anthropologist Robert Sussman as the next AA editor was doubtless in part an effort to assuage some of criticism of the journal. Sussman resurrected commentaries, research reports, and obituaries. His vision statement in an editorial in his first issue was unpolemic, saying that “empirical research can be both qualitative and quantitative, and the combination of these two approaches are what makes the results of anthropological research unique” (Sussman 1998:606). In the AAA newsletter, Sussman noted that the journal would continue its focus on world issues through a Contemporary Issues Forum that would include cross-disciplinary research in areas such as race and racism, international interdependence and global economics, AIDS research, urban anthropology, deforestation and development, the uses of satellite imagery, feminism, nutrition, and disease.21
To my eyes, the journal under Sussman’s editorship struck a nice balance among anthropological subfields and scientific and humanistic approaches and appropriately included material about contemporary issues. The Tedlocks, however, could not hide their unhappiness with Sussman’s editorial practices and comments, which they interpreted as an unsubtle rebuttal of their work. In 2000, they acerbically observed in an essay in Anthropology News that Sussman’s editorial board members were all from the United States and that submissions were down 31 percent. They also objected to new text on the masthead that replaced the words international journal with flagship journal and referred to the mission of the AAA. According to the Tedlocks, flagship and mission were inappropriate military metaphors used in diplomacy and evangelism.
The Tedlocks even complained about the masthead’s seemingly inoffensive statement that “of particular interest are manuscripts … that develop general implications from exacting substantive research.” They asserted that this was a “rather transparent effort to reassert the hegemony of positivistic over qualitative research.” Making no attempts to be conciliatory, they went on to say that “in our opinion, anthropology will never realize its full possibilities in the post–Cold War era until the positivist camp gives up the idea that qualitative researchers are somehow second-class citizens, or that they should be treated as subversives.”22
In 2000, the AAA decided that AA would once again be sent to all members. Despite this show of support, Sussman resigned the editorship in 2001 because of his unhappiness with the amount of funding the association provided for the journal. Louise Lamphere and Don Brenneis became interim editors of AA for four issues. The journal became longer, with more than 1,200 pages in both 2001 and 2002. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the issues edited by Sussman, Lamphere, and Brenneis was an increase in special sections. A centennial issue marked the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the AAA; forums examined race and racism, urban anthropology, historical archaeology in the United States, and social welfare and welfare reform.
In mid-2002, sociocultural anthropologists Frances Mascia-Lees and Susan Lees became AA editors. Because their theoretical approaches differ—Mascia-Lees is more humanistic and Lees is more scientific—their appointment suggests that the AAA was trying to tamp down the science-humanities tensions associated with the editorships of the Tedlocks and Sussman. Mascia-Lees and Lees committed themselves in their vision statement to publish scholarly commentary and research on critical issues such as the environment, health, education, and the information revolution. They followed through on this commitment by running In Focus sections examining the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks, indigenous rights movements, race, landscape degradation, and human rights.23
As usual, most submissions and articles were in sociocultural anthropology. Mascia-Lees commented in Anthropology News that there were especially few unsolicited submissions in biological anthropology. Perhaps for this reason, she and Lees ran a special section in an issue in 2003 with nine essays on biological anthropology. These included a piece on recent developments in anthropological genetics and historical overviews of past AA articles on race, human variation, skeletal biology, and primatology.24
During Ben Blount’s editorship from 2006 to 2007, the journal emphasized In Focus sections and short research reports. Blount ran relatively few lengthy research articles; two issues had only three such articles not part of an In Focus section. Tom Boellstorff became AA editor in June 2007, a position he held for the next five years. He was initially appointed on an interim basis after Blount’s unexpected departure. After the position was advertised, Boellstorff was officially given the position of editor-in-chief with the word interim removed.
Blount had left Boellstorff only three articles in the pipeline. AA’s future budget was uncertain; the AAA’s publishing contract with the University of California Press was not working out well. Despite Boellstorff’s prodigious efforts to revive AA, he was able to publish only 556 pages in 2008 and 552 pages in 2009.
The situation improved markedly as a result of Boellstorff’s hard work and the AAA’s move to a more profitable publishing partnership with Wiley-Blackwell. In each of Boellstorff’s last three years as editor, AA published more than 700 pages. Boellstorff made more significant changes in the journal than any editor since the Tedlocks. He greatly increased international representation on the editorial board and regularly wrote lively from-the-editor columns about the journal, publishing in general, and ongoing anthropological controversies. In 2009, AA began publishing lengthy year-in-review essays on biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, public anthropology (called practicing anthropology the first three years), and sociocultural anthropology. A new public anthropology section was inaugurated in 2010; the visual anthropology section was expanded. Vital topics forums were another innovation. These were occasional collections of short essays by distinguished anthropologists about general topics such as “On Nature and the Human,” “On Happiness,” and “What Is Science in Anthropology?” Boellstorff also edited an online-only “virtual issue” of past AA articles in linguistic anthropology.25
Boellstorff cut the amount of space devoted to other parts of the journal. He eliminated research reports and published fewer commentaries and In Focus sections. The number of book reviews dropped to an average of twenty-two per issue, compared to an average of forty when Mascia-Lees and Lees were AA editors. The difference would be even greater without Boellstorff’s first issue, which included eighty-six reviews mostly acquired during Blount’s editorship.
The types of articles Boellstorff published were similar to those run by other editors in this century. Although sociocultural anthropology articles continued to dominate AA, the journal ran numerous pieces from the other subfields. About half the authors were women; gender issues were frequently addressed by both male and female contributors. The number of articles written by members of underrepresented minorities in the United States remained low.26 The research areas covered in articles spanned the globe, including many papers about aspects of U.S. culture. Contributors to the journal examined the usual diversity of topics, with globalization, economics, the environment, politics, and migration being especially common foci of research. AA was no longer isolated from the messiness of the world.
Editors disagreed somewhat about the extent to which articles should be of general interest:
The journal primarily will publish unsolicited articles that add substantially new anthropological knowledge … synthesize and integrate anthropological knowledge, and focus on broad cross-cutting problems, themes, and theories. (Sussman 1998:605)
To fulfill the AA’s role as a unifying force, we will be looking for articles of the highest quality that are accessible to readers across the discipline…. [Contributors] should try to balance the reporting of specific research results with general theory and articulate the general importance of what they are doing for the discipline as a whole. (Mascia-Lees and Lees 2001:9)
Publications within each field ideally will be accessible to anthropologists in any field of specialization—that is, they should be of interest across the traditional fields—but they will
