Dear Dwight,

Don Brenneis is out of the country and incommunicado for the next month, so I will reply to your letter from my point of view, hoping that you will understand that Don is not committed to my view, and he may send his own reply when he returns from Europe.

I think your letter raises an important issue of general policy: the AAA should try to ensure that the full range of topics and theoretical orientations within anthropology are represented at the national meetings. I see two ways of accomplishing this. One is to arrange for a larger venue with more rooms and more time slots available. This is the course that the Society for American Archaeology chose several years ago when exclusions by the program chair (of a Marxist session, a gender session) raised similar protests. The other option is to add diversity to the set of criteria that section program chairs are asked to consider when ranking volunteered sessions. This is especially important for the program chair of GAD for, as you observe, the accommodation of diversity by GAD will help to stem the proliferation of sections and the balkanization of the field. I will ask Lucille Horn (AAA Meetings Director) to add a mention of diversity to the meeting for new section program chairs in New Orleans, and I will see if we can add diversity to the written criteria for session evaluation, if such written criteria exist.

I hope that this episode does not discourage you and your colleagues from organizing sessions for the AAA in the future. I think that formal modeling is an important complement to the more qualitative studies that many anthropologists pursue.

With best wishes,

Liz Brumfiel