quite different subfields in one discipline can be understood to a certain extent by examining what anthropologists were doing when the field became a separate discipline in the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists in the United States regarded their general goal as the description of human societies past and present. Their research examined technology, social organization, and ideology in recent times (sociocultural anthropology) and the distant past (archaeology), physical characteristics (biological anthropology), and languages (linguistic anthropology). In what has become a cliché, anthropology came to be described as a holistic discipline that showed relationships among culture, human biology, and language.
From the beginnings of anthropology in the United States, the subjects examined and methods used in studies in the four subfields were so unlike one another that their coexistence in a single discipline must have mystified outside observers. In the first years of the twentieth century, sociocultural anthropologists were interviewing American Indians about their customs, archaeologists were digging up material remains from long ago, biological anthropologists—then called physical anthropologists—were measuring skulls, and linguistic anthropologists were devising ways to describe and analyze unwritten languages. As time passed, the particular topics and methods in each of the subfields changed. Sociocultural anthropologists from the United States now conduct research in all parts of the world, archaeologists examine current material culture as well as remains from the past, biological anthropologists employ sophisticated genetic tools, and linguistic anthropologists focus on relations between language and culture. Nonetheless, the subfields are as separate as ever from one another. This separation is exacerbated by increased professional specialization. In the first part of the twentieth century, some anthropologists did research in more than one subfield. Hardly anyone has been able to do this since the 1930s. Most anthropologists know little even about topics within their own subfield outside of their particular areas of expertise.
The fragmentation of anthropology has led many to wonder if the traditional four-field nature of the discipline in the United States continues to make sense. Most archaeologists and biological anthropologists are not AAA members and professionally identify instead with their own scholarly societies. Many graduate programs have abandoned requirements that students take courses in each of the four subfields. In some universities, biological anthropologists have left the anthropology department and established their own separate department. Linguistic anthropology has become a small subfield, with most of the technical analysis of languages left to members of departments of linguistics.
At the beginning of my anthropological career, I was a sharp critic of the four-field division of anthropology. In the fall of 1968, the Wenner-Gren Foundation provided funds to seventy-two students from twelve departments to attend the AAA meetings in Seattle. I was at the time a first-year graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University. The graduate students in my department decided to choose our six awardees by chance. After my name was picked out of a hat, I went to my first AAA meeting. When we returned, Wenner-Gren asked us to write something about our impressions. I wrote an essay arguing that the four-field division of anthropology was outdated and that many sociocultural anthropologists had more in common with historians, geographers, and sociologists than they did with archaeologists and biological anthropologists. This was a foolish thing to write as a beginning graduate student in a department that took pride in its four-field approach. Some members of the faculty at Columbia were not pleased by these remarks, and one (Marvin Harris) commented sarcastically on my essay in a class I was enrolled in. Although I regret the sophomoric tone of the essay, I continue to think that much of what I argued is reasonable. However, I now see more merit to the four-field approach. The connections among archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology are obvious, even if some biological anthropology seems only loosely connected to the rest of the field.
Many anthropologists continue to favor the four-field approach. The AAA expects editors of AA to provide content in each of the subfields. AA is the only AAA-sponsored journal that includes articles in archaeology and biological anthropology. As a result of its commitment to the four fields, AA’s content is markedly less cohesive than that of most other anthropology journals. Here, for example, are representative titles of articles during my editorship in each of the four subfields: “Orchestrating Care in Time: Ghanaian Migrant Women, Family, and Reciprocity” (sociocultural anthropology), “Circulation as Placemaking: Late Classic Maya Polities and Portable Objects” (archaeology), “Contemporary Primatology in Anthropology: Beyond the Epistemological Abyss” (biological anthropology), and “Storytelling, Language Shift, and Revitalization in a Transborder Community: Tell It in Zapotec!” (linguistic anthropology).2
When AA was founded in the late nineteenth century, the publication was usually referred to as a magazine. This nomenclature made sense; AA was a hodgepodge of articles, book reviews, essays, lists of members of associations, reports of meetings, obituaries, and anthropological miscellanea. Many articles made little pretense of being scholarly and would not have been out of place in a newspaper or general-interest magazine.
Although AA has since its inception included articles, book reviews, and obituaries, the journal has always devoted considerable space to other kinds of content. These sections periodically change. The meeting reports and membership lists are long gone, replaced at different times by sections on discussion and debate, commentaries, letters to the editors, forums, museum anthropology, visual anthropology, and, most recently, public anthropology and world anthropology. Because AA has these sections (often more reader-friendly than the research articles and research reports), the journal is a rare combination of a scholarly publication and a special-interest magazine. This differentiates AA from most other academic journals, which consist primarily of articles and book reviews.
The designation by the AAA of AA as its flagship journal can be misleading. The word “flagship” implies that AA has a preeminent place in the anthropological publishing landscape. Although AA was unquestionably the most prestigious U.S. outlet for anthropological articles for many years, the journal is now only one of several important publications in the field. Of the more than twenty journals now sponsored by the AAA, two (American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology) consistently score better on most measures of “impact” than AA. Moreover, sociocultural anthropologists often try to place their best articles in specialized AAA journals such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly and PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
Until recently, AA’s flagship designation made a certain amount of sense because, unlike other AAA journals, it was sent to every member of the association. But nowadays, AAA members have access to all the sponsored journals via AnthroSource, a website maintained by the association. Nonetheless, AA can still be regarded as the most widely circulated AAA journal. AA has by far the most library subscriptions of any of the association’s journals. Furthermore, the number of annual downloads of AA articles from AnthroSource is about equal to that of all the other AAA journals combined. (The dominance in downloads is unrelated to the current popularity of AA. American Anthropologist has been around since 1888; the other journals have been in existence for only several decades. Many more articles can be downloaded from AA than from any other AAA journal.)
Anthropologists often publish in prominent journals that are not affiliated with the AAA. Because AA is the only AAA publication that regularly publishes archaeology and biological anthropology, specialists in these sub-fields do not publish much in the association’s journals. Archaeologists and biological anthropologists instead usually seek to publish their articles in subdiscipline-specific journals such as American Antiquity and the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Sociocultural anthropologists write for Anthropological Quarterly, Human Organization, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Anthropologists in all four subfields publish in Current Anthropology (which has a higher impact factor than any AAA journal) and the Journal of Anthropological Research.
Many sociocultural anthropologists save their
