It is difficult to discern evidence of these conflicts in the pages of AA. No matter who was editor, the journal in the 1920s was dominated by descriptive articles. George Stocking comments that with few exceptions, articles in the journal were dull “by almost anyone’s standards.” Even Lowie noted the “lamentable dearth of theoretical discussion” and later recalled that the lack of “good stuff” had forced him to make frantic appeals for aid (Stocking 1976:52).
By the 1930s, the journal had become more diverse and interesting. The proportion of ethnographic articles about North American Indians was down to about 50 percent, with another 15 percent about other groups in the Western Hemisphere and 35 percent about the rest of the world. The most common topics were religion, kinship and social organization, and expressive culture; descriptions of material objects were becoming less frequent. Narrowly descriptive articles, sarcastically characterized by Stern and Bohannan (1970:6) as being about “A Curious Example of X from Y-land,” became less common. Such articles, however, did not disappear from the journal for a long time. In the early 1940s, AA published “Shawnee Musical Instruments,” “A Sioux Medicine Bundle,” and “Games of the Mountain Tarascans.”5
In a 1939 AA article about ethnological theory and method, Alexander Lesser discusses new approaches to research in sociocultural anthropology. Although most ethnographers still brought back from the field a “general assortment of data” presented as “a descriptive treatment of a people or culture,” increasing numbers of anthropologists were examining “problems” that could be empirically examined. They were, in Lesser’s (1939:576) words, testing “hypotheses … that assert something about the nature of the real world which is to be checked against the facts.” (This formulation is too positivistic for many contemporary sociocultural anthropologists!) Some AA articles now had titles such as “The Problem of the Incest Tabu in a North China Village” and “A Problem in Kinship Terminology.” In a related development, AA was beginning to publish articles about the use of statistical methods to examine particular problems.6
Although anthropologists now did more research among peasants and other members of state societies, this was reflected to only a limited extent in the pages of AA. Stocking argues that the Boasian orientation of AA editors may have made them resistant to this and other changes in the field: “Insofar as they were interdisciplinary in character, the newer trends tended to develop at its intellectual margins. Articles on culture and personality were likely to appear in journals that were rarely or irregularly read by anthropologists. Furthermore, insofar as they were resisted by older anthropologists, the new trends also tended institutionally to be forced to the margins. The Anthropologist published little on culture and personality … [and] was apparently unreceptive to the work of Julian Steward [on cultural ecology]” (Stocking 1976:23).
The distribution of articles among anthropological subfields gradually became less even. The journal became considerably more oriented to socio-cultural anthropology. Physical anthropologists often preferred to publish in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (founded in 1918); American Antiquity (founded in 1935) became an attractive outlet for articles in archaeology. The drop in submissions in these two fields was also related to fields of study among doctoral recipients in anthropology. In the 1930s and 1940s, only about one-quarter of PhD degrees in anthropology in the United States were given in archaeology and physical anthropology compared to about half in the 1920s. Linguistic anthropology remained a small subfield.
Contributors to AA between 1921 and 1945 said little about sociopolitical and economic events in the wider world. Articles in the journal rarely mentioned the boom of the 1920s, the ensuing Great Depression, the inequities of colonialism, and the rise of fascism, Nazism, and communism. Even though many anthropologists were involved with the government and the military during World War II, the journal included few pieces related to the war.
AA was not totally apolitical. In 1939, the journal published an AAA resolution on “racial theories”; several articles in the 1940s discussed constraints on the practice of anthropology during the war in different countries. Nevertheless, the general avoidance of politics and social justice in AA is exemplified by the complete lack of critical commentary about internment centers in the United States for Japanese Americans during and immediately after the war. Although U.S. anthropologists were involved in the administration of these camps, the only AA article about them during the war was Marvin Opler’s “A ‘Sumo’ Tournament at Tule Lake Center.” Opler was a “community analyst” at Tule Lake, and it may be unreasonable to expect him to have made a political critique of such centers during wartime. But the journal editor’s decision to publish an ethnographic article that did not include any social commentary about the situation of the participants in the tournament is not one that would be made today.7
The format of AA remained more or less the same between 1921 and 1945. The journal consisted of articles, book reviews, brief communications (the former discussion and correspondence), notes and news, obituaries, and accounts of the proceedings of scholarly societies. The only significant innovation was a series of annual reviews of archaeological fieldwork in the United States and Canada that appeared between 1929 and 1934.
The Heyday of the Journal, 1946–1973
AAA membership grew from 408 in 1947 to 2,536 in 1976. This growth was fueled by a substantial increase in the number of academic positions in the United States as more and more students were attending college. Many new anthropology departments were founded; existing departments doubled or tripled in size. In addition, government organizations such as the National Science Foundation and private foundations such as Wenner-Gren were providing more funding for anthropological research.
The expansion of anthropology was good for AA. In 1953, the AAA budget allowed the journal, which had been a quarterly, to come out six times a year. The number of pages steadily increased, from 762 in 1953 to 1,132 in 1960, 1,615 in 1965, and 2,053 in 1973. AA had more influence than ever, with just about every prominent anthropologist in the United States and Great Britain sending in contributions. The cost of AAA membership, which continued to include a subscription to AA, gradually rose during this period from $9 in the early 1950s (the equivalent of about $95 today) to $30 in the early 1970s (the equivalent of about $185 today).
The bulk of the journal, as always, consisted of research articles and book reviews. Film reviews were introduced in the mid-1960s. Until 1969, the journal ran separate, hard-to-distinguish sections labeled brief communications and letters to the editor. These were then combined into an often-combative section called Discussion and Debate. The journal included obituaries throughout this period, but most reports of meetings and other news were discontinued in the 1950s.
Although AA editors had previously rarely commented in the journal about the economics, mechanics, and intellectual problems of publishing, this changed in the 1950s. In his first issue as editor, Sol Tax, who edited the journal between 1953 and 1955, noted that anthropologists wanted and needed the broader coverage allowed by the increase in pages and said that AA would explore the use of microproduction and other means of distribution of large masses of material. Although nothing much would come of this, Tax presciently observed that publication need not be equated with printing. In subsequent columns, Tax and his associate editors wrote about the need to balance subfield coverage in the journal and summarized the contents of issues.8
Walter Goldschmidt, the editor between 1956 and 1959, regularly wrote columns called “From the Editor’s Desk.” In his second issue, Goldschmidt described how he assembled his editorial board:
In establishing a panel of Associate Editors, we have tried to rationalize the processing of manuscripts and to broaden the basis of editorial decision. The Associates were selected to represent the diverse interests of our discipline…. We have selected an archeologist and a physical anthropologist, and four representatives of what may be broadly called social anthropology or ethnology. These latter were chosen