Tom Boellstorff provided me with the relevant information. The AAA annually paid the salary of the managing editor, $25,000 toward the support of a graduate student editorial assistant, $500 in supplies, and travel by the editor-in-chief to the annual meeting of the association. Each year, Tom received $10,000 toward the support of the editorial assistant, a reduced teaching load, $500 in supplies, and minor accounting support from his institution, the University of California, Irvine.
I next contacted administrators at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Graduate College at Iowa to see what support might be available. I was not sure that they would promise anything. A year earlier, I had been informally contacted by the Society for Applied Anthropology about the possibility of my applying for the editorship of its journal, Human Organization. Although I had been ambivalent about this possibility, I asked Linda Maxson, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, if support would be available if I took on the position. The dean, citing budgetary considerations, offered nothing.
Dean Maxson turned out to be more willing to consider supporting the AA editorship. She called Jim Enloe, the chair of my department, to ask about the prestige of AA. After Jim told her that American Anthropologist was the flagship journal of the AAA, the university promised essentially the same support that Tom was receiving at Irvine. I would get $10,000 a year for a graduate student editorial assistant (the remainder of the salary for the position would be paid by the AAA), money for supplies, and a nice office for the journal. I would also have a reduced teaching load, from two courses in the fall to one.1
Two friends agreed to write letters of recommendation. Ellen Lewin, a distinguished feminist anthropologist, had been a colleague of mine at Iowa for many years. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, an economic anthropologist with scholarly interests similar to my own, had occupied the office next to me for a decade before recently moving to the University of North Carolina.
Although lining up organizational support and letters of recommendation had taken some time, it was not difficult. I was not looking forward, however, to the remaining task of writing the vision statement. I understood why the search committee wanted to know what the journal might be like under my editorship. Nonetheless, I was skeptical about the many cliché-filled vision statements that I had seen produced by universities, administrators, and job candidates. The few concrete proposals in these cloying documents were only sometimes carried out. Despite my antipathy for vision statements, I knew that what I wrote might be crucial to the search committee’s decision making. I had several months to produce what would be only a single-spaced document of three to five pages. After some uncharacteristic procrastination, I began mulling over what I might want to say and how I should present my ideas.
The vision statement had to express my enthusiasm for the position, present my approach to editing, indicate any potential changes to the journal, and assure the search committee that I would not do anything that might be troublesome for significant segments of AA’s diverse readership. In addition, I had to address two aspects of the journal that I knew the search committee was especially concerned about. Even though the title of the journal was American Anthropologist, the AAA wanted to attract more contributions to its flagship journal from authors based in places other than the United States. The AAA was also concerned with AA’s use of digital technology. The two other most cited AAA-sponsored journals—American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology—were well ahead of AA in their employment of social media. Both journals had well-designed websites that allowed rapid online responses to articles.
I started my statement with some enthusiastic words: “It would be an honor and pleasure to edit American Anthropologist. The editor-in-chief of AA is able to present the latest developments in the field to a large, intellectually-engaged readership. I have long enjoyed learning about new ideas in anthropology by editing and reviewing manuscripts.”
After few sentences about my relevant past experience, I then threw in another platitude-heavy paragraph intended to reassure the search committee of my neutrality in the ongoing science wars in anthropology:
The editor of the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association is committed to publish both articles from the four traditional subfields (archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociocultural anthropology) and articles from other disciplinary subdivisions such as medical anthropology, applied anthropology, and public anthropology. Although some articles cross subfield and subdivision boundaries, such pieces are no more central to the journal’s mission than those presenting the best research within particular subfields and subdivisions. The editor of AA should give no priority to any particular subfield, subdivision, or theoretical perspective. Articles employing both scientific and humanistic approaches are deserving of publication, as are those that bridge or combine scientific and humanistic approaches.
The next paragraph was the first with any discernible content. I had long loathed journal articles about obscure topics written in impenetrable and often deservedly mocked academic prose. If I became AA editor, I wanted to try to publish understandable articles about matters of some importance:
AA can only accept a small fraction of the manuscripts submitted for possible publication. In choosing articles for publication, my principal consideration would be to give preference to those submissions that present material that is important and new in the discipline theoretically, methodologically, and empirically. All other things being equal, I would also give preference to articles that demonstrate how anthropological research improves our understanding of issues of practical importance and cultural significance in both the present and past. To the extent possible, the main ideas of articles should be comprehensible to nonspecialists. As editor, I would encourage clear writing and straightforward organization and would discourage the overuse of jargon intelligible to only to those with particular theoretical perspectives. I would emphasize the importance of lucid, logical, evidence-based arguments, and discourage polemical statements in the absence of empirical content.
I then tried to deal with the issue of international scholarship in AA:
American Anthropologist attracts many readers from outside of the United States. The editor of AA therefore needs to encourage the participation of international scholars both as contributors to the journal and as members of the editorial board. Increasing the number of international contributions to the journal is not a straightforward consequence of attracting more submissions from scholars living outside of the United States and providing extra copy editing for non-native speakers of English. The style of writing in scholarly publications in many countries differs somewhat from that typically found in articles in U.S.-based journals such as AA, American Ethnologist, and American Antiquity. This is not an insurmountable obstacle. As editor of Anthropology of Work Review (which comes out twice a year, has only three to five major articles per issue, and focuses to a certain extent on the United States), I have been able in the past three years to publish pieces by scholars from Canada, Great Britain, Argentina, India, Uganda, and Japan.
Even I did not find this persuasive. I had worked hard on these pieces in the Anthropology of Work Review but would not have time for similar amounts of labor at American Anthropologist. Furthermore, these articles might not have been accepted for publication in AA, with its highly critical peer reviewers.
My vision statement went on to praise Tom Boellstorff’s version of AA, noting the mix of articles and the efficient ways in which manuscripts were processed. I said that I would not make major changes in either the content of the journal or the methods for selecting reviewers and evaluating manuscripts. I actually had only a vague idea of what these methods were, but I assumed they worked well because AA was publishing good articles and making timely decisions about whether to publish potential manuscripts. The only changes I suggested were bringing back two AA sections that had been dropped—research reports and commentaries on articles (discussion and debate).
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