Why we need more members; Why you should join.
With the transition of our section journal Culture and Agriculture to Anthrosource, the Executive Committee has been concerned with the problem of maintaining our membership. Although the cost is nominal, it is easy to envision that membership will drop as the journal goes online and becomes available to all members of the AAA, especially if we also stop producing the hard copy entirely. If getting the journal is the main benefit of membership, it is then easy to see that the only thing standing between us and disappearance as a section is a kind of honor principle.
While we are trying to think of ways to add value to the electronic publication for paid-up members, such as password access to additional material like data-bases and computer models that the articles might refer to, my purpose here is to discuss reasons why our membership should increase quite apart from the arrangements with the journal. Essentially there are three: collaboration, representation, and impact. Background to all three is the evolving place of sections in the Association as a whole.
Organizationally, since its inception, the AAA has evolved from a unitary body to a federation. Conceptually, it has evolved from a scientific society to a marketplace of ideas about science (and other matters). Some of the sections are still dedicated to the idea that anthropology as a whole is a science and the Association ought to be a scientific society, but others are not. There are two main venues through which the debate is being carried out: the publications of the association and sections, and the annual meetings. Anthrosource represents an important rationalization and consolidation of the former, and it should be easy to see that without membership we would not have C & A as part of it, and hence would not have as part of the larger debate. My main concern here is with the comparable role of the section in the meetings.
For the annual meetings, each section gets a certain number of “invited” sessions, meaning panels that it can make up according to its own lights. In addition, each section has a representative on what amounts to a virtual program committee. Our program representative this year was Lisa Markowits. Last year it was Lois Stanford, who was also serving as President.
When an organizer submits a paper or panel, they designate a section to review it. After the submissions close, each section program representative gets access for one week to a website where they can find all the papers and panels that have assigned themselves to them, as well as others that have been assigned by the AAA staff. They also have a list of all other program representatives from the other sections. They can accept panels or trade them back and forth, which they do. At the end of the time, they have to submit a ranked list, and papers are included in the program according to the ranking. The representatives can also suggest scheduling. This year, we had two “invited” panels, and one other that we also originated as a body, and we were able to get them considered, named, and scheduled in a sequence. There were four additional panels we reviewed. Three were entirely independent in origin, and one was a large and very interesting panel on food organized by Lois Stanford that we had also discussed in preliminary way at the 2003 business meeting. All were accepted by us and all are appearing in the meeting program. Moreover, Lisa was able to spread them out through the meetings in such way as to have only one scheduling conflict. If we were not a section, we could not do this. Agriculture papers would probably go to the General Anthropology Division, which is overcrowded, and the result would be much more a matter of the luck of the draw than any sort of rational planning. This is what I mean by representation: our presence in meeting planning and, in consequence, in the meetings themselves.
Because the Association continues to grow and attendance at the meetings continues to increase, we can expect the sections’ importance in the programming process to increase as well. It follows that the business meetings of the sections ought to become correspondingly more important as places where meeting planning takes place, which means that they will also increasingly have to be places where we engage in serious substantive discussions of our topics and their mutual relationships. This is one aspect of collaboration. The other aspect is that there is a great potential to expand our business meeting and the journal and website to promote collaboration more directly, such as with formal discussion topics, speakers, or simply gatherings with something like cash-bar.
Finally, by impact I mean the influence of our “local” theoretical issues and concerns on the theoretical development of anthropology as a whole. All social or cultural theory must in the end involve some consistent notion of human nature, and generally theory in last century has turned on a clash between two such views. One view of theory is essentially that it should show how culture or society controls behavior, which is essentially irrational. The other is that it should how culture and society provide tools or resources for behavior, which is essentially rational. In the former view, it is culture or society which adapts, and carries people along with it; in the latter it is humans who adapt (or fail to) and maintain or modify their cultural and social toolkit in the process.
Agriculture is where instrumental rationality is most unavoidable, and accurate description of it is a powerful antidote to deterministic pretence. Agriculture is the foundation, if not the bedrock, of the human adaptation as we now know it. In the nature of the case, the work of the members of the Culture and Agriculture is not and should not be regarded as either an isolated subsegment of what anthropologists in general do, or simply a substantive application of general theoretical ideas. General theoretical ideas in anthropology are not settled, and culture and anthropology has a powerful contribution to make to their eventual development. The research and writing of most, probably all, of our members is aimed at making that contribution. Belonging to the C & A section is a further contribution to assure that all that work and effort pays off.
In short, in paying for membership in C & A we are not only paying for a journal or really any other direct service, we are also paying for a voice and pulpit to use it from. I suspect that a large part of our membership already recognizes this. For others, I hope this will serve as a reminder and encouragement to stay with us. And for all, what the Executive Committtee would most like is that it would serve as a stimulus to go out and try to bring in a few more members. Every year we receive papers to review for the journal and papers and panels for the meetings from non-members. Such people should see the importance of joining. If you run into any, please try to suggest it to them.
Murray J. Leaf, President 2005-2006.