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August 14, 2002
Don Brenneis, President Dear Don, Elizabeth, and Deborah, A volunteered session we developed for the 2002 AAA meetings, "Cultural Structures and Distributed Cognition," that deals rigorously with central issues in anthropology relating to the relationship between culture and society was rejected. The reasons for the rejection were not given and the letter of rejection only tautologically mentioned "insufficient ranking" as the basis for the rejection. Many of us have an active and continuing track record of substantive contributions to the field and as organizers and participants in sessions of previous AAA annual meetings--which argues for the likelihood that the proffered papers will deal creatively and effectively with the important issues raised in our proposal.
We are aware of the difficulties in deciding among sessions when some must be rejected, but in our experience with AAA sessions we find it difficult to believe that on the basis of objective criteria such as significance of the topic, grounding analyses in data, novel implications, and the like our proposal would be ranked so low in comparison to other proposals received by the Program Committee as to be rejected. As we stated in our abstract:
The last sentence, in particular, identifies the session as addressing a long-standing issue in anthropology and one that reoccurs in a number of different guises, such as the logic of practice elaborated on by Bourdieu or the practical reason critiqued by Sahlins. Correspondence we had with Bob Desjarlais about the possibility of SPA sponsoring the session led to his commenting that "everyone found that the session you proposed was of great intellectual and scholarly merit." And correspondence with Andrea Sankar of GAD about possible sponsorship elicited the comment "I hope you will consider submitting the panel as a volunteered session to GAD. The topic is very interesting,…"
We followed up on Prof. Sankar's suggestion, yet GAD ended up giving the proposal a low ranking. It is instructive to consider the titles of sessions selected to be sponsored by SPA or by SPA in conjunction with GAD:
Undoubtedly each of these is a worthwhile session. What concerns us is the imbalance created by rejecting a major scientific session, even as a volunteered session, whereas sessions that represent the current fashion of being either unconcerned with the development of anthropology as a descriptively accountable science or positively hostile to such development seem to have no difficulty finding space in the program. We take the name of GAD -- GENERAL Anthropology Division -- seriously. If a session like the one we proposed is not appropriate for recommendation by GAD for inclusion in the 2002 program, then we are at a loss as to what is happening to our profession. We can see no reason for the rejection except possibly the fact that not only is it an explicitly scientific session, but one in which some of the papers use formalism and mathematics:
If the current trend of the AAA is away from scientifically rigorous sessions that address central theoretical issues in anthropology, then this should be announced and made public so that we do not waste our time developing the kind of session that the AAA appears to no longer want. Instead we will need to shift to other venues. We have already developed sessions in other venues along the lines of this session and they have been well received. One was a session on Cultural Systems held as part of the European Cybernetics and Systems 2002 International Meeting in Vienna. Anthropology as a discipline had the honor of one of our papers being selected as the best paper in that meeting. Another venue was the 1st International Meeting on Computational Modeling in the Social Sciences held at Lake Arrowhead under the auspices of UCLA this past Spring, where a series of papers were presented by several of the participants in the proposed AAA session. And one of the participants in our proposed AAA session gave a paper at the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, ‘‘Adaptive Agents, Intelligence, and Emergent Human Organization: Capturing Complexity through Agent-Based Modeling’’ this past Fall. But these venues are ways in which we are introduce concepts developed in anthropology to researchers in other areas, not the way to present the results from current research to our colleagues in anthropology. If a session such as the one we submitted for review is no longer considered to be of any importance to anthropology as a profession, then we will be forced to reconsider whether or not there is any reason to continue as active members of the AAA. Ironically, the session we presented last year and the session we proposed this year has begun to attract back into the AAA scholars who did give up on the AAA in the past. We are very concerned that the rejection of our session is not an isolated incident but indicative of a trend in the Association with regard to what are considered acceptable sessions. One avenue open to us is to establish yet another section of the Association so as to be assured a session slot in the Annual Meetings. However, we do not think it is in the long-term interest of the Association to continually fragment our profession simply as a way to achieve balance in our Annual Meetings. Perhaps we are naïve, but we do not consider a session that addresses the interrelationships among culture, behavior and cognition a "specialized interest," but one that surely falls within the province of the General Anthropology Division. We urge discussion of the general goals and criteria for acceptance of sessions for the annual meetings with representation from all concerned parties. The matter is urgent. We (along with others in a similar position) have been provided with no substantive information as to why our session was canceled, leaving us only with our speculation and no basis for assessing the likelihood that any future session we might propose will be accepted or not. Sincerely, SIGNATURE REMOVED
Dwight W. Read, UCLA, Session Co-Organizer Cc: Bill Davis, Executive Director (bdavis@aaanet.org)
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