AA had more influence than ever, with just about every prominent anthropologist in the United States and Great Britain sending in contributions. The cost of AAA membership, which continued to include a subscription to AA, gradually rose during this period from $9 in the early 1950s (the equivalent of about $95 today) to $30 in the early 1970s (the equivalent of about $185 today).
The bulk of the journal, as always, consisted of research articles and book reviews. Film reviews were introduced in the mid-1960s. Until 1969, the journal ran separate, hard-to-distinguish sections labeled brief communications and letters to the editor. These were then combined into an often-combative section called Discussion and Debate. The journal included obituaries throughout this period, but most reports of meetings and other news were discontinued in the 1950s.
Although AA editors had previously rarely commented in the journal about the economics, mechanics, and intellectual problems of publishing, this changed in the 1950s. In his first issue as editor, Sol Tax, who edited the journal between 1953 and 1955, noted that anthropologists wanted and needed the broader coverage allowed by the increase in pages and said that AA would explore the use of microproduction and other means of distribution of large masses of material. Although nothing much would come of this, Tax presciently observed that publication need not be equated with printing. In subsequent columns, Tax and his associate editors wrote about the need to balance subfield coverage in the journal and summarized the contents of issues.8
Walter Goldschmidt, the editor between 1956 and 1959, regularly wrote columns called “From the Editor’s Desk.” In his second issue, Goldschmidt described how he assembled his editorial board:
In establishing a panel of Associate Editors, we have tried to rationalize the processing of manuscripts and to broaden the basis of editorial decision. The Associates were selected to represent the diverse interests of our discipline…. We have selected an archeologist and a physical anthropologist, and four representatives of what may be broadly called social anthropology or ethnology. These latter were chosen to represent theoretical orientations; one for the psychological approach to ethnological material, one for the historical, and two for the sociological. This pattern was based on a rough analysis of articles appearing in the Anthropologist over the past six to eight years. (Goldschmidt 1956a:iii)
He also discussed how manuscripts were reviewed. After Goldschmidt screened submissions, they were sent to the appropriate associate editor, who made a detailed recommendation. Although manuscripts were occasionally sent to anthropologists not on the editorial board, Goldschmidt tried not to do this. He said that using “special readers” placed a burden on them (no one worries much about this anymore), delayed the handling of manuscripts (doubtless the case), and placed the editorial decision in anonymous hands (now thought by many to be a good idea). After looking at the recommendation of the reader of a manuscript, Goldschmidt made a final decision about whether to publish it. This in-house evaluation of manuscripts led to speedy reviews. The journal was not very selective. About half of the manuscripts submitted as potential research articles were accepted.9
Goldschmidt usually suggested certain changes on accepted manuscripts. After authors made revisions in response to these suggestions, the journal’s editorial assistant worked on “stylistic and grammatical detail.” It took about three months between sending an article to the printer and its appearance in an issue.
Goldschmidt was the first of many editors to worry in the journal about the fragmentation of anthropology:
Our discipline, which has always been a broad and generalizing one [ignoring AA articles in the Boasian period] has increasingly been subject to the pressures of specialization. Most of us are no longer anthropologists in the old sense; few of us control, let alone contribute to, the data of more than one of the several specialties in our field. We are rather archeologists or linguists, specialists in human genetics, primitive law, or some other particular aspect of the human scent…. Our clan has split into many lineages…. The loyalty to the lineage frequently outweighs the sentiment that binds us to the clan. (Goldschmidt 1956b:iv)
He argued that there was nonetheless a unity of anthropology that rested in “the ultimate goal of providing an understanding of the consistencies and diversities in human existence as they are manifested in the characteristics of peoples over the globe and throughout the course of human history.” AA, he said, was a chief symbol of this greater unity.
Goldschmidt was also the first editor to comment in the journal about writing problems related to specialization. He observed that authors had to communicate their findings in ways that were useful to fellow specialists and understandable to other anthropologists. An author therefore needed to “present his [inclusive language was still in the future] material in such a way that … [nonspecialists] can understand the conclusions and the broad base upon which these rest, even though they cannot control the accuracy of his data or understand the intricacies of his method” (Goldschmidt 1956b:iv). Although editors made efforts to strike a balance among the subfields, the journal was dominated more than ever by sociocultural anthropology. Of 1,106 research articles in AA between 1946 and 1970, 805 (80 percent) were in sociocultural anthropology compared to 86 (9 percent) in archaeology, 68 (7 percent) in physical anthropology, and 47 (5 percent) in linguistic anthropology (Murphy 1976:2).10 Within sociocultural anthropology, the most common topic was kinship and social organization, followed by social change (“acculturation”), economics, and politics. Articles about peasants and people living in towns and cities became much more common than previously. Despite the tumult of the Cold War, the civil rights era, the Vietnam War, and feminist movements, just about nothing in the journal touched on current issues.
Areal coverage in sociocultural anthropology was evenly divided between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. While coverage of American Indian groups declined, articles about them still took up disproportionate space in the journal. About one-quarter of articles in sociocultural anthropology concerned aspects of the indigenous cultures of North America (not including Mexico) compared to only about 7 percent about other groups and subcultures in the region. Sol Tax, one of the more creative editors of AA, did put together in 1955 an unusual journal section on “American” (nonindigenous) culture that included articles by distinguished anthropologists about social class, acculturation of ethnic groups, biracialism, values, and music. However, these kinds of articles largely disappeared from the journal in subsequent years.
Contributors were mostly white males from the United States. Women wrote only 13 percent of research articles between 1946 and 1973 (Murphy 1976:5); AA did not have its first female editor until Laura Bohannan was appointed in 1971. Although Sol Tax later played an important role in creating the international journal Current Anthropology, issues under his editorship and those of his successors included only a handful of articles written by authors from places other than the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. There were only a minuscule number of Asian American, Latinx, African American, and American Indian authors.11
By the early 1970s, it had become evident that the format of AA was no longer viable. When Laura Bohannan edited the journal between 1971 and 1973, AA had so much material that it was forced to publish three issues a year filled entirely with book reviews and discussion and debate. Other issues regularly had twenty to thirty articles spanning a bewildering mix of topics, subfields, methods, and theoretical approaches. The number of submissions was especially high in sociocultural anthropology, perhaps because AA was the most important outlet in the United States for articles in this subfield.
Debates About Journal Identity, 1974–1994
After the AAA began publishing other journals in 1974, AA declined in size and influence. The journal was once again a quarterly. Robert Manners, the editor of AA, reported in his first issue that “astronomical increases in the cost of paper and other publication expenses would limit the journal for the next several years to about 900 pages of
