2003 SMA Annual Report

Annual Report 2003-Society for Medical Anthropology
Febuary 16, 2004

Members of the SMA Board Ad Hoc Non-voting Board Members Standing Pam Erickson1 Mark Nichter, President Nancy Vuckovic2 Craig Janes: President Elect Janelle Taylor2 Mark Luborsky, Secretary-Treasurer Suzanne Heurtin-Roberts3 Linda-Anne Rebhun Besty Brada* Carolyn Sargent Cheryl Mattingly Paul Farmer Wenda Trevathan Vincanne Adams Linda Hunt Catherine Panter-Brick Sabrina Chase (Student Representative 1) Kari Olsen (Student Representative 2)

President's Report
Last year, I began the SMA business meeting with a proverb: pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land. I chose this proverb as we embarked on a new journey-that of moving beyond being a society organized around an annual meeting, a journal, and awards to becoming an interactive network as well as a society. The proverb was timely. I was preparing the SMA community for several moves I was urging the Board to make. These moves place us at the vanguard of several important initiatives being introduced by the AAA and called for by members who want to see the SMA more supportive of practicing anthropologists and more involved in public policy. The AAA is clearly in the process of introducing Anthrosource, which requires us to offer something to our membership beyond a journal if they are going to pay dues for a journal they can access online for the price of an AAA membership. This year we invested time and resources in laying a foundation upon which to build a stronger community of practice, provide members with the tools they need to be more successful in both applied and academic works, and to become more proactive in public policy debates where our opinion is needed and would be valued. We have also introduced new awards to acknowledge excellence in the different kinds of pursuits relevant to the growth of our discipline. We look forward to our joint meeting with the SFAA in March. It looks like it will be a terrific gathering and exchange f ideas and experiences.

Financial Affairs
The SMA fund balance was $121,094. Revenues for 2003 were projected as $91,500. Expenditures were projected at $98,274. Thus, the projected deficit for 2003 was $-6,774. Today, a $3,100 deficit is expected in 2003 which is $2,900 less than the original estimate.

Outlook for 2004:
Given the SMA's current dues structure, the Society will continue to maintain a fund balance at the end of the year and into the very immediate future. Dues increases helped, but these are offset by the enhanced web services. MAQ revenues now more closely match estimates and provide small but continuing excess revenue. New costs related to emerging AAA web based publishing initiative Anthrosource will likely effect our membership and have budget implications. It is too early to estimate what these will be.

Membership
Membership in the SMA is steady. We currently have 1,433 members compared to 1,508 last year at this time.

The Medical Anthropology Quarterly
The transition of relocating MAQ to the University of Connecticut went very smoothly. We are currently in the process of taking MAQ through another transition to complete electronic submission and correspondence. MAQ had a total of 114 submissions since 9/25/02, six of which were resubmissions following a "revise and resubmit" judgment on the first round. Of the 114 submissions, 72 were decided upon and 39 are still in process (new or out to reviewers). For manuscripts that were decided upon, the average time from submission to mailing of the decision letter was four months. Manuscripts that are accepted after the first round of reviews are usually published within six months of the initial submission. Manuscripts that need to be revised, resubmitted, and reviewed again usually take much longer. We are working hard to achieve a faster turnaround, and hope to report shorter intervals next year. However, the submission rate this year was much larger than that reported in previous years (60-70), even if we consider the extra month and a half in our reporting period. Merrill Singer (Hispanic Health Council) has become the new MAQ Book Review Editor. He will serve a 3-year term. We are happy to report that MAQ ranked third among AAA's six in-house journals in 2002 for the third year in a row. Looking at journal citation indices for Anthropology, MAQ ranked 19 among 38 anthropology journals evaluated. MAQ has ranked between 15 and 19 for the last four years.

Webmaster's Report
The SMA website was launched on October 1, 2002 and has been a resounding success leading to the SMA voting to support the website as a core resource of the society along with MAQ. Between October 1, 2002 and October 1, 2003, the site received 113,655 visitors, with a monthly average of 10,168. We've seen an average of 310 visitors per day, and the average visitor looks at 3.75 pages and stays just under 3 minutes. Visits vary by month as one would suspect. We had about 6,000 visitors in our first month, October 2002, and steadily increased to 10,000 in March and April of 2003. We declined to about 8,500 visitors per month during May and June of 2003, hovered between 9,000 and 10,000 in July and August, and shot to more than 18,000 for September and more than 19,000 for last month.

The pages visited most frequently are the front page, the main page of the Academic Resources section, the main page of the Jobs section, the main page of the Special Interest Groups section, the main page of the Medical Anthropology Quarterly section, and the page displaying the Take a Stand forum members. Academic Resources is the most popular section, accounting for almost 25% of pages viewed, followed by the forum, Jobs, Special Interest Groups, Take a Stand, and Funding. To date the site houses 50 medical anthropology related syllabi we've collected, with links to hundreds more under forty-six separate topics. To date, we have built sections for: the Student Membership Committee, the Clinically Applied Medical Anthropology group, the Critical Anthropology of Health Caucus, the Disability Research group, the Global Health and Emerging Diseases Study Group, and the Pharmaceutical Study Group.

We have also built twelve topical resource sections, two of which are sponsored by Special Interest Groups (pharmaceuticals and global/international health). Exciting plans for the near future include developing an email-based moderated discussion list for SMA members with H-NET; expand topical resources, including sections on social capital, structural adjustment, civil society, and critical studies of NGOs; and building a database of films relevant to medical anthropologists and other health social scientists.

Annual Meeting
This year there were 29 sessions submitted to the annual meeting and 25 of these were accepted. Of the accepted sessions, four were awarded invited status, including two that were co-sponsored, one with GAD and one with NAPA. Of the remaining 21 sessions, one was a poster session. There were 106 individually volunteered papers of which 96 were accepted and 5 forwarded to other sections. The ones accepted by SMA were organized into nine sessions, including one poster session and one double session. Additionally, the two sessions invited by BAS address issues of concern to medical anthropologists and include SMA members, so our visibility and impact are enhanced beyond our own section's sponsorship.

In comparison with last year, SMA members this year submitted far more organized sessions (16 last year, 29 this year) and thus fewer volunteered papers (177 last year, 106 this year), suggesting better planning and collaboration. On the other hand, students and recent PhDs are more likely to submit volunteered papers, so we want to continue supporting their efforts.

Graduate Student Activities Report
This year the graduate student organization sponsored a Special Event panel discussion at the AAA on Work vs. Family in Academia. Issues discussed included institutional policies that help or hinder faculty members with family responsibilities, tips for dealing with family issues during interviews and the job search process, strategies for negotiating the pre-tenure years and family concerns, and more. A student membership meeting was held and in addition to the planning of a 2004 AAA Special Event, plans were made to conduct a survey of medical anthropology graduate programs, create a SMA graduate student listserve, and compile a directory of medical anthropology graduate students to be distributed electronically to all students. A committee was established to review candidates for a new Graduate Student Mentoring Award to honor mid-career and senior medical anthropology professors with outstanding records of mentorship. The first Mentoring Award will be presented at the 2004 AAA meetings.

Prizes and Awards
The judges for this year's SMA prize competition coordinated by Vinceaane Adams included:
Polgar Award: Pamela Erikson, Catherine Maternowska, and Linda-Anne Rebhun
Hughes Graduate Student Prize: Sandra Hyde, Nancy Chen, James Quesada
Rivers Undergraduate Prize: Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Kathleen Erwin, Shanti Parikh

This year, we had fewer submissions for both the Undergraduate WHR Rivers prize, and for the graduate Charles Hughes Prize. For the Rivers Prize, we received only four submissions, and for the Hughes prize we received six submissions.

This year's winner of the Rivers undergraduate Prize was Jennifer Staple for her essay, titled: "Forging Activist Identities in the Kalaupapa Community of Leprosy Patients." The winner of the Hughes Graduate Student Paper Prize this year was awarded to to Nili Kaplan-Myrth for her essay entitled: "Black, White or Brindle: Community Advocacy in Austrailian Aboriginal Health." Finally, this year's Polgar Prize was awarded to James Pfeiffer for his essay entitled: "African Independent Churches in Mozambique: Healing the Afflictions of Inequality," an essay that appeared in volume 16 of MAQ.

The Society for Medical Anthropology is pleased to announce two new awards in applied/practicing medical anthropology. The awards will be given in recognition of significant accomplishment in applying anthropology to real world problem-solving in the area of health. Inaugural awards will be announced at the Joint SMA/SfAA meetings in Dallas, Texas, March 31 - April 4, 2004. The Career Achievement Award is designed to honor career-long (at least 10 years post Ph.D.) contributions to establishing the practice of medical anthropology as a full partner in solving health problems. The Practicing Medical Anthropology Award is designed to honor scholars engaged in applying anthropological principles in particular health project settings. It will be presented in recognition of anthropological contributions made in the context of a specific project setting or problem arena.

Eileen Basker Memorial Prize
We received four nominations for the 2003 competition. They were judged by Committee members C. Panter-Brick (Chair), V Dominguez, L Leidy Sievert. This year's winner is Caroline H. Bledsoe for her book Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa (2002, University of Chicago Press). Dr. Bledsoe asked to share the prize with Fatoumatta Banja, who made significant contributions to the book.

Nominations and Elections
Helen Lambert, Lesley Sharp, and Joao Biehl were elected to the SMA Executive Board and Arachu Castro became the new Secretary-Treasurer.

Anthropology News Column
The SMA column serves a number of purposes. Beyond its important function as a vehicle for conveying time-sensitive announcements regarding conferences, fellowships, and awards, the goal for the SMA column this past year has been to use the space for substantive intellectual exchange and to make it interactive with the SMA website. Toward that end, one month's column featured the "SMA Takes a Stand" area of the website and encouraged readers to log on to the website and take part in the discussion taking place there. This year the primary topical area focused upon in the column was "Institutional Research Boards." Readers were asked to write in with IRB stories and other contributions. A volunteered contribution on this subject from Maureen Fitzwater was featured describing her ethnographic research project focusing on ethical review as a cultural process. We then invited contributions on this subject from members of the SMA having expertise in this area-Patricia Marshall and Helen McGough. In the upcoming year, we will shift the topical focus of the column from "IRBs" to "the politics of funding."

1 Editor of MAQ, ex-officio 2Co-Editor, AN SMA column, ex-officio 3Ad hoc committee of medical anthropologists working in government and foundation work environments *SMA Webmaster SMA Annual Report -January 2004 Page 4

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