Attendance was sparse. The full Executive Board was in attendance.

Murray Leaf, outgoing President, opened the meeting by posting the evening’s agenda and reporting that the minutes of last year’s meetings had been approved by the Board at the Board meeting on Thursday. He then introduced the Board members to the meeting attendees.

Regarding the treasury, Treasurer Kate Sullivan reported that our projected operating budget for 2007 is $14,523. C&A can expect to operate in the red in 2006, by between $500 and $1200, but we will not know the actual figure for a few more months. Murray stated that the same basic strategy used for 2006 budgeting, one which prioritizes the journal, was used for designing the 2007 budget. Discussion was raised about altering the budgeting process in 2008.

Jim McDonald, editor of C&A, announced that he is stepping down by the end of 2007. He then reported that C&A production quality remains high. Given that C&A is a niche journal, Anthrosource is proving to be a good vehicle for getting our work into much wider circulation, including providing electronic indexing. As a result, Jim has been receiving increased numbers of enquiries, including those originating from outside the U.S. The commitment to go electronic has added value to the journal, in the editor’s evaluation at the conclusion of nearly two years of being directly involved with Anthrosource. Articles are lined up for both issues for the 2007 volume, including one special issue. Whoever takes over as editor will come into a surplus of reviewed articles for 2008. The new editor can expect a soft launch on that front. The Board decided that as of 2007 the journal will be provided solely as electronic Anthrosource media for C&A members. Please use the Anthrosource interface and download or print the journal, as C&A gets a cash return on these activities. Please send any suggestions as to names of parties that might serve as editor to Ben Blount, new President of C&A.

Barbara Dilley concluded her tenure as newsletter editor last November. However the replacement person disappeared after only a few months on the job. Lois Stanford agreed to take over as co-editor of the Newsletter column at the Board meeting. At the business meeting, a call was made for a volunteer to help Lois and Ron Rich stepped forward to become the second co-editor. Ideas were floated as to possible content, including the 2006 panel organizers providing short reports on the 2006 panels, guest editorial-opinion pieces, C&A journal announcements, reports on other related conferences of interest, current research projects. All materials are due six weeks ahead of the month in which they will be published (by the 15^th). Photos can also be submitted. Kate will post an announcement calling for content to the C&A listserve to encourage additional submissions.

The next order of business was the C&A website. The Board decided to split the website into the Section and the Journal websites with links between them at their Thursday meeting. The website is currently housed at UTSA along with the journal, but this will end once the editorship changes hands. Although traditionally combined in C&A, it is not strictly necessary that the university hosting the journal also host the websites and listserve. Michael Fisher joined the C&A business meeting to explain the possibilities and workings of a wiki interactive website for the Section. After extensive discussion, we all agreed the wiki setup sounds much more productive and interesting than our current traditional style website. Michael said that using the free download wiki software, we can customize both the look of our interface (which is designed to be redrawn), and control access to and privacy in the wiki, depending on our preferences. He suggests hiring a web-savvy graduate student to maintain the site [as C&A has done in the recent past using a grant type arrangement via the hosting institution]. Michael estimates the cost will be about $50 a month for a webmaster. He is willing to help the C&A webmaster with a few adjustments to the wiki software, adjustments that he has penned. Ron Rich agreed to help with the wiki work, although he cannot currently provide a university host. We also discussed a possible domain name, which Michael is willing to register for the first time for the Section. He is not willing to continue with the annual re-registration, and that responsibility must be assumed by the Section. We all agreed to: cultureandagriculture.org.

We next began planning for the 2007 AAA meeting program. Lisa Markowitz has agreed to serve as Program Chair for 2007. She updated the Section as to what occurred at the Program Chairs’ meeting. Faye Harrison announced the theme for Washington D.C., "Difference, Inequality and Justice." Lisa reported lots of excitement and energy in the air for next year, as well as an openness to panels and special events that are structured in innovative ways. The Program Chair encourages Sections to design alternatives to the standard panels. Those present discussed the issue of how we wish to decide on our invited sessions, which led to suggestions as to how we might combine our invitations with other Sections so as to pull in more panels. We need to use our listserve to more effectively organize and to encourage all of those interested in an invited slot to submit their material by March 1. The deadline for volunteered panels, etc is around April 1. Several thoughts as to involving more students arose. The first was that Ryan Adams, C&A student representative, organize a student panel, and the second was that all of the panels try to integrate graduate students among their proposed participants. A number of panel ideas were floated. These are noted in order of discussion:

We then turned to the slate for next year’s election. The following people were nominated and seconded:

The group took a final stab at ways in which the website and newsletter column might be developed and augmented. Ryan suggested that we could post interesting syllabi. It was then brought to everyone’s attention that an extensive archive of syllabi can be found at http://food-culture.org/syllabi.html, hosted by the Association for the Study of Food and Society. It was then agreed that this site be linked to the C&A website. Glenn Stone suggested that w e might follow the lead of Anthropological Currents and create short summaries of interesting and related journal articles from sources other than Anthrosource. It was again suggested this year that we try to create an article peer review process for students and junior faculty to be hosted by senior faculty in the Section. Jim again reminded everyone to access and print from Anthrosource weekly, or at least monthly, as this directly contributes to C&A’s cash flow from Anthrosource.

The meeting concluded when Murray handed the C&A imaginary gavel to incoming President Ben Blount, who in turn called on the group to thank Murray for his service.

Respectfully submitted

Kate Sullivan Secretary-Treasurer

December 2, 2006