is correct, but it is not by design of the editors. It is a reflection of changes that are going on throughout the discipline. Archeology and physical anthropology have become highly quantitative fields … cultural anthropology is also becoming a more quantitative field” (Bernard 1985:7).
Bernard is right about the increase in quantification in sociocultural anthropology at the time, but this cannot account for the amount of numerical data in AA during his editorship. The percentage of articles with such data dropped considerably after Keller became AA editor.
Although every AA editor ran articles from archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, attempts to have an even distribution among the four subfields ended with Bernard. In the long run, the AAA’s 1972 mandate to maintain some sort of balance was unsuccessful. The proportion of articles in the journal about sociocultural anthropology during Keller’s editorship in the 1990s was about the same as it had been in the late 1960s. Given the preponderance of sociocultural anthropologists in the profession, this seems to have been inevitable.
During this period, AA ran relatively few articles written by international scholars and hardly any at all by African American, Latinx, and American Indian authors. The proportion of female authors did not increase much, averaging 20 to 25 percent for single-authored research articles. The amount of attention in the journal to gender was surprisingly low, given the emergence of feminist anthropology.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the journal continued to largely ignore contemporary politics, globalization, and environmental destruction. In an editorial in her first issue, Keller indicated that this would change, saying that she encouraged articles on the reduction of biodiversity, the global flow of cultural patterns, ownership of the past, the social and biological implications of development, abortion, drug use, and the historical and contemporary implications of disease. She later reported that “our vision for the journal … as we undertook the editorship was rooted in a commitment to the intellectual issues of the profession and the contemporary significance of those issues in the modern world” (Keller 1994:261). Despite this commitment, it was not until the very end of Keller’s term that articles such as “The Power of the Imagined Community: The Settlement of Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans in the U.S.” and “Global Integration and Subsistence Insecurity” became common in the journal.18
One would not know from reading AA in the 1980s and early 1990s that various humanistic approaches to anthropology—sometimes labeled critical or postmodern—were becoming increasingly influential. Many anthropologists questioned the apolitical, detached, scientistic, authoritative tone of most ethnographic books and articles. They observed that within any society, individuals differed in their accounts of events and cultural practices; you could not always assume that certain accounts were truer than others. These scholars further argued that power relations between anthropologists and the people they tellingly called informants affected the descriptions of culture found in ethnographies. Humanistic anthropologists often felt shut out of the flagship journal of their professional association. This was about to change in a dramatic way.
Conflicts, Controversies, and Recoveries, 1994–2012
In an essay in their first issue as AA editors, Barbara and Dennis Tedlock mentioned what they called without explanation “terrific tensions in anthropology.” They took what on the surface seemed to be a conciliatory approach, saying that “it is time that we stop fighting and got on with showing our neighbors on both sides that they haven’t even begun to deal with the full range of human diversity and that no one knows how to do that better than anthropologists” (Tedlock and Tedlock 1994a:521). The Tedlocks replaced what they regarded as contentious commentaries and dull research reports with a section called Forum that provided anthropological perspectives on contemporary issues and discussed new ways of presenting anthropological data: “Our intent is to provide a space where anthropologists can discuss and critique educational, multicultural, international, and public policy issues of importance to the discipline as we approach the millennium. Here … will appear work that broadens the very forms of anthropological discourse, whether by extending writing strategies, crossing the boundaries of standard genres of writing, or using graphic means to challenge the dominance of the printed word” (Tedlock and Tedlock 1994a:522).
Despite the Tedlocks’ stated commitment to reducing tensions in anthropology, their first issue seemed to many readers to be a deliberate provocation. The issue began with a poem in the Forum called “ ‘Je Est un Autre’: Ethnopoetics and the Poet as Other.” The other three contributions to the Forum were a piece about cultural studies, a feminist critique of agricultural development, and an essay on why so many primatologists are women. Articles included “The Anthropological Unconscious,” “Embodying Colonial Memories,” and “From Olmecs to Zapatistas: A Once and Future History of Souls.” In subsequent issues, it became clear that the Tedlocks’ version of AA included a much greater proportion of articles using humanistic approaches and a much smaller proportion of articles using scientific approaches than had been characteristic of the journal in the preceding two decades. Quantification just about disappeared from articles in sociocultural anthropology.19
The reaction was immediate, with many anthropologists who had been alienated from AA appreciating the experimentation with new writing forms, the space for humanistic approaches, and the greater attention to contemporary issues and gender. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a mostly laudatory article called “A Shakeup in Anthropology: New Editors Dramatically Revise a Staid Journal” (McMillen 1994). Other anthropologists were outraged by the transformation of the journal, with the inclusion of poetry being an often-mentioned symbolic flash point. At the annual business meeting of the AAA in November 1994, the new editors were accused of turning away from “the diversity that has always marked our flagship journal.” A resolution disapproving the changes in AA was narrowly defeated, 112 to 86.
The Tedlocks were inconsistent in the tone they took when defending their editorial practices. They mildly and sensibly observed in the AAA newsletter that “we are open to quantitative research in any subfield, but would caution that the possession of objective data [it is interesting that they used the word objective without quote marks] does not exempt authors from the effort to achieve clarity and felicity in their writing, striving for the widest possible readership” (Tedlock and Tedlock 1994b:41). Nevertheless, I cannot help noticing the implication that articles using quantification are sometimes written for a small in-group, ironically a criticism often made of postmodern prose. The Tedlocks were less even-tempered when claiming in AA that one reason for the increase in humanistic articles was that “the very anthropologists who berate us for not publishing enough hard science are also the harshest in their assessments of one another [in peer reviews]” (Tedlock and Tedlock 1995:8). They also complained in the newsletter about rude, sexist behavior of male authors (implicitly of scientifically oriented articles): “It is sad for us to report that the number one problem in the day-to-day running of the journal has been phone calls and e-mail messages in which disappointed or impatient male authors repeatedly attempt to intimidate female members of our office staff. We have started keeping a file of calls that are loud, insulting, and laden with threats to bring in higher authorities. The e-mail messages have been similar, with the addition of four letter words. In our view, such actions constitute harassment, and they will not be tolerated” (Tedlock and Tedlock 1994b:41).
Some criticisms of the Tedlocks were unjustified. Previous editors had neglected certain humanistic approaches to anthropology and paid little attention to public policy, globalization, human rights, gender, and other contemporary issues. Furthermore, the Tedlocks did publish numerous scientific articles—especially in archaeology and biological anthropology—with titles such as “Transportation Innovation and Social Complexity Among Maritime Hunter-Gatherers” and “Biocultural Interaction and the Mechanism of Mosaic Evolution in the Emergence of ‘Modern’ Morphology.” Still, the journal had taken what many, including me at the time, considered to be too much of a turn.20
The
