reasons why the size of AA had been halved. The cost of paper was a minor factor. What really mattered was that the AAA had decided to devote less money to AA. Prior to the 1970s, most of the AAA budget had been used to support the journal. With the decision to expand the AAA publication program and the desire of the association to spend more on diverse nonpublishing activities, AA became a lesser priority.12
The influence of AA was further limited when the AAA was reorganized in the early 1980s. For many years, all members of the association had received the journal. After the reorganization, AA was sent only to members of the new General Anthropology Division. Although at first all AAA members were automatically enrolled in the General Anthropology Division, many soon left, preferring to affiliate with new sections of the association that had formed as part of the reorganization. Between June 1984 and December 1986, membership of the General Anthropology Division dropped from 7,137 to 4,288.13
I do not envy Manners’s situation when he became AA editor. In addition to the drastic page reduction, the AAA took away some of the autonomy of the journal’s editor. An AAA committee recommended in 1972 that “the American Anthropologist be changed from a journal primarily devoted to articles in cultural anthropology to a general journal publishing review articles, book reviews, and obituaries, with equal emphasis in applied, archaeological, cultural, linguistic, and physical anthropology.” The AAA required Manners to have associate editors representing different subfields who were chosen by sections of the association. He was also asked to place priority on interdisciplinary articles that appealed to AA readers from all subfields.14
Perhaps in an effort by the AAA to encourage contributions from sub-fields other than sociocultural anthropology, Manners’s successors were an archaeologist (Richard Woodbury, 1976–1978) and a linguistic anthropologist (David Olmsted, 1979–1981). The shrunken AA was very different from its predecessor. Between 1974 and 1981, most issues had only three to five research articles. The rest of the journal consisted of short review articles of particular topics, discussion and debate (relabeled reports and comments in 1978), book reviews, and obituaries.
Two essays in AA during this time foreshadowed subsequent changes in the journal. In a 1977 piece, Cyril Belshaw, editor of Current Anthropology, noted the importance of work done by anthropologists from places other than the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Western Europe. While Belshaw’s essay had little immediate impact on the content of AA, decades later, editors took pains to make the journal less provincial. In his last issue as AA editor, David Olmsted commented that he had preferred that contributors not use generic masculine pronouns such as “he.” Although Olmsted’s suggestions of alternative pronouns such as “heesh,” “hermself,” and “hisr” were not taken up by any AA contributors, the use of the generic “he” gradually disappeared from the journal. Olmsted also remarked that “surely it is time that we stopped using ‘primitive’ as an adjective for those who collaborate with us on research; similarly for the use of ‘man’ to signify the species.” These suggestions soon became the norm in the journal.15
H. Russell Bernard, the editor of AA for all but four issues between 1982 and mid-1990, had more control over the journal than his immediate predecessors. He was permitted to choose the associate editors and no longer had a mandate to publish interdisciplinary articles. Bernard was able to increase the number of research articles to an average of six or seven per issue. He also instituted a section for short research reports and began publishing distinguished lectures given at AAA meetings. The format of the journal changed only a little under the editorship of Janet Keller from mid-1990 to mid-1994. She published a few wide-ranging essays that were not research articles, began regular reviews of museum exhibits, and stopped running obituaries.
By the 1970s, the AAA’s newsletter had become a venue for news and debates about AA. In 1978, Eugene Cohen and Edwin Ames wrote in the newsletter to protest what they called the dismemberment of the section on discussion and debate and its replacement by reports and comments. Richard Woodbury, then AA editor, responded that “[there has been too] much space devoted to exchanges between authors or reviewers and their critics—particularly since these exchanges too often discuss narrowly specialized comments, focus on trivialities, descend to acrimony, and sometimes seem intended mainly to publicize the writers’ activities or publications” (Woodbury 1978:33). Despite Woodbury’s pointed and, in my view, accurate response, AA continued to devote many pages to such exchanges—called commentaries beginning in 1982—until the end of Keller’s editorship.
In 1993, Sydel Silverman and Nancy Parezo wrote in the newsletter objecting to the removal of obituaries from AA. Keller replied by citing page constraints and the difficulties of selecting one or two people to highlight from the many deaths of professional anthropologists. She observed that the AAA newsletter published short obituaries and suggested that more lengthy tributes might be placed online. This is one of the earliest comments by an AA editor about possibilities of digital publishing.16
Editors during this period occasionally provided information about review processes. By the late 1970s, manuscripts were regularly sent to outside reviewers instead of being looked at primarily by members of the editorial board. In 1981, David Olmsted praised the recently instituted practice of blind reviewing, in which manuscript authors and reviewers did not know one another’s identities. Russell Bernard reported that the average time between receipt of a manuscript and initial decision was two and one-half months and that acceptance rates for research articles ranged from 20 to 25 percent.17
AA’s shifting and uncertain identity resulted in editors being inconsistent about the extent to which articles should be of general interest:
In the American Anthropologist we hope to see an increasing reintegration of the discipline as a whole with specialists writing of their subfields in terms of interest to all anthropologists and beyond them to sociologists, geographers, and others. (Woodbury 1975:25)
The AA publishes front-line anthropology without regard to the breadth of the subject matters. We judge manuscripts on their scientific merit, not their breadth of appeal. My goal is not to publish seven articles per issue, all of which can be read by every anthropologist. My goal is for every anthropologist to find at least one article or research report of interest to his or her career in every issue of the AA. (Bernard 1982:777)
We emphasized the journal’s traditional strengths, especially the responsibility to showcase integrative and synthesizing research that addressed issues of general relevance to anthropology and went beyond the confines of the profession in its implications. We emphasized this mission because it seemed critical to provide a centralizing resource in the present circumstance of increasing scholarly specialization, and we strove to reach our goal by tapping the most vital, significant, and broadly relevant research today. (Keller 1994:261)
Scientific approaches were common in AA articles. Bernard explicitly encouraged such approaches, saying that “the AA must be a place where a lot of the best science [my emphasis] that’s going on in anthropology get published” (Bernard 1984:261). This was the peak time for quantitative data in the journal. I have argued (Chibnik 1999) that such data are a rough indicator of the extent to which authors use scientific approaches. Bernard (2011:21) disagrees. He argues that one should “never use the distinction between quantitative and qualitative as cover for talking about the difference between science and humanism. Lots of scientists do their work without numbers, and many scientists whose work is highly quantitative consider themselves humanist.” These comments must be considered in the context of Bernard’s practices as AA editor, when the percentage of articles in sociocultural anthropology with numerical tables (about 55 percent) was by far the highest in the journal’s history.
Bernard insisted that the editors of AA did not favor numerical analyses: “Many people have
