As usual, most submissions and articles were in sociocultural anthropology. Mascia-Lees commented in Anthropology News that there were especially few unsolicited submissions in biological anthropology. Perhaps for this reason, she and Lees ran a special section in an issue in 2003 with nine essays on biological anthropology. These included a piece on recent developments in anthropological genetics and historical overviews of past AA articles on race, human variation, skeletal biology, and primatology.24
During Ben Blount’s editorship from 2006 to 2007, the journal emphasized In Focus sections and short research reports. Blount ran relatively few lengthy research articles; two issues had only three such articles not part of an In Focus section. Tom Boellstorff became AA editor in June 2007, a position he held for the next five years. He was initially appointed on an interim basis after Blount’s unexpected departure. After the position was advertised, Boellstorff was officially given the position of editor-in-chief with the word interim removed.
Blount had left Boellstorff only three articles in the pipeline. AA’s future budget was uncertain; the AAA’s publishing contract with the University of California Press was not working out well. Despite Boellstorff’s prodigious efforts to revive AA, he was able to publish only 556 pages in 2008 and 552 pages in 2009.
The situation improved markedly as a result of Boellstorff’s hard work and the AAA’s move to a more profitable publishing partnership with Wiley-Blackwell. In each of Boellstorff’s last three years as editor, AA published more than 700 pages. Boellstorff made more significant changes in the journal than any editor since the Tedlocks. He greatly increased international representation on the editorial board and regularly wrote lively from-the-editor columns about the journal, publishing in general, and ongoing anthropological controversies. In 2009, AA began publishing lengthy year-in-review essays on biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, public anthropology (called practicing anthropology the first three years), and sociocultural anthropology. A new public anthropology section was inaugurated in 2010; the visual anthropology section was expanded. Vital topics forums were another innovation. These were occasional collections of short essays by distinguished anthropologists about general topics such as “On Nature and the Human,” “On Happiness,” and “What Is Science in Anthropology?” Boellstorff also edited an online-only “virtual issue” of past AA articles in linguistic anthropology.25
Boellstorff cut the amount of space devoted to other parts of the journal. He eliminated research reports and published fewer commentaries and In Focus sections. The number of book reviews dropped to an average of twenty-two per issue, compared to an average of forty when Mascia-Lees and Lees were AA editors. The difference would be even greater without Boellstorff’s first issue, which included eighty-six reviews mostly acquired during Blount’s editorship.
The types of articles Boellstorff published were similar to those run by other editors in this century. Although sociocultural anthropology articles continued to dominate AA, the journal ran numerous pieces from the other subfields. About half the authors were women; gender issues were frequently addressed by both male and female contributors. The number of articles written by members of underrepresented minorities in the United States remained low.26 The research areas covered in articles spanned the globe, including many papers about aspects of U.S. culture. Contributors to the journal examined the usual diversity of topics, with globalization, economics, the environment, politics, and migration being especially common foci of research. AA was no longer isolated from the messiness of the world.
Editors disagreed somewhat about the extent to which articles should be of general interest:
The journal primarily will publish unsolicited articles that add substantially new anthropological knowledge … synthesize and integrate anthropological knowledge, and focus on broad cross-cutting problems, themes, and theories. (Sussman 1998:605)
To fulfill the AA’s role as a unifying force, we will be looking for articles of the highest quality that are accessible to readers across the discipline…. [Contributors] should try to balance the reporting of specific research results with general theory and articulate the general importance of what they are doing for the discipline as a whole. (Mascia-Lees and Lees 2001:9)
Publications within each field ideally will be accessible to anthropologists in any field of specialization—that is, they should be of interest across the traditional fields—but they will not be expected to directly address cross-field issues, concerns, or topics. (Blount 2006:463)
American Anthropologist welcomes work that bridges subfields or speaks to the interstices of subfields, but also recognizes that the vast majority of anthropological research lies squarely within one subfield. …A “lowest common denominator” approach that would require authors to frame research questions in a manner intelligible to all subfields is a near-impossible task…. Anthropologists not invested in a four-field vision of the discipline should feel welcome to publish in American Anthropologist. (Boellstorff 2008a:1)
Despite these stated differences, the balance between general and specific articles seems to me to have been about the same no matter who was editor.
The vision statements of editors usually included something about the importance of accessible writing for the journal’s diverse readership:
In order to increase readability, we will give close editorial scrutiny to diction, rhetoric, and clarity. We will go beyond copy editing into style editing, and to this end we will employ an editorial assistant with appropriate editorial skills. For the sake of readability across subfields, we will ask all authors to explain terms that have yet to gain a place in the general anthropological lexicon. (Tedlock and Tedlock 1993:24)
I believe that clarity of writing and minimal use of jargon are necessary in order to allow readers from all subfields and fields outside of anthropology easy access to articles and reviews within the journal. (Sussman 1998:605)
We will encourage contributions written in a language that we all, as trained anthropologists, can understand. We will work with authors to ensure that the language in which they present their work is comprehensible. (Mascia-Lees and Lees 2001:9)
We work through the editorial process to unpack subdiscipline-specific terminology and provide contextual information that will make manuscripts maximally intelligible to all readers without requiring that authors alter their research questions, analytic style, or writing voice. (Boellstorff 2008a:1–2)
Acceptance rates for articles remained fairly consistent at 20 to 25 percent through this period. Time between manuscript submission and initial decision was more variable. Mascia-Lees and Lees reported an average of two to three months; the Tedlocks said that it often took six months to get the three peer reviews they needed to make a decision.27
The work of editors was eased by a transition to online processing of manuscripts. AA began requiring electronic submissions during the editorship of Mascia-Lees and Lees. The move to Wiley-Blackwell in 2008 provided the journal with access to a good online manuscript control system, ScholarOne, for papers submitted as potential research articles.
Despite AA’s sometimes-turbulent recent history, the journal was in good shape when the position of editor-in-chief was advertised in 2011. Profit sharing from the Wiley-Blackwell contract had allowed the journal to publish substantial issues even while library subscriptions were declining. Under Tom Boellstorff’s editorship, the journal had instituted attractive new features while managing to avoid science-humanities controversies. ScholarOne allowed efficient,