goodman

A More Inclusive, Open and Public Association

Alan Goodman
AAA President

Many individuals and groups have come together this year to improve upon various aspects of the AAA. The result is a more open, inclusive, engaged and public association. Highlights include the following changes:

Completion of the ambitious RACE Project. This public education project features a 5,000-square-foot traveling museum exhibit and a website, both of which début in January 2007.
Lower dues for student members and adoption of income-based dues to make membership in the AAA more affordable for those who are under- or unemployed.
Free access to AnthroSource to select categories of educational institutions.

The RACE Project
The goal of the RACE Project is to promote public understanding of myths and misunderstandings regarding ideas of race, racism and human variation. Our project focuses on intersecting stories about the history, science and lived experience of race and racism.

The RACE Project was initiated nearly a decade ago under the leadership of AAA President Yolanda Moses. Yolanda and colleagues felt it was time for anthropology to regain its voice in public conversations about race. The project garnered nearly $4 million in funding from the Ford Foundation and NSF. Now, nearly a decade later, the main products of the project are about to “go public.”

In early January 2007, a multifaceted, interactive, bold and thought-provoking 5,000-square-foot museum exhibit will open at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St Paul. After St Paul, the exhibit will travel around the country for at least five years, and it is our hope that smaller exhibits will be developed from the larger one. Also in January, the RACE Project’s public website will be launched with detailed timelines, stories, engaging games and interactive components. Watch for the link on the AAA website.

Income-Based Dues
Earlier in the year, AAA staff surveyed our membership and found that about two-thirds of respondents agreed that dues should be based specifically on members’ income. AAA staff developed a number of possible dues structure models and the executive board reviewed these models, modifying and approving the final model in June. The new income-based dues structure reduces dues for students, individuals at the beginning of their careers, un/underemployed individuals and anyone else who earns less than $75,000 per year.

I hope that the new dues structure will help to maintain economic inclusiveness and a wide range of perspectives in the AAA: It is in the long-term interest of the association to accomplish these objectives. It is also simply the right thing to do in a society that has such tremendous disparities in wealth.

AnthroSource for All
During his AAA presidency, Don Brenneis realized with Executive Director Bill Davis that our self-publishing scheme was unsustainable: We were losing money as libraries dropped subscriptions to hard copies of publications, and by not providing digital access to our publications, their impact was diminishing. With the help of many members, they obtained funding from the Mellon Foundation, developed a model for electronic publishing, and AnthroSource was born.

AnthroSource (AS) is one of the most extraordinary changes in our association. It is both a product and a vision. As a product, AnthroSource is an electronic portal to AAA journals and other publications. As a thoughtful and inclusive vision called “beyond boundaries” by Leslie Chan of the AnthroSource Steering Committee, AnthroSource is a means to democratizing anthropology. In following our vision to increase access to our publications, the AAA Executive Board moved in May to provide AnthroSource at no cost in 2007 to:

Tribal Colleges and Universities in the US and Canadian First Nation and Arctic Colleges
US Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
Institutions in less developed countries

Although it might seem a financial burden to provide free subscriptions, reasons for doing so were persuasive. First, the class and ethnic groups that are educated by these institutions have contributed substantially to the production of anthropological knowledge, often at a cost. Second, we broaden the reach of anthropology by increasing the diversity of individuals who become acquainted with the discipline and may eventually join and contribute to the discipline as well. Third, the financial cost was minimal as few of these institutions either subscribed to our print journal or were likely to subscribe to AS.

However, to make such free access possible, and in the bigger picture to make AnthroSource economically sustainable, we need to secure more paid institutional subscriptions. To support free and inexpensive access to those who are less privileged, we need those who can pay for AnthroSource to do so. There are many advantages to institutional subscription:

Students and colleagues benefit from having access to AAA articles from their computers.
AnthroSource articles can be linked to course reading lists, thereby making teachers’ jobs easier.
Our work is disseminated more widely.
More revenue flows back to the journals to help keep them vital.
More revenue becomes available to the AAA to add new services and benefits and to reduce service costs to members.

Annual Meetings, Anthropology and Labor
The successful 2005 AAA annual meeting in Washington DC and the 2006 annual meeting in San José were critical to recovering our morale from the move to Atlanta in 2004. The 2006 meeting was initially to be held in San Francisco. Because of the ongoing labor dispute between Unite Here Local 2 (the union representing hotel workers in San Francisco) and the San Francisco hotel management group (MEG), the executive board followed the advice of our Commission on Labor Relations and quickly agreed to move these meetings to San José. The move was the right thing to do. The majority of our members would not cross a picket line, nor would I. Fortunately, this second move was less costly and less disruptive than in 2004.

After almost two years of working without a contract, Unite Here closed a new contract on September 15, 2006, with MEG. The contract grants higher wages, better pensions and full healthcare benefits to more than 4,200 members of Unite Here Local 2. After the 2004 move to Atlanta, I wrote in AN that I hoped that history would show that the AAA played a positive role in advocacy for a living wage. We did.

Looking Forward
From where I sit as AAA president, I have the advantage of seeing an extraordinary concurrence of encouraging changes. The AAA is blessed with a dedicated and bright staff and literally hundreds of members who volunteer tremendous amounts of their time and expertise. Yet, there are many challenges ahead.

We recently faced two huge financial hits: the move of the annual meetings in 2004 and 2006 and investments in AnthroSource. We have weathered these storms, and I think we are poised to move into much calmer financial waters. While it is difficult to predict our financial future, it is certain that we need to get our respective institutions to sign up for AnthroSource. In some sense as AnthroSource goes, so goes the AAA.

I hope that the new income-based dues structure will reduce the financial burden of membership for some. But we also need to contain costs and improve services at the same time. There is a way to pull off the trick: increase other sources of revenue. And this is exactly my hope in AnthroSource.

As we close 2006, we are merging and replacing two pioneering committees, the AnthroSource Steering Committee and the AnthroSource Working Groups, with a single entity tentatively titled “Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic and Publishing” (CFPEP), chaired by Alisse Waterston. CFPEP will help direct: 1) increasing AS revenues, 2) equitably and fairly dividing costs and revenues among section publications, 3) working with sections to make sure their publications remain viable and in a form that is useful for their members and subscribers, 4) continuing to articulate and refine the vision of AS, and 5) further opening up and developing AS so that it becomes even more the premiere digital source for anthropology.

We also need to continue our efforts to improve communications and inclusiveness in general. The AAA is beginning to invest in revamping its technological infrastructure, including an improved website, meetings software, listserves and other means to take advantage of electronic communications. On a human side, I look forward to public debates around the recommendations of the Governance Commission for improving communications and democratizing AAA governance.

In the US (and in other countries as well), subtle efforts to undermine anthropology intersect with outright attacks against the discipline. In an ongoing attempt to refine our discipline, I hope that we may continue to engage with questions regarding the manifold boundaries, objectives and practices that constitute anthropology. What are the stakes, for instance, in maintaining and even expanding the AAA’s wide vision of anthropology? The 2006 meeting theme “Critical Intersections/Dangerous Issues” highlights these questions and they will continue to be central to the theme of the 2007 meeting in Washington DC. Developed by Executive Program Chair Faye V Harrison, the theme for next year is “Difference, (In)equality & Justice.”

Finally, I hope the RACE Project is just the first in a long line of bold public education projects. In the coming years, many of us involved in the RACE Project will consider how to take the project still further. Let’s continue to think creatively about how to get anthropology out of confined meeting spaces, journals, and classrooms and into broader public spheres. Today, the relevance of forms of anthropological knowledge and expertise cannot be overstated. Anthropology has much to contribute to, for example, our understanding of such problems as race, class and religion-based hatred and the ways in which drugs and foods capture market shares, shaping our understandings and practices of health and identity as well. What is the theme of our next public education project?

Thank you. It has been one of my life’s greatest pleasures to serve as president of the AAA in 2006.