He also discussed how manuscripts were reviewed. After Goldschmidt screened submissions, they were sent to the appropriate associate editor, who made a detailed recommendation. Although manuscripts were occasionally sent to anthropologists not on the editorial board, Goldschmidt tried not to do this. He said that using “special readers” placed a burden on them (no one worries much about this anymore), delayed the handling of manuscripts (doubtless the case), and placed the editorial decision in anonymous hands (now thought by many to be a good idea). After looking at the recommendation of the reader of a manuscript, Goldschmidt made a final decision about whether to publish it. This in-house evaluation of manuscripts led to speedy reviews. The journal was not very selective. About half of the manuscripts submitted as potential research articles were accepted.9
Goldschmidt usually suggested certain changes on accepted manuscripts. After authors made revisions in response to these suggestions, the journal’s editorial assistant worked on “stylistic and grammatical detail.” It took about three months between sending an article to the printer and its appearance in an issue.
Goldschmidt was the first of many editors to worry in the journal about the fragmentation of anthropology:
Our discipline, which has always been a broad and generalizing one [ignoring AA articles in the Boasian period] has increasingly been subject to the pressures of specialization. Most of us are no longer anthropologists in the old sense; few of us control, let alone contribute to, the data of more than one of the several specialties in our field. We are rather archeologists or linguists, specialists in human genetics, primitive law, or some other particular aspect of the human scent…. Our clan has split into many lineages…. The loyalty to the lineage frequently outweighs the sentiment that binds us to the clan. (Goldschmidt 1956b:iv)
He argued that there was nonetheless a unity of anthropology that rested in “the ultimate goal of providing an understanding of the consistencies and diversities in human existence as they are manifested in the characteristics of peoples over the globe and throughout the course of human history.” AA, he said, was a chief symbol of this greater unity.
Goldschmidt was also the first editor to comment in the journal about writing problems related to specialization. He observed that authors had to communicate their findings in ways that were useful to fellow specialists and understandable to other anthropologists. An author therefore needed to “present his [inclusive language was still in the future] material in such a way that … [nonspecialists] can understand the conclusions and the broad base upon which these rest, even though they cannot control the accuracy of his data or understand the intricacies of his method” (Goldschmidt 1956b:iv). Although editors made efforts to strike a balance among the subfields, the journal was dominated more than ever by sociocultural anthropology. Of 1,106 research articles in AA between 1946 and 1970, 805 (80 percent) were in sociocultural anthropology compared to 86 (9 percent) in archaeology, 68 (7 percent) in physical anthropology, and 47 (5 percent) in linguistic anthropology (Murphy 1976:2).10 Within sociocultural anthropology, the most common topic was kinship and social organization, followed by social change (“acculturation”), economics, and politics. Articles about peasants and people living in towns and cities became much more common than previously. Despite the tumult of the Cold War, the civil rights era, the Vietnam War, and feminist movements, just about nothing in the journal touched on current issues.
Areal coverage in sociocultural anthropology was evenly divided between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. While coverage of American Indian groups declined, articles about them still took up disproportionate space in the journal. About one-quarter of articles in sociocultural anthropology concerned aspects of the indigenous cultures of North America (not including Mexico) compared to only about 7 percent about other groups and subcultures in the region. Sol Tax, one of the more creative editors of AA, did put together in 1955 an unusual journal section on “American” (nonindigenous) culture that included articles by distinguished anthropologists about social class, acculturation of ethnic groups, biracialism, values, and music. However, these kinds of articles largely disappeared from the journal in subsequent years.
Contributors were mostly white males from the United States. Women wrote only 13 percent of research articles between 1946 and 1973 (Murphy 1976:5); AA did not have its first female editor until Laura Bohannan was appointed in 1971. Although Sol Tax later played an important role in creating the international journal Current Anthropology, issues under his editorship and those of his successors included only a handful of articles written by authors from places other than the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. There were only a minuscule number of Asian American, Latinx, African American, and American Indian authors.11
By the early 1970s, it had become evident that the format of AA was no longer viable. When Laura Bohannan edited the journal between 1971 and 1973, AA had so much material that it was forced to publish three issues a year filled entirely with book reviews and discussion and debate. Other issues regularly had twenty to thirty articles spanning a bewildering mix of topics, subfields, methods, and theoretical approaches. The number of submissions was especially high in sociocultural anthropology, perhaps because AA was the most important outlet in the United States for articles in this subfield.
Debates About Journal Identity, 1974–1994
After the AAA began publishing other journals in 1974, AA declined in size and influence. The journal was once again a quarterly. Robert Manners, the editor of AA, reported in his first issue that “astronomical increases in the cost of paper and other publication expenses would limit the journal for the next several years to about 900 pages of contributed material” (Manners 1974:6). This vague, ingenuous statement only hints at the real reasons why the size of AA had been halved. The cost of paper was a minor factor. What really mattered was that the AAA had decided to devote less money to AA. Prior to the 1970s, most of the AAA budget had been used to support the journal. With the decision to expand the AAA publication program and the desire of the association to spend more on diverse nonpublishing activities, AA became a lesser priority.12
The influence of AA was further limited when the AAA was reorganized in the early 1980s. For many years, all members of the association had received the journal. After the reorganization, AA was sent only to members of the new General Anthropology Division. Although at first all AAA members were automatically enrolled in the General Anthropology Division, many soon left, preferring to affiliate with new sections of the association that had formed as part of the reorganization. Between June 1984 and December 1986, membership of the General Anthropology Division dropped from 7,137 to 4,288.13
I do not envy Manners’s situation when he became AA editor. In addition to the drastic page reduction, the AAA took away some of the autonomy of the journal’s editor. An AAA committee recommended in 1972 that “the American Anthropologist be changed from a journal primarily devoted to articles in cultural anthropology to a general journal publishing review articles, book reviews, and obituaries, with equal emphasis in applied, archaeological, cultural, linguistic, and physical anthropology.” The AAA required Manners to have associate editors representing different subfields who were chosen by sections of the association. He was also asked to place priority on interdisciplinary articles that appealed to AA readers from all subfields.14
Perhaps in an effort by the AAA to encourage contributions from sub-fields other than sociocultural anthropology, Manners’s successors were an archaeologist (Richard Woodbury, 1976–1978) and a linguistic anthropologist (David Olmsted, 1979–1981). The shrunken AA was very different from its predecessor. Between 1974 and 1981, most issues had only three to five research articles. The rest of the journal consisted of short review articles of particular topics, discussion and debate (relabeled reports and comments in 1978), book reviews, and obituaries.
Two essays in AA during this time foreshadowed subsequent changes in the journal. In a 1977 piece, Cyril Belshaw, editor of Current Anthropology,