Chapter 1

      Trials and Tribulations

      AA’s Tangled History

      Anyone browsing through back issues of American Anthropologist will notice how changes in the journal’s content over the years reflect the rise and fall of different topical specializations, research sites, and theoretical perspectives among anthropologists in the United States. But the history of AA cannot be understood solely in the context of intellectual currents in the discipline. What has appeared in the pages of the journal has also been influenced by the practical economics of publishing, conflicts within the American Anthropological Association, and the idiosyncratic decisions of the AAA and AA editors.

      Despite the many changes in AA since its founding more than a century ago, editors have consistently felt an obligation to strike an ill-defined balance among different subfields, topics, geographical areas, and theories. Since the 1930s, editors have worried that the journal is too dominated by sociocultural anthropology. AA has often been criticized for overemphasizing certain theoretical positions and underemphasizing others. In recent years, these critiques have usually concerned the balance between humanistic and scientific approaches to anthropology.

       The Early Years, 1888–1920

      The first issue of AA appeared in January 1888. The magazine was published for a decade by the Anthropological Society of Washington, D.C. This Old Series of AA has been described as “the first successful journal devoted to all branches of the science [of anthropology]” (de Laguna 1960:92). Because of the rarity of professional training in anthropology in the nineteenth century, authors came from varied backgrounds. The magazine’s articles might be roughly divided into three types. Most were descriptions of cultural traits among past and present American Indians with titles such as “Remarks on Ojibwa Ball Play,” “Note on the Turtle-Back Celt,” “Some Interesting Mounds,” and “Notes on the Chemakum Language.” Other articles were attempts to make grand generalizations about the origin and evolution of human customs. The scope and ambition of these essays are indicated by titles such as “From Barbarism to Civilization,” “The Development of Sculpture,” “Similarities in Culture,” and “The Beginning of Agriculture.” Finally, there were articles about matters that nowadays would not be considered anthropological such as “The Rural School Problem,” “The Deadly Microbe and Its Destruction,” and “Simplified Spelling.” In addition to articles, the magazine included obituaries, book reviews, notices about recent publications, reports of meetings, and miscellaneous notes and news. AA appeared quarterly from 1888 to 1895 and monthly from 1896 to 1898, publishing about 400 pages a year.¹

      In 1897, the American Association for the Advancement of Science appointed a committee to draft a plan for founding an anthropology journal. The Anthropological Society of Washington supported this project, thinking that this journal, also to be called American Anthropologist, would have more funds at its disposal than its magazine. The New Series of AA was to have “quarterly numbers of 200 large octavo pages and be amply illustrated.” The contents of the journal would include “(1) high grade papers pertaining to all parts of the domain of anthropology; (2) briefer contributions, including discussion and correspondence; (3) reviews of anthropological literature; (4) a current bibliography of anthropology … [and] (5) anthropological notes and news” (American Anthropologist—New Series 1898:389).

      The first issue of the New Series appeared in 1899. When the American Anthropological Association was incorporated in March 1902, the organization’s constitution stated that “the Association may publish a periodical journal [AA], which will be sent to all members not in arrears.” Membership in the AAA cost $6, the equivalent of about $160 today. AA editor Frederick Webb Hodge became one of the officers of the AAA. AA was also the official magazine of the Anthropological Society of Washington and the American Ethnological Society. AA published on average 759 pages between 1899 and 1913. Issues then became shorter, averaging 478 pages annually between 1914 and 1920.²

      The sections of AA during this period were more or less those outlined in the notice announcing the New Series. The allocation of space among sections changed over time. The book review and discussion and correspondence sections took up more pages with each passing year, with less space devoted to obituaries, reports of meetings, and notes and news. About four-fifths of the articles in sociocultural anthropology between 1900 and 1919 were studies of North American Indians, many focusing on expressive culture, material culture, and religion.³ So little attention was paid to economics that the famous anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1918:331) commented in an AA article that “there is probably no phase of native life that has been so unreasonably neglected by American anthropologists.”

      Many anthropologists at the time, especially those influenced by Franz Boas, rejected ambitious generalizations and speculation, advocating instead detailed ethnographic and archaeological descriptions. Although AA continued to publish articles with titles such as “Mind and Matter in Culture,” “Some Problems of the American Race,” and “Some Ethnological and National Factors of War,” the proportion of such pieces dropped sharply. Some thoughtful articles by prominent anthropologists such as Boas and Kroeber attempted to make middle-range generalizations without engaging in the speculation and conjectural history of earlier years. AA also included useful essays about methodology, pedagogy, and scholarly cooperation. Most articles, however, were narrow descriptions of cultural traits, languages, archaeological sites, and the dimensions of human bodies (anthropometry). Historians of the period have mixed reactions to this particularism. Frederica de Laguna (1960:102) applauds the move to description, saying that by 1906, the AA had lost much of its old-fashioned flavor. (From a contemporary perspective, it is hard to imagine how AA issues from this time could be more old-fashioned.) Gwen Stern and Paul Bohannan (1970:6) are less enthusiastic, remarking that “what had been a lively journal had become downright dull.” While I agree with Stern and Bohannan, much of the previous liveliness of AA came from speculative articles that in the long run proved to be useless.⁴

       A More Professional Journal, 1921–1945

      During the first part of the twentieth century, the AAA and AA were controlled by Boasians, who opposed racism and evolutionary speculation. This control was threatened after Boas sent a letter to The Nation in 1919 criticizing certain unnamed anthropologists for being spies in Central America during World War I while claiming to be conducting research. At the annual meeting of the association that year, Boas was censured and forced to resign his position as an anthropological representative on the National Research Council. Counterrevolutionaries, including many scholars less than completely sympathetic to Boas’s historical particularism and antiracism, then attempted to complete their coup by gaining control of AA. The Boasians succeeded in preventing this and in