was not much, given my lack of expertise—about ways of increasing AA’s digital presence:
All publications must make changes in response to dramatic developments in digital technology and increases in online readership. Although many (perhaps most) readers of AA interact with the journal primarily by printing out online articles, the journal to date has taken little advantage of digital publication of material aside from what is available in the print version. I would encourage authors of articles and research reports to make more use of the “supporting information” capability already available to present online supplementary material such as photographs, charts, tables, interview transcripts, appendices, and videos. Wiley-Blackwell now provides online space for supporting information free of charge, but this may not be the case with publishers in the future. The extent to which I would be able to use this method of presenting information depends not only on authors’ interest in providing materials but also on financial exigencies.
I knew that this was weak, but I had no idea what more I could say given the unclear support of any initiatives along these lines from the AAA and my university.
The final paragraph explained why at this point in my career, I had the time to devote to what I called “the rewarding task of editing a major journal.” After circulating a draft of the vision statement to friends, I made some minor changes and sent the document off to the search committee along with details about institutional support for the journal. I was glad to see the last of this task.
The Interview
In mid-October, I received an email from the search committee saying that I was one of the finalists for the position as AA editor. At this point, I no longer had to worry about perceived favoritism because of my connections with key members of the committee. Laura Graham and Virginia Dominguez had recused themselves from the search. The brief email listed the members of the search committee and noted that finalists would be interviewed at the annual meeting of the AAA in November in Montreal. I was not then or later told anything more that might help me prepare for the interview. I received no information about who would be at the interview, how long it would last, and who would make the decision about selecting the editor.
I was a bit worried about the interview. Although I had talked to many job candidates at the University of Iowa over years, I had not been on the other side of a serious interview for a position since 1978. When I had been on the job market long ago, I had not done particularly well in interviews. I was reticent in promoting my virtues and tended to be overly candid about my opinions about different types of anthropology. I could not even give concise answers to expectable questions about the topic of my dissertation. Of course, I was much more experienced now and hoped that I would be self-assured and tactful when meeting with the search committee.
The interview took place on the first day of the meetings. I was ushered into a room with about twenty people seated around a large table. In addition to members of the search committee, the interviewers included people from the AAA staff in Washington, D.C., and—with the significant exception of Virginia Dominguez—elected officials of the association. I had met or corresponded with most of the people in the room and knew just about all the rest by reputation.
The meeting was chaired by Lee Baker, an anthropologist who had recently written a book titled Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (2010). Although I had expected the interview to start off with some softball questions, this turned out not to be the case. Baker immediately asked about my plans concerning diversity at AA. To this day, I have no idea if I took the right approach in my response. I was fairly sure that Baker was mostly concerned about what efforts I would take to encourage the publication of articles and essays by members of underrepresented (in anthropology) minorities in the United States such as African Americans, Latinx, and American Indians. Although I wanted to do this, I had no ideas about what actions I might take beyond what Tom Boellstorff was already doing. Nonetheless, I quickly responded by discussing the different meanings of diversity with respect to AA. There needed to be diversity among anthropological subfields, theoretical approaches, topics of research articles, and journal sections. The AA editor also had to pay attention to diversity among contributors with respect to nationality, gender, and underrepresented minorities.2 I said that I would appoint an editorial board with all these types of diversity in mind and would reach out to various subsections of the anthropological community in my efforts to solicit contributions to the journal. Baker did not look particularly happy with this answer and later on asked me specifically about U.S. minorities. I knew that it was time to trot out platitudes and gave a pleasant-sounding answer notably lacking in specifics.
Most of the rest of the questions were straightforward inquiries about matters covered in my vision statement. I did my best to reassure the committee that I was not planning drastic changes in the journal. There were, however, a series of questions about something I had hardly thought about. Several people wanted to know what I would do to further incorporate biological anthropology into AA. I was surprised by this line of inquiry because Tom Boellstorff had published a number of articles in this subfield. I responded briefly that biological anthropology would continue to be an important part of the journal.
After the interview was over, I realized that these questions were related to a recent skirmish in the seemingly never-ending science wars. In 2010, the AAA had made a change in its long-term plan. The introduction to this document had previously stated that the association’s goal was “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” The AAA executive board changed this to “the purposes of the association shall be to advance the understanding of humankind in all its aspects.” The word science was also removed from two other places in the plan. When questioned about this, Virginia Dominguez had replied—in my view sensibly—that the changes had been made in order to include anthropologists who did not locate their work in the sciences. This was not how many scientifically oriented anthropologists interpreted the changes. They saw them instead as emblematic of what they perceived as the increasing dominance of humanistic and postmodern approaches in anthropology. Biological anthropologists, never all that enthusiastic as a group about the AAA, were especially unhappy. The controversy was covered in some depth in publications such as the New York Times (Wade 2010), Inside Higher Education (Berrett 2010), and Psychology Today (Joyce 2010). The search committee did not want an editor who would adopt policies that would further alienate biological anthropologists and lead to more unfavorable publicity for the AAA.
When I rehashed the interview in the months that followed, the questions about diversity worried me more than the inquiries about biological anthropology. In retrospect, this was a mistake. While I was never criticized about diversity during my years editing the journal, complaints from biological anthropologists resulted in some of my most difficult moments.
The interview lasted no more than twenty-five minutes. I left the room thinking that I had not done particularly well. I told my friends that I probably would not be offered the position and began to think about other work-related ways to spend the next several years. The executive board of the AAA was to select an editor later in the meeting, which lasted until Sunday. On Tuesday, Leith Mullings, who had just succeeded Virginia Dominguez as AAA president, called to offer me the position. Although I eventually learned the name of one of the other finalists (interestingly, a biological anthropologist), I never found out who the other two were. Years later, someone at the interview told me that one reason I was offered the position was the search committee’s confidence that I would not have problems reliably producing the journal. The executive board had evidently agreed with Tom Boellstorff about the importance of bread-and-butter qualifications.
The Chronicle of Higher Education contacted me by email asking about my plans for the journal. Not wanting to stir up controversy, I responded with some bland statements from my vision statement. The resulting paragraph in the Chronicle was reassuringly free of anything likely to cause problems for me or the AAA.
