Business Meeting, December 1, 2005
Marriott Wardman, Washington D. C.
Minutes compiled by President Murray Leaf and Treasurer Kate Sullivan (12-13-05)
Meeting was called to order at 6:15 pm by President Murray Leaf.
2. American Anthropological Association Changes: Murray reported back from the Section Assembly about the changes that seem likely in the organization of the AAA as whole. The general idea is that we are no longer a single scientific society but a federation with diverse interests and aims, and the governance system of the AAA has not quite caught up with this change. Murray described the nature and task of the Governance Commission, the Finance Committee, and the lack up to now of a formal relation between them as it was discussed in the Assembly. According to those discussions, this gap should now be remedied. The two committees will be brought into communication with each other and with the Assembly.
A reason for the concern with the relationship between the two committees is that at the present time sections cannot actually manage their own budgets; the AAA controls the books and sets the budget categories and sections usually do not find out what the expenses are until after the fact. The governance system should include a way for sections to agree on appropriate budget categories with the AAA staff, and to hold back specific funds for their own officers to allocate.
There is also a working group on Anthrosource. This had been intended to go out of existence by now, but because issues still develop and are not settled, it will be continued.
The Section Assembly has a listserve where there is active discussion of all of these issues. Dan Segal, coordinator of the Assembly, has been doing excellent work and has been reelected by the Assembly for another year.
3. Finances: Treasurer Kate Sullivan reported on Culture and Agriculture’s current finances. In general, we are solvent, but the prognosis for next year is not good. We should end 2005 with about $10,000 in reserves, if the University of California Press estimates for producing the 2005 volume are accurate. Both 2004 and 2005 volumes had to be produced in 2005 as per our agreement with UCP and this has been expensive. We spent $14,500 (substantially more than expected due to rising costs) on the 2004 volume, which was a print volume, and expect to spend just under $7000 on the 2005 volume, which is an electronic volume. However, we have not yet received any actual bills or income for the 2005 volume (both issues of the 2005 volume are at UCP). University of Texas San Antonio will have given us approximately $7000 to help defray the costs for publication in 2005 (including the CD burn which is over and above the $7000 cost estimate for 2005 electronic volume). We are still not sure of the actual costs of Anthrosource or of the income stream from Anthrosource, because AAA and UCP have only provided estimates thus far. Murray pointed out to the group that the future of publishing lies with electronic publishing, and we must continue to work to weather the uncertain early days of Anthrosource.
In 2004, the Board agreed to suspend print versions of Culture and Agriculture to members with the 2004 volume because C&A section could not afford both a print and an electronic version according to the UCP estimates for production in 2005. However because of the possible effect on membership, Kate and Journal Editor Jim McDonald are working to put the current 2005 volume on a CD for members. UTSA has agreed to pay for the CD burn. Kate has arranged to burn the CDs when she gets the PDF file from UCP, and will then mail it. We can expect to receive our CDs in late January or February with the 2005 issues. AAA staff has agreed to put the PDF file for the 2005 volume on their web space, because we will not be fully integrated into Anthrosource until the 2006 volume is published.
We are also experiencing a significant drop in institutional subscribers, and these subscriptions provide an important source of income for the section. We appear to have lost about 30 institutional subscribers as of the September 2005 financial statements (the latest available to us). At the meeting, we formed a committee of volunteers to investigate possible reasons and to solicit their return. Member-at-Large Valerie Wheeler will coordinate and Susan Andreattea and Lois Stanford will help her contact the libraries; Kate will help get AAA to supply the contact information. It is possible that some of the institutional subscribers have decided to subscribe to Anthrosource, and therefore an institutional subscription is redundant, but there might also be other reasons. The committee will report their findings.
At the same time, our membership is declining—as it is for almost all sections and the AAA as a whole. In our case, it has dropped from 291 C&A members (regular and students combined) in October of 2004 to 257 C&A members in October 2005. Although we have increased dues to $35 for regular members, this does not make up for the lost members. Increased dues may be a cause of some of the losses—not in itself, probably, but when added to all the other costs of AAA membership. It may also be that people are generally cutting back on multiple section memberships.
5. Journal listing on Agricola: Past-president Lois Stanford reported on efforts to list Culture and Agriculture in the index Agricola. She has been trying to get UCP to help arrange this, but UCP has not succeeded. Other sections are reporting similar problems with their efforts to get their journals on indexes. UCP has arranged for listing of C&A in Thomson Sauer Verlag’s humanities and social science databases. They are based in Germany and are important in Europe. Lois will continue to work on Agricola.
6. Journal editorship: Jim has done an excellent job, but is ready to end his tenure. He expects to leave the position at the end of 2006. We have to think about the transition. Two obvious steps are: 1) to get the editorial board fully engaged and 2) share the work that is falling to the editorial office as much as possible by off-loading whatever we can from the journal group to others. Jim will have to arrange the former, but we might be able to arrange the latter independently—such as setting up a separate group to manage the listserve and the expanding website. We therefore need volunteers. Journal volunteers should contact Jim (james.mcdonald@utsa.edu), and others should contact Murray (mjleaf@utdallas.edu).
7. Membership drive—what to do? Discussion was brief, and several suggestions were made, mainly revolving around different types of mentoring for younger scholars by more senior members of the section. One possibility was to help with writing articles, either for publication in C&A or elsewhere. Another was to have senior members identify junior scholars who are not now members and directly invite them to join. A related idea was to post a list of senior scholars willing to serve as mentors on the website, with contact addresses. We will definitely put the latter list on the new section of the website, and wait for volunteers and/or discussion on the listserve for the others. If anyone is interested in participating please contact Murray (mjleaf@utdallas.edu). The idea of using the business meetings for speakers or a cash bar was briefly suggested, but not explored. Perhaps discussion about this could be raised on the listserve. Our main problem at the moment is a lack of extra funds.
8. Website additions: The website was discussed briefly by Murray, and everyone agreed that we should continue to upgrade and expand it.
9. Listserve: The meeting considered whether or not to open the listserve to non-members. The main issue was the need for monitoring that could arise. The general consensus was to leave it closed.
10. Newsletter column: Newsletter editor Barbara Dilly has now served three terms (years) as newsletter editor. It was agreed that we should prepare for a transition to another editor by having an assistant editor to work with her. Several people at the meeting were solicited but no person has stepped forward. Please contact Barbara (bjdilly@creighton.edu) if this sounds like something you would like to do. She is willing to work with the new person as they get started.
11. Term of President-Elect: Murray raised the issue of an inconsistency in our current governance structure, which was remedied at the meeting. Our practice has been to elect the president-elect in the second year of the term of the president. This practice is not discussed in our bylaws and our current practice has not been consistent with our bylaws, which stipulate that all officers serve for two years. Before the change at this meeting, the president-elect was elected every three years and served one year as president-elect and two as president. The meeting agreed to elect the president-elect every two years to serve for two years, so that the president-elect and president serve concurrent two-year terms and so that we have a backup in case something happens to the president. This means that we will hold an election for president-elect this coming year.
12. AAA meeting panels and programs for 2006: Member-at-Large Lisa Markowitz agreed to continue to serve as program coordinator for us for 2006 (she undertook this task in 2005). Lois Stanford agreed to provide support for Lisa. There was insufficient time for a full discussion of panels for 2006. Suzan Andreatta suggested a panel on “Transition of Women to Agriculture” and “Women in Agriculture.” It was agreed that the latter was more likely to attract a good pool of papers. Lisa Chollett agreed to act as organizer of that panel for 2006. It was also suggested that we have a panel on the new farm bill but no one volunteered to organize that session yet. On discussion, it seemed more likely that at least two panels would be a good idea. We agreed to circulate these ideas on our C&A listserve and call for a fuller discussion and more possibilities.
Murray Leaf adjourned the business meeting at 7:30 pm.