Scholarship, Money, and Prose. Michael Chibnik

       Chapter 2

      A Lot to Learn

      Becoming AA Editor

      For most of the people I interviewed … journal editorship has been … [an] accidental profession.

      (McGinty 1999:13)

      During the two months in early 2011 when I was thinking about applying for the AA editorship, I realized that I had not been paying much attention to the journal. When AA arrived in the mail, I would briefly look at the contents, noting any articles and book reviews that might be relevant to my research and teaching. Although I often cited material from AA in my publications and regularly assigned articles from the journal in my courses, I was not particularly knowledgeable about the contents of issues over the past two decades. I therefore decided to look carefully at what had been published in the journal in recent years.

      I reached two general conclusions from my examination of past issues of AA. First, there was a significant history of conflict and tension between AA editors and the AAA. These problems sometimes arose because of the behavior of particular editors. But it also seemed to be the case that financial pressures at the AAA could lead the organization’s administrators to compel the editors to be more cost-conscious than they might like. Robert Sussman had quit as a result of such pressures; Fran Mascia-Lees and Susan Lees had seen significant cuts in the size of the journal. I knew vaguely that changes in the financial structure of publishing were affecting scholarly journals and worried that these developments might lead to difficult relations between the AAA and the new editor of AA.

      My second general conclusion was that AA was doing well under Tom Boellstorff’s editorship. The new editor would not have to immediately make any significant changes in the journal. I had nothing but admiration for what Tom had been able to do after the sudden departure of Ben Blount, but I had no desire to repeat his experience of taking over a journal in serious trouble.

      Although I remained concerned about how well I would get along with the staff at the AAA, I applied for the editorship in mid-April by sending a two-page letter and my curriculum vitae (CV) to Emilia Guevara of the AAA and Laura Graham. The letter included descriptions of my scholarly interests, publications, and editorial and administrative experience. In early June, I received a response from the search committee saying that “your initial statement and CV lead us to believe that you would be a very strong candidate for the position.” I assumed that this meant that I was on a short list of candidates who had passed an initial winnowing. The committee asked for a vision statement, two letters of recommendation, and information about potential institutional support by September 1. The letter was signed by Laura Graham and Virginia Dominguez, the president of the American Anthropological Association. Virginia, a good friend, was a former colleague at Iowa who had moved a few years earlier to the University of Illinois. I wondered if Laura and Virginia would later have to remove themselves from the search committee because of what might be perceived as conflicts of interest.

      Before approaching administrators at Iowa, I decided to find out what support was currently provided for the journal. The publication of AA involves the paid positions of managing editor and editorial assistant as well as unpaid volunteer labor such as that provided by manuscript reviewers and the editorial board. Staff at Wiley-Blackwell are responsible for the production of the print and online versions of AA and assist with copy editing and proofreading.

      My immediate concern was about support provided by the AAA and the editor’s institution. Tom Boellstorff provided me with the relevant information. The AAA annually paid the salary of the managing editor, $25,000 toward the support of a graduate student editorial assistant, $500 in supplies, and travel by the editor-in-chief to the annual meeting of the association. Each year, Tom received $10,000 toward the support of the editorial assistant, a reduced teaching load, $500 in supplies, and minor accounting support from his institution, the University of California, Irvine.

      I next contacted administrators at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Graduate College at Iowa to see what support might be available. I was not sure that they would promise anything. A year earlier, I had been informally contacted by the Society for Applied Anthropology about the possibility of my applying for the editorship of its journal, Human Organization. Although I had been ambivalent about this possibility, I asked Linda Maxson, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, if support would be available if I took on the position. The dean, citing budgetary considerations, offered nothing.

      Dean Maxson turned out to be more willing to consider supporting the AA editorship. She called Jim Enloe, the chair of my department, to ask about the prestige of AA. After Jim told her that American Anthropologist was the flagship journal of the AAA, the university promised essentially the same support that Tom was receiving at Irvine. I would get $10,000 a year for a graduate student editorial assistant (the remainder of the salary for the position would be paid by the AAA), money for supplies, and a nice office for the journal. I would also have a reduced teaching load, from two courses in the fall to one.¹

      Two friends agreed to write letters of recommendation. Ellen Lewin, a distinguished feminist anthropologist, had been a colleague of mine at Iowa for many years. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, an economic anthropologist with scholarly interests similar to my own, had occupied the office next to me for a decade before recently moving to the University of North Carolina.

      Although lining up organizational support and letters of recommendation had taken some time, it was not difficult. I was not looking forward, however, to the remaining task of writing the vision statement. I understood why the search committee wanted to know what the journal might be like under my editorship. Nonetheless, I was skeptical about the many cliché-filled vision statements that I had seen produced by universities, administrators, and job candidates. The few concrete proposals in these cloying documents were only sometimes carried out. Despite my antipathy for vision statements, I knew that what I wrote might be crucial to the search committee’s decision making. I had several months to produce what would be only a single-spaced document of three to five pages. After some uncharacteristic procrastination, I began mulling over what I might want to say and how I should present my ideas.

      The vision statement had to express my enthusiasm for the position, present my approach to editing, indicate any potential changes to the journal, and assure the search committee that I would not do anything that might be troublesome for significant segments of AA’s diverse readership. In addition, I had to address two aspects of the journal that I knew the search committee was especially concerned about. Even though the title of the journal was American Anthropologist, the AAA wanted to attract more contributions to its flagship journal from authors based in places other than the United States. The AAA was also concerned with AA’s use of digital technology. The two other most cited AAA-sponsored journals—American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology—were well ahead of AA in their employment of social media. Both journals had well-designed websites that allowed rapid online responses to articles.

      I started my statement with some enthusiastic words: “It would be an honor and pleasure