Brief Report on First General Scholarly Meeting of SASci in Santa Fe, Feb 24-26 2005
There exist two levels at which we want to report on the Santa Fe SASci meetings of February 23-27, 2005. The first concerns the (to our eyes, very successful) outcome. The second concerns what it took to produce this result - and thus what it will take to produce as good or better results in future meetings.
1. The Meeting:
Over the 24-26 of February we held 13 scholarly sessions and one business meeting; no executive committee meeting was held. Through much of the 3 day period we had two sessions running concurrently from ca. 8 am to ca. 7 pm. The 13 scholarly sessions included 6 organized SASci symposia, one joint SASci/SCCR organized symposium, 3 sessions of volunteered papers, 2 special sessions in which a presenter introduced a new topic or approach for general discussion, one general discussion session on a broad topic (cognitive anthropology). The Thursday evening business meeting was attended by ca. 35 members. Additionally, Professor Ralph Bolton and the Inn of the Turquoise Bear generously provided and hosted a Wine and Cheese Reception Thursday night after our business meeting-for which we are most grateful.
Ca. 59 papers were presented, not counting ca. 5 drop outs. 53 registrants were on the program, including 27 old members, 15 new members, 7 students, one old member retiree, and 3 members who were co-registrants with SCCR (at a $30 reduced rate); 5 registrants were not on the program, including 3 old members, 1 new member, and one co-registrant with SCCR. Two scheduled presenters from Russia were not able to attend because of visa problems, one from Russia could not make it because of travel support reasons, and one other did not show; none of these paid. Two others had to drop out for personal reasons, and their registrations are being refunded; one member cancelled her paper, but still paid and attended. A complete financial accounting will be provided soon. Amongst our SASci participants were three members of the National Academy of Sciences (two in attendance and one as a non-attending co-author).
One logistic problem involved the widespread need for LCD projectors-which we could not rent because of the high rental fee ($500 per machine per day); instead-in response to our appraising them of the problem, a number of members generously brought their own projectors which they then let others use; we are most appreciative of and grateful to these members. For next time one donor (who wishes to remain anonymous) has offered to underwrite the rental cost for at least one room.
The informal feedback that we have received indicates that those who attended both had a good time and found the meetings academically useful. The latter means that they found the papers and sessions informative and were happy with the opportunities provided within sessions for discussion and with the opportunities provided by the relaxed and low-pressure venue for informative informal discussions outside of sessions. But these conclusions so far are only our informal impressions-though based on what a number of people have independently told us. We are in the process of surveying attendees in order to get a more systematic read on what they liked and didn't like about these meetings; we also are asking their feelings about future meetings.
2. Organizational Lessons
With a new organization such as SASci, it seems particularly important for the organizer to “provoke” good sessions by inviting a wide range of active researchers to organize invited sessions-and then to publicize these early enough for other members to feel confident enough of the density and quality of the conference to offer papers of their own-whether volunteered papers or (if so allowed or invited) papers that might be added to the invited sessions. With an organization such as SAS/SASci that does not have any tight topical focus (whether areal [such as African Studies] or systemic focus [such as the Economic Anthropology or Cognitive Anthropology] or methodological focus [such as Networks]) it is particularly important to assure members of the breadth of the papers that are welcome-and that, then, will be presented at the meetings for people to attend. The initial set of invited sessions seem the only way to convincingly convey to potential attendees the quality and range of the planned meetings-at least up until SAS/SASci has established enough of a tradition for members to automatically know what to expect.
These meetings-the one we just held in Santa Fe, and future ones that we might hold-seem to have two kinds of functions. First they provide a dependable professional umbrella for participants in a research focus such as cognitive anthropology that (unlike economic anthropology is too small to have its own society) to meet together and exchange/discuss theoretical and methodological insights and experience-in a context that counts as a professional society meeting for funding and promotion purposes. Secondly, they provide an effective way for members to get a richer and more interactive sense of what is happening in other specialties (than their own) than they can get at the bigger and more chaotic AAA meetings. The former function is independent of size, but the larger depends, obviously, on the number and breadth of papers that can be elicited. Both functions benefit from the presupposition that those attending all share a common interest in some version of science-formal, theoretical rigor joined to the empirical chance for “nature to say 'no'” (quoting Martin Orans).
Comments on sharing meeting with SCCR
Meeting with another society provides the twin/reciprocal opportunities for our members to attend a wider range of papers than they could if we met alone and for our presentations to be made available to a wider range of attendees. Such benefits, of course, presume that the partner society has congenial anthropological aims and a congenial membership; it also helps if they have a congenial view of how the meetings are supposed to work. SCCR has been outstanding in these cooperative regards, but other societies might also be similarly congenial-and over the longer haul we should explore such connections. More immediately, for the present meetings SCCR allowed us to “ride their coattails” in the sense that they did all of the hotel and equipment negotiations and arrangements for both societies-and, then, worked out the cost/price framework within which we could fit. This generosity on their part allowed us to concentrate on generating good sessions and papers and on collecting the attendance and money needed to make it work. Our sense is that this service remains-for the present-useful; that is, it is not clear that we yet have the institutional experience necessarily to smoothly function on our own in these economic and negotiation realms. It is worth noting in this connection that some substantial number of our attendees and presenters were also participants in the SCCR meetings.
We (Carmella and David) do intend in the near future to write up our experiences and the lessons we have learned, and to leave these write-ups on file for future meetings organizers. In those write-ups we will have some suggestions regarding how in the future to spread the work-load a little more widely, while still keeping it efficient. And, finally, while we are both quite willing to advise and help with any future efforts, we strongly feel that for a society to be successful such efforts must be spread around.
Respectfully Submitted,
David B. Kronenfeld
Carmella Moore