Scholarship, Money, and Prose
Scholarship, Money, and Prose
Behind the Scenes at an Academic Journal
Michael Chibnik
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8122-5217-0
Contents
Chapter 1. Trials and Tribulations: AA’s Tangled History
Chapter 2. A Lot to Learn: Becoming AA Editor
Chapter 3. Reviews: Experts Comment on Manuscripts
Chapter 4. Yes or No: How I Made Manuscript Decisions
Chapter 5. Writing: My Attempts to Make AA Readable
Chapter 6. Sections: AA as a Magazine
Chapter 7. The Bottom Line Matters: AA as a Business
Chapter 8. Moving On: The Editorship Ends
Preface
From 2012 to 2016, I was editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist (AA), a major journal sponsored by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Editing AA was a complicated job that involved working with a large editorial board, six associate editors, a managing editor in California, an editorial assistant at my university in Iowa, and staff at the AAA and our publisher, Wiley-Blackwell. Articles and essays in AA examined an astonishing variety of topics. Issues included research articles, research reports, book reviews, obituaries, interviews, commentaries, vital topics forums, distinguished lectures, and sections on public anthropology, visual anthropology, and world anthropology.
One of my topical specialties is the anthropology of work. Researchers in this field have carried out careful ethnographic studies of farmers, hedge fund traders, truck drivers, geishas, and drug dealers. When I was learning about the complexities of editing AA, I wondered why there was not also an ethnography of the work of academic editors. Their activities, after all, directly affect the careers of anthropologists writing books and articles about other professions. I could not even find a breezy, gossipy memoir about academic publishing similar to those written by editors at popular magazines and commercial presses.
In the 1950s, two editors of AA, Sol Tax and Walter Goldschmidt, wrote numerous short columns for the journal about various aspects of their work. Such essays appeared only sporadically in AA in subsequent years until Tom Boellstorff became editor-in-chief in 2007. Tom wrote a from-the-editor column for every issue about matters related to anthropology and publishing. These essays provided insightful, inside glimpses of a world of editing that most readers of the journal knew little about. Because I enjoyed the columns and thought that they included useful information, I decided to continue them after I took over the editorship of AA.
The from-the-editor columns that Tom and I wrote were the immediate inspiration for this book. Some parts of the book are greatly expanded treatments of ideas that we first explored in our essays. Most of what I say here, however, examines aspects of editing that we never got around to discussing. This book is not intended to be either a definitive study of scholarly editing or a manual of how such editing should be done. Instead, it is a historical and autobiographical account of my experiences and practices at AA. As such, the book is a perhaps unusual hybrid of an ethnography and a memoir that focuses on work. The story I tell must be understood in the context of the particularities of AA and the AAA, the field of anthropology, and my own interests, obsessions, and eccentricities. Although I have done my best to be as straightforward as possible, I realize that many of the events I describe might well be interpreted differently by others. I take some comfort in knowing that such ambiguities characterize all ethnography.
Much of this book is based on articles and essays from AA and Anthropology News (called Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association from 1960 to mid-1974 and Anthropology Newsletter from mid-1974 to mid-1999). In an effort to avoid too much clutter, I have provided in-text citations for information found in these journals only for direct quotes. References to other material from these journals can be found in endnotes. All references to sources other than AA and Anthropology News have intext citations. The bibliography at the end of the book includes both sources cited in the text and sources cited in the endnotes.
Introduction
One day in February 2011, Laura Graham walked into my office and asked if I would be interested in applying for the position of editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist. Laura, a colleague of mine at the University of Iowa, had agreed the previous fall to chair the search committee for the editor of the journal. The term of Tom Boellstorff, the current editor, was to end in the summer of 2012. AA, founded in 1888, is one of the oldest and most influential anthropology journals in the world. It was for many years the only journal published by the American Anthropological Association. Although the AAA now sponsors more than twenty journals, the association calls AA its “flagship” publication.
Despite the prestige of the AA editorship, the competition for the job might not be all that intense. Of the many talented people who could do the work, few were likely to apply. When I discussed the possibility with other anthropologists, the most common reaction was wonderment that anyone would want to edit the journal. Most regarded the job as a time-consuming, thankless slog likely to involve unpleasant conflicts with disgruntled authors whose manuscripts were turned down. The unsalaried position provided no significant perks other than a reduced teaching load that might be negotiated with