H. Russell Bernard, the editor of AA for all but four issues between 1982 and mid-1990, had more control over the journal than his immediate predecessors. He was permitted to choose the associate editors and no longer had a mandate to publish interdisciplinary articles. Bernard was able to increase the number of research articles to an average of six or seven per issue. He also instituted a section for short research reports and began publishing distinguished lectures given at AAA meetings. The format of the journal changed only a little under the editorship of Janet Keller from mid-1990 to mid-1994. She published a few wide-ranging essays that were not research articles, began regular reviews of museum exhibits, and stopped running obituaries.
By the 1970s, the AAA’s newsletter had become a venue for news and debates about AA. In 1978, Eugene Cohen and Edwin Ames wrote in the newsletter to protest what they called the dismemberment of the section on discussion and debate and its replacement by reports and comments. Richard Woodbury, then AA editor, responded that “[there has been too] much space devoted to exchanges between authors or reviewers and their critics—particularly since these exchanges too often discuss narrowly specialized comments, focus on trivialities, descend to acrimony, and sometimes seem intended mainly to publicize the writers’ activities or publications” (Woodbury 1978:33). Despite Woodbury’s pointed and, in my view, accurate response, AA continued to devote many pages to such exchanges—called commentaries beginning in 1982—until the end of Keller’s editorship.
In 1993, Sydel Silverman and Nancy Parezo wrote in the newsletter objecting to the removal of obituaries from AA. Keller replied by citing page constraints and the difficulties of selecting one or two people to highlight from the many deaths of professional anthropologists. She observed that the AAA newsletter published short obituaries and suggested that more lengthy tributes might be placed online. This is one of the earliest comments by an AA editor about possibilities of digital publishing.16
Editors during this period occasionally provided information about review processes. By the late 1970s, manuscripts were regularly sent to outside reviewers instead of being looked at primarily by members of the editorial board. In 1981, David Olmsted praised the recently instituted practice of blind reviewing, in which manuscript authors and reviewers did not know one another’s identities. Russell Bernard reported that the average time between receipt of a manuscript and initial decision was two and one-half months and that acceptance rates for research articles ranged from 20 to 25 percent.17
AA’s shifting and uncertain identity resulted in editors being inconsistent about the extent to which articles should be of general interest:
In the American Anthropologist we hope to see an increasing reintegration of the discipline as a whole with specialists writing of their subfields in terms of interest to all anthropologists and beyond them to sociologists, geographers, and others. (Woodbury 1975:25)
The AA publishes front-line anthropology without regard to the breadth of the subject matters. We judge manuscripts on their scientific merit, not their breadth of appeal. My goal is not to publish seven articles per issue, all of which can be read by every anthropologist. My goal is for every anthropologist to find at least one article or research report of interest to his or her career in every issue of the AA. (Bernard 1982:777)
We emphasized the journal’s traditional strengths, especially the responsibility to showcase integrative and synthesizing research that addressed issues of general relevance to anthropology and went beyond the confines of the profession in its implications. We emphasized this mission because it seemed critical to provide a centralizing resource in the present circumstance of increasing scholarly specialization, and we strove to reach our goal by tapping the most vital, significant, and broadly relevant research today. (Keller 1994:261)
Scientific approaches were common in AA articles. Bernard explicitly encouraged such approaches, saying that “the AA must be a place where a lot of the best science [my emphasis] that’s going on in anthropology get published” (Bernard 1984:261). This was the peak time for quantitative data in the journal. I have argued (Chibnik 1999) that such data are a rough indicator of the extent to which authors use scientific approaches. Bernard (2011:21) disagrees. He argues that one should “never use the distinction between quantitative and qualitative as cover for talking about the difference between science and humanism. Lots of scientists do their work without numbers, and many scientists whose work is highly quantitative consider themselves humanist.” These comments must be considered in the context of Bernard’s practices as AA editor, when the percentage of articles in sociocultural anthropology with numerical tables (about 55 percent) was by far the highest in the journal’s history.
Bernard insisted that the editors of AA did not favor numerical analyses: “Many people have remarked to me that the journal seems to contain more statistics and mathematics than it used to. This is correct, but it is not by design of the editors. It is a reflection of changes that are going on throughout the discipline. Archeology and physical anthropology have become highly quantitative fields … cultural anthropology is also becoming a more quantitative field” (Bernard 1985:7).
Bernard is right about the increase in quantification in sociocultural anthropology at the time, but this cannot account for the amount of numerical data in AA during his editorship. The percentage of articles with such data dropped considerably after Keller became AA editor.
Although every AA editor ran articles from archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, attempts to have an even distribution among the four subfields ended with Bernard. In the long run, the AAA’s 1972 mandate to maintain some sort of balance was unsuccessful. The proportion of articles in the journal about sociocultural anthropology during Keller’s editorship in the 1990s was about the same as it had been in the late 1960s. Given the preponderance of sociocultural anthropologists in the profession, this seems to have been inevitable.
During this period, AA ran relatively few articles written by international scholars and hardly any at all by African American, Latinx, and American Indian authors. The proportion of female authors did not increase much, averaging 20 to 25 percent for single-authored research articles. The amount of attention in the journal to gender was surprisingly low, given the emergence of feminist anthropology.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the journal continued to largely ignore contemporary politics, globalization, and environmental destruction. In an editorial in her first issue, Keller indicated that this would change, saying that she encouraged articles on the reduction of biodiversity, the global flow of cultural patterns, ownership of the past, the social and biological implications of development, abortion, drug use, and the historical and contemporary implications of disease. She later reported that “our vision for the journal … as we undertook the editorship was rooted in a commitment to the intellectual issues of the profession and the contemporary significance of those issues in the modern world” (Keller 1994:261). Despite this commitment, it was not until the very end of Keller’s term that articles such as “The Power of the Imagined Community: The Settlement of Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans in the U.S.” and “Global Integration and Subsistence Insecurity” became common in the journal.18
One would not know from reading AA in the 1980s and early 1990s that various humanistic approaches to anthropology—sometimes labeled critical or postmodern—were becoming increasingly influential. Many anthropologists questioned