Society for Linguistic Anthropology Annual Report, 2001-2002

Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Annual Report, 2001-2002

Elinor Ochs
President

1. Officers:
In the past academic year, the officers of the SLA have been:
Elinor Ochs, President
Monica Heller, Secretary Treasurer
James Collins, Member at Large
Bonnie McElhinney, Member at Large
Mark Peterson, AN column editor
James Stanlaw, AN column editor
Elizabeth Keating and Mary Bucholtz, Editors, Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology
Jack Sidnell, Program Chair
James Wilce, Nominations Chair
Starting with the 2002 AAA Meeting, the officers of the SLA are:
Elinor Ochs, President
Leanne Hinton, President-Elect
Betsy Rymes, Secretary Treasurer
Niko Besnier, Member at Large
Bambi Schieffelin, Member at Large
James Stanlaw, AN column editor
Mark Peterson, AN column editor
Elizabeth Keating and Mary Bucholtz, Editors, Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology
Jack Sidnell, Program Chair
Stanton Wortham, Nominations Chair

2. Year's Activities:

A. Membership and Budget:
The membership of the SLA has risen slightly this year (26 members/3.9%), but over the past three years there have been numerous lapsed memberships (377). Nonetheless, the budget is strong due to royalties from Key Terms in Language and Culture, the book version of a special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Alessandro Duranti. The major expense of SLA is the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (see below). A major incidental expense is an overcharge for food from the 2001 SLA Executive Board meeting. After a year trying to recover funds from the conference hotel through AAA administrative liaison, it is unlikely the funds will be recovered.

B. Journal:
The new editors of the JLA, Elizabeth Keating and Mary Bucholtz, have successfully completed their first year of overseeing the journal. Because the number of published pages was in danger of exceeding the budget; the editor reduced the published page length by publishing book reviews and notices on the JLA website as pdf files rather than in the print issue. The journal continues to ship on schedule. Fifty-one submissions were received in the past year, a substantial increase from 2001. The acceptance rate for the journal has decreased slightly in the past year (from 31% in 2001 to 24% in 2002). The editors have introduced a journal format that includes a special topical focus section, with a lead article and responses. This format appears in journal issue 12.2 ,as does another innovation -- the supplementation of research articles with materials available on the JLA web site.

The journal currently faces several important issues that affect its finances. First, special fonts and formatting are more expensive and time consuming, raising production cost and causing production delays. Secondly, the journal's growth this year led to unwitting over expenditure. Other AAA journals are experiencing similar problems, and AAA's publications as a whole are undergoing a thorough reexamination in order to address association-wide budgetary issues. Online publication of book reviews and book notices is one way to alleviate the journal's financial problems. This step has already been taken in issue 12.2. The journal's editors welcome the input of the SLA leadership and membership on online publication and other means of addressing these financial issues.

C. AN Column:
There have been no significant problems for the AN column editors this year, and all AN deadlines were met. Mark Peterson stepped in to replace Richard Senghas and is doing an admirable job working alongside James Stanlaw. The SLA columns covered a variety of topics and interviews (with additional coverage in the Knowledge Exchange section) with leading scholars in the field. Space continues to be tight in AN, but the editors are doing an excellent job in obtaining coverage. As always, ideas, input, news and announcements from the SLA membership are welcomed.

D. Prizes and Awards:
SLA Student Essay Prize:
Members-at-large Bonnie McElhinny (chair) and James Collins served as the committee to judge papers submitted for the 2001-2002 SLA Student Essay Prize. Fourteen papers were submitted by graduate students, representing ten different institutions. None were submitted by undergraduates.

The prize was jointly awarded to Eleanor Culley (Univ. of Virginia) for her paper "Learning to Listen: Confronting Two meanings of 'Language Loss' in the Contemporary White Mountain Speech Community" and Jonathan Larson (Univ. of Michigan) for "Ambiguous Transparency: Resume Fetishism in a Slovak Workshop." Each award winner received $100. The prize was announced in the Oct. 2002 issue of Anthropology News, and on appropriate email lists (linganthro, language and culture). The award was presented at the 2002 SLA business meeting. The deadline for submissions for 2003 was January 6, 2003.

Edward Sapir Book Prize:
SLA invited nominations for the biannual Edward Sapir Book Prize of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, initiated in 2001 by former President Susan Gal,. This year's awardee was Alexandra Jaffe for her monograph Ideologies in Action. Honorable mention was awarded to Laura Ahearn for her book Invitations to Love. The deadline for submissions for the next prize is December 31, 2003.

In addition to these SLA prizes, we celebrated John Rickford's winning of the AAA Anthropology in the Media award.

E. Program:
This year 43 individually volunteered paper submissions were received, which Program Chair Jack Sidnell organized into eight panels. In addition, 15 organized single sessions and 5 organized double sessions were submitted, amounting to just under 6o hours of session time. Unfortunately, the AAA did not accept all our sessions. The schedule for the 2002 meetings included 14 single sessions, and 4 double sessions for a total of 39 and one half hours on the schedule. According to Lucille Horn, the AAA as a whole received many more submissions this year than in the past. At the same time, the New Orleans venue did not allow for as many sessions to be accommodated. In addition, while the scheduling committee followed the Chair's ranking, they did not evenly distribute the SLA sessions across the meetings days. The two invited sessions, one single and one double,were: 1) Intertextuality in Discourse and Culture: Problems and Prospects, organized by Asif Agha & Stanton Wortham, and 2) Children Socializing Children through Language: New Perspectives on Agency, Play, and Identities, organized by Lourdes de Leon & Marjorie Harness Goodwin. In an effort to further extend SLA presence at the AAA and create new opportunities for intellectual engagement, the Chair scheduled a workshop on evidentiality organized by Asif Agha and John Haviland.

F. Nominations:
In the fall of 2001, under the excellent leadership of our past nominations chair Mary Bucholtz, the committee put forward a number of names for AAA-level offices. Those who won offices include: AAA Executive Board, William Beeman; AAA Nominations Committee, Asif Agha; AAA Long-Range Planning Committee, Alexandra Jaffe; AAA Committee for Human Rights, Marco Jacquemet; AAA Committee on Public Policy, Jan Blommaert; Committee on Status of Women in Anthropology, Christina Wasson.

This year's nominations committee, with Jim Wilce as Chair and Stanton Wortham and William Hanks as members, submitted nominations for the SLA Executive Committee. Those who won offices include: president-elect, Leanne Hinton; secretary-treasurer, Betsy Rymes; members-at-large, Niko Besnier and Bambi Schieffelin. The committee also put forward a large slate of names for almost all of the AAA offices available to our members. The committee has asked that the AAA nominating committee communicate the outcome of their decisions on selecting final nominees for the AAA ballot to the section nominating committee.

G. Relations between SSILA and AAA
The SLA discussed at length the deteriorating relationship between the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of America (SSILA) and the AAA. SSILA shares an important intellectual history with the field of linguistic anthropology and anthropology more broadly. Breaking with a long-standing tradition, the organization decided not to hold their sessions and business meeting at the AAA conference this year in part due to increased fees imposed by AAA. President-elect Leanne Hinton has been working with Elinor Ochs on addressing SSILA's concerns and integrating SSILA and SLA interests. To this end, SLA is proposing to the AAA Long Range Planning Committee an agenda related to the documentation and preservation of endangered languages. At the SLA business meeting, members affirmed their commitment to enhancing the relationship between SSILA, SLA and AAA as a whole.

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