SLA 2001 Annual Report

December 17, 2001
TO: American Anthropological Association
FROM: Susan Gal, President, Society for Linguistic Anthropology
RE: Annual Report, 2000-2001

1. Officers:

In the past academic year, the officers of the SLA have been:

Susan Gal, President
Elinor Ochs, President-Elect
Monica Heller, Secretary Treasurer
John Haviland, Member at Large
Bonnie McElhinney, Member at Large
Richard Senghas, AN column editor
James Stanlaw, AN column editor
Alessandro Duranti, Editor of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Laura Miller, Program Chair
Mary Bucholtz, Nominations Chair

Starting with the 2001 AAA Meeting, the officers of the SLA are:

Elinor Ochs, President
Monica Heller, Secretary Treasurer
Bonnie McElhinney, Member at Large
James Collins, Member at Large
James Stanlaw, AN column editor
Mark Peterson, AN column editor
Elizabeth Keating and Mary Bucholtz, Editors of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Jack Sidnell, Program Chair
James Wilce, Nominations Chair

2. Year’s Activities:

A. Membership:

The membership of the SLA has dropped slightly and the Board discussed possible actions to revive lapsed memberships and to revitalize participation. One of these is to pay more attention to the Society’s website, which has just been revised and updated. The budget, however, is in fine shape as result the infusion of royalties from Key Terms, the book version of a special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Sandro Duranti.

B. Journal:

A major change this year is the tranfer of leadership of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. After two and a half years of innovative activity, Sandro Duranti is stepping down as Editor. He brought the journal up to date, organized and edited a special issue on “Key Terms” in linguistic anthropology that has become a well-selling book. He also initiated reports on the status of linguistic anthropology across regions of the world. There has nevertheless been a dearth of submissions. The new editors of the JLA are: Elizabeth Keating and Mary Bucholtz. They are the youngest editors thus far and the first to work as a two-person pair. They cover a wide range of expertise and come with a great deal of energy and ideas for soliciting manuscripts, organizing issues and staging a forum for discussion and controversy. They wish to maintain the basis of the journal within linguistic anthropology in its strictest sense, while also reaching out to related subdisciplines such as discourse analysis, critical discourse studies, and applied linguistics. They will take over the journal on January 1, 2002. Their initial term will be for three years.

C: AN Column:

There will be a switchover in editor of the column (see above), and there dissatisfaction with the small size of the space available. The membership of the SLA voted at its Business Meeting that it would prefer to see a published, paper version of the Program for the AAA Meetings, rather than only an electronic version. The membership is willing to give up its column space for September in order to get the published program.

D: Prizes:

This year, the SLA Student Essay Prize was won by Sarah Meacham of UCLA, and

Honorable Mention was awarded to Angela Reyes of the University of Pennsylvania. As of this year, we initiated the Edward Sapir Book Prize of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology to be awarded every alternate year to the single or multiple-author book (not edited collection) that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes. The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2001. The President of SLA will name a committee to choose the winner, the award will be presented at the next Business Meeting of the SLA.

E: Program:

As usual, the SLA mounted a program at the 2001 Meetings of the AAA in Washington

D.C. Program Chair Laura Miller reported that we were given a total of 5.5 hours for invited sessions. We received 16 proposals for organized sessions (including invited sessions), and 16 volunteered abstracts for papers. All the submitted organized sessions were placed on the program. Together we had 19 paper sessions on the program: 12 single sessions (1.75 hours a piece) and 7 double sessions (3.75 hours). We also received abstracts for three posters, which were placed in one poster session. The three invited sessions were: “Performing Affect” (Michele Koven), “The History of Ideology and the Ideology of History” (Miyako Inoue), “Anthropological Linguistics and Language Policy” (Richard Senghas). Next year’s program chair, Jack Sidnell assisted Laura Miller in organizing this year’s program. Due attention was paid not only to the theme of the annual meeting but also to mixtures of rank of participants in order to assure more egalitarianism. Laura Miller noted that there were many instances this year of linguistic anthropology sessions scheduled against each other. She suggested that everyone who submits a session on language-related issues notify the SLA program chair, even if the session is not submitted through the SLA. This might help prevent some of the conflicts.

F: Nominations:

The nominations committee, chaired by Mary Bucholtz, was very successful this year. There have been linguistic anthropologists placed on many of the AAA’s slates, several have been nominated for AAA prizes; Sandro Duranti won the Mayfield Prize this year. The SLA failed to meet AAA deadlines in 2001 and therefore did not get on the AAA ballot. Instead, one Member at Large was appointed by the President, and next year (2002) a somewhat larger than usual number of officers will have to be elected: President Elect, Secretary-Treasurer, two Members-at-Large. We need to attend to the staggering and synchronization of their terms.

G: Organizational Innovation:

Both the Nominations Chair and the Program Chair informally trained their successors this year, so that new Chairs for both functions are already in place (Wilce for nominations; Sidnell for program). Elinor Ochs suggested that this method of overlap be institutionalized and the Board agreed. From now on, therefore, the next nominations chair and program chair will “apprentice” with the current one for a year before taking on the full duties. This method seems also well suited for Editor of AN column, and in fact is now in practice with new editor Mark Peterson coming on with James Stanlaw who shared it for a year with previous editor Richard Senghas. In addition the Board decided to invite to our meetings the person who holds the Linguistic Anthropology seat on the Executive Board of the AAA so as to encourage better communication between the AAA and the SLA.

H: Job Survey:

Robert MacLaury volunteered last year to informally survey the linguistic anthropology job market. He reported that there were 19 such in 2000-01; anthropology departments hired anthropology PhDs; of the 4 jobs in other kinds of departments 2 went to anthropologists. He will continue the survey.

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