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Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2002 15:05:29 -0700 October 2, 2002 Professor Dwight Read dread@anthro.ucla.edu Professor David Kronenfeld kfeld@ucrac1.ucr.edu Dear Dwight and David: Many thanks for your letter of August 14. As Liz Brumfiel noted in her letter to Dwight, I was in Europe and unable to get into my e-mail. I appreciate both the issues you raise in your letter and the thoughtful way in which you approached them, and I appreciate the spirit of Liz's response, especially her concern which I fully share that "the full range of topics and theoretical orientations within anthropology [be] represented at the national meetings." I want in this letter to clarify some aspects of AAA's procedures for putting the program together and to lay out some of the special features of this year's submissions. It has taken some time to gather relevant data, and I apologize for the delay in getting back to you that this has occasioned. First, it is critical to stress that sections, whether acting solely through their program chairs or working through program committees, are the principal agents in shaping the annual meeting program. Considerably more than 90% of this year's sessions came to the group of us who assembled the final program directly as ranked lists from sections. Deborah Heath (Program Chair), Liz Brumfiel (President-Elect), Margery Wolf (AAA Secretary), and I spent three very full days putting the program together on the basis of these ranked recommendations. I know that you had been in touch with both GAD and SPA about invited session status and did not receive it from either group. I understand that GAD was the section to which your volunteered panel proposal was submitted and which then forwarded your session, among others as part of its ranked recommendation to us. The AAA group itself can act only upon section recommendations, placing invited sessions first and then moving down the section lists. Given the number of proposed sessions, the complexity of scheduling, and, most significantly, a commitment to the autonomy and responsibility of sections, this final group was not in a position to review in any detail or to second-guess sectional recommendations. This year's meetings catalyzed an unpredictably quite high number of submissions. Generally San Francisco meetings draw the most submissions, followed by Washington, and then with mid-country meetings drawing the fewest. This year, however, the number of submissions went up 19% from last year's already high number. The number of session rooms available actually went up a small bit from past year, but that increase was far from commensurate with the dramatic increase in proposed panels. The crucial implication of the increased number of submissions was that, in putting the final program together, we could go less far down each section's ranked lists, and a number of sessions which might well have found a place on the program in a more usual year were necessarily excluded. The average rejection rate over the past ten years has been 9.9%; this year it is 20.5%, a direct result of the increased submissions. As Liz noted in her letter, one option for ensuring the comprehensiveness of the annual meeting is to schedule us into larger venues, e.g., convention centers. This is an option that has historically been attractive neither to the Board nor to members, but the Board Committee on Scholarly Communication will be revisiting the issue in the near future, given the increased interest in participation. Finally, I should note that the rejection of your panel does not in any way represent a AAA disregard of or lack of interest in "scientific session[s}." The Executive Program Committee, for example, has organized an invited session on "Biological Roots of Human Aggression Revisited," there will be a major public policy forum on "Bioterrorism, Epidemics, and the Future of Public Health," a major panel on GIS tools in anthropology, a three-part panel on human behavioral ecology, and a session on "Non-Linear Systems Models and their Applications to the Archaeological Record," to mention a few such panels. I personally find the topic of your proposed session fascinating, and certainly consequential for me as both a linguistic and social anthropologist, and I regret that it will not be on the program. But it would be inappropriate and inaccurate to interpret this as a sign of discipline-wide and particularly AAA resistance to or rejection of scientific work in the field. I want to add another possible remedy for the longer term to those that Liz proposed. Given the central role of sections in shaping the scientific program of the meetings, one option might be to move towards developing a new section along these lines. I hope my letter both clarifies general practice in AAA and also highlights some of the singular features of this year's meeting preparations. Even more than in other years, a number of quite promising and significant sessions could not be included on the program. I share Liz's hope that this will not dissuade you from pursuing participation in the program in future years and encourage you to think about ways in which you might most effectively pursue such participation. Thanks again for your letter. With best wishes, Don Brenneis |