pressures; or, arguably, how the Anthropocene blurs the very distinction between “natural” and “artificial” forms of selection. Examples here include the recent surge of interest in epigenetics and how this provides a powerful purchase on the social reproduction of biological problems, as in Elizabeth Roberts’ current bio-ethnography in Mexico City.

Another driver within anthropology is the emergence of multispecies accounts, which increasingly feature an attention to evolutionary threats to our species, particularly in the form of mutating and adapting viruses. Recent ethnographic examples include accounts of viruses by Natalie Porter, Lyle Fearnley, Alex Nading, and Austin Zeiderman, potentially along with work on HIV, SARS, and Ebola. But more fundamentally, the multispecies turn at the beginning included calls to incorporate components of evolutionary theory in cultural analysis. Agustín Fuentes made this case in a Culture at Large forum with Dorion Sagan, in relation to a core dimension of evolutionary theory: niche construction, something very much like “place-making” and the subject of Downey’s discussion, as well. Fuentes stated, “I’d like to convince you that, as anthropologists, we should think about niche construction, the building, destroying and altering of niches in external and internal senses, in our bodies and ecologies,  and how this perspective, combined with a true multispecies-ness impacts our senses of selves .” But Fuentes’ stance was informed as much by how evolution is being reconsidered by natural scientists; in the process, its collective and cooperative dimensions come to the foreground—that which we cultural anthropologists know a lot about. Fuentes noted that “Many biologists, geneticists and others” are recognizing that “nearly all major events in the history of life can be seen not as primarily a conflictual Hobbesian moment, ‘nature red tooth and claw,’ but rather an epic of enormous cooperation and symbiosis in the evolution of life again, and again and again.” Mauricio Meloni recounts this major intellectual shift (“How biology became social, and what it means for social theory,” in Sociological Review, 2014) by which a “prosocial view of evolution” (along with accounts of “the social brain” and “the socialized gene”) are on the rise in the natural sciences. But more broadly, Standard Evolutionary Theory is facing a fundamental reconfiguration of how we understand intergenerational dynamics.

A primary outcome is the recognition that culture “is an evolutionary player,” in the words of Kevin Laland. That is, culture drives and shapes so many aspects of evolution that it can destabilize reductivist assertions about human biology. The dialectic possibilities involve thinking about the key concept of phenotypic plasticity and how that vacillates along a continuum of fixity and fluidity, particularly as influenced by domestication (whether the version practiced by humans or not). And this gets back to a point the Fuentes stressed: “The mutual mutability of form and function in becoming human with other humans and nonhuman others is a central tenet in human evolution and should be recognized as a locus for the anthropological gaze …one where we can influence scientific practice in fields outside our own.” The way to challenge and change the way evolution operates in public discourse as an explanatory frame—see evolutionary psychology and economics—won’t improve until we fashion a more cultural account of how it operates.

The Methods of Ethnology, by Franz Boas, edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub

In “Methods” Boas constructs a three way comparison between his own American approach and that of two other schools of thought found in Europe. The first school is what I will refer to as the “evolutionists,” who Boas also refers to as universalists, or theorists of “development by inner causes.” This positions hold that all societies evolve through set stages of development, and some are more ahead of others in this regard. The second school is, confusingly, called “diffusionism” or “world diffusionists” (the label I’ll use) which is similar to Boas’s diffusionism but distinct from it in key ways. World diffusion assumes that culture traits do not change over time, but diffuse from one central area across the entire globe. Thus Polynesian outrigger canoes, on this view, might originally be from Ancient Egypt and have over the course of thousands of years diffused to the Pacific.

Boas disagrees with both of these views. He argues that both of these positions make assumptions about human culture and then fit the evidence into those assumptions, rather than attempting to work inductively from the data to theory. Boas says that this act of theorizing is important, but cannot be done at the moment because we simply do not have enough data. This empiricism and skepticism for accepted narratives is still with us in anthropology.

It is also worth noting that Boas is also interested in process, change, and the dynamism of culture — another hallmark of our discipline. In fact Boas uses the term “dynamic” five times in this paper, and argues that “All cultural forms… appear in a constant state of flux and subject to fundamental modifications.” This is why world diffusionism cannot be correct — culture traits do not stay the same for thousands of years as they traverse the globe. So Boas is interested in diffusion, he just doesn’t think it takes the form that world diffusionists such as Elliot Smith believe it does.

Finally, Boas shares an interest with the evolutionists: the way in which ‘inner needs’ or ‘tendencies’ shape the way that culture traits which diffuse into an area are integrated into its culture. However, where evolutionists see all cultures as sharing the same developmental program, Boas believes each one has its own unique developmental urges — its own ‘configuration,’ as Ruth Benedict would call it. And indeed this is the basic vision of the Boasian program: ‘history’ (or historical processes) diffuses traits across the world, while ‘psychology’ (or cultural patterns) then integrate them into local cultural configurations.  This is why Boas points out the importance of studies of acculturation — something that would move to the forefront of anthropology in the years leading up to World War II.

“Methods” is a short piece, and I have given it a very light treatment. I have deleted extraneous phrases and qualifications which weigh down Boas’s prose. I have also cut Boas’s reference to scholars who are no longer widely read, while keeping citations of better-known scholars. My goal has been to give the reader a cleaner, more legible Boas to encounter, and of course to lead them back to the original text.

I hope that this paper, like the others in this series, will help present early anthropological theory in a form that is accessible to everyone. There is today a tremendous amount of material which is open access, but it is difficult to find, inconvenient to read, and many people do not know where to start looking for it. By curating a selection of important open access work, I hope to make open access resources better known and to raise awareness of the actual history of anthropological theory.