Abstract

This year was marked by a successful biennial meeting, election of new board members, the stabilization of section finances, and plans to transition Ethos to online publication as part of the "AnthroSource" proposal developed by the AAA. Recognizing the desirability (inevitability) of online publication for academic journals, the board welcomes this process, but has raised questions and concerns about the financial implications for section membership.

Leadership
There were several significant developments for the SPA Board during the year. This was an election year that saw a new President-elect (Tom Weisner), two new board members (Rob Lemelson and Holly Mathews) and the first elected student member (Jason Throop) voted into office by the membership. Rebecca Lester decided to step down as SPA editor for the Anthropology Newsletter and we are in the process of appointing a replacement. Sara Harkness completed her third year as editor of Ethos and the board created a search committee to initiate recruitment of her successor (Dottie Holland, chair, with Holly Mathews, Claudia Straus and Geoff White members).

Membership

Over the past several years, our membership has remained relatively constant in the mid 600s. We continue to work on increasing membership, and increasing participation of current members. The SPA listserv and website have proven to be important tools in this effort.

Biennial Meeting

The 8th SPA Biennial Meeting was held at the Catamaran Hotel in San Diego, California April 10-13, 2003. With about 200 registered participants, this was the largest biennial in recent memory, attracting a wide range of participants with diverse interests. Student participation was encouraged by urging session organizers to include students in proposed sessions-a strategy that worked well. The meeting marked the 25th anniversary of the SPA, officially reached in 2002, as well as the 30th anniversary of Ethos. In recognition of the anniversary, Lifetime Achievement Awards were presented to Theodore Schwartz and Walter Goldschmidt for their roles in establishing Ethos and the SPA.

The theme of the 2003 Biennial was "Reaching In: Conversations Between Psychological and Cultural Anthropology," emphasizing the importance of relations between psychological anthropology and the broader field of cultural anthropology. The program consisted of 12 organized panels, 6 sessions of volunteered papers, a poster session, 2 lunchtime roundtable discussions, and a plenary symposium. In the spirit of the meeting theme, a plenary "Presidential Forum" featured an invited talk from Sherry Ortner with responses and commentary from Jean Briggs and Jean Lave.

Income from the Biennial matched the costs of hosting the meeting. Given Board priorities to encourage student participation, surplus funds that might have accrued through meeting fees were used to subsidize student rates for registration and special events.

Fiscal Issues
After several years of worsening deficits, the SPA has now achieved a balanced budget in two successive years: 2003 and (projected) 2004. An important factor in the ability of the SPA to balance its budget is the continuing policy of the AAA Executive Board to rescind charges once applied to sections for AAA-wide publication costs (in its traditional print publications).

Following recommendations from the AAA publications office, the Board voted to increase Ethos subscription rates to: $65 for institutions and a $2 increase in individual rates to $47.

The Board's efforts to reduce publication costs (the major destabilizing factor in SPA budgets) have been overtaken by the AAA proposal to publish all of its publications (including Ethos) in a single electronic portal ("AnthroSource") available to all AAA members. The SPA board looks forward to the transition as an opportunity to better contain production costs and return Ethos to a regular schedule.

This year the AAA provided SPA with two projected budgets: one for Ethos expenses and another for nonpublication items. To accomplish this, AAA formally allocated $10,311 of dues and other revenue to Ethos, but then projected an Ethos deficit of $12,408 (new costs associated with AnthroSource--$7,604 management fee, $4,323 online operating expense and $481 digital preservation fund).

Ethos publication revenue and expenses budgeted for 2004 incorporate new sources associated with the change to AnthroSource. Ethos is one of a handful of journals that will switch over from AAA production to UC Press at the beginning of 2004. Because AAA's fixed editorial costs will be spread among a smaller-than-usual number of journals, the AAA notified SPA treasurer Claudia Strauss of their intention to charge SPA almost twice what they charged in 2003 ($12,362 instead of $6,500 for Editorial & Production). Our board has taken the position that these are transition costs that should be borne by the AAA. We were encouraged by Sandy Berlin's comments at the AAA indicating that this concern will be addressed

Ethos [from Sara Harkness, Ethos Editor]

40 manuscripts were submitted to Ethos during the period October 31, 2002 to October 30, 2003. This represents an increase from 2002 submissions, allowing the editorial office to begin to build up an inventory that will avoid some of the scheduling problems that have beset the journal in recent years. During this same period, Ethos accepted 21 manuscripts for publication, declined 4 and asked for 19 to be revised and resubmitted. As of November 2003 21 manuscripts were under review.

Several special issues have been proposed and are under review or in preparation. These include Positioning and Subjectivity (Dorothy Holland and Kevin Leander, eds.), Ronald Rohner's Parental Acceptance and Rejection Theory: Biocultural Anthropology (Daniel Lende, ed.), Anthropological Studies of Grandmothers (Judith Brown, ed.), and Feminist Psychological Anthropology (Susan Seymour, Ernestine McHugh, Katherine Frank, Naomi Quinn and Claudia Strauss, eds.). In addition the editor also is planning a special issue or section to be built around Robert Levy's distinguished lecture delivered at the 2001 biennial meeting in Decataur, Georgia.

The editor has expressed concern that only one-fourth of submissions to Ethos come from SPA members, despite the fact that 60% are submitted by AAA members. The remainder are from psychology, linguistics and related fields. The editor and board are discussing several strategies for using the popularity of Ethos submissions to increase membership.

Impressionistic data indicate that Ethos is also attracting a growing number of submissions from outside the United States, particularly eastern and western Europe, Israel, and Asia. It is a goal of the editorial office and the board to further elevate the journal's international visibility.

Book Series [submitted by Douglas Hollan, SPA Book Series Editor]

This year was the first active year for the new SPA book series established in 2002 with Palgrave/St. Martin's Press. Under the direction the Book Series Editor, Douglas Hollan, and editorial board members Linda Garro, Catherine Lutz, Peggy Miller, Robert Paul, Bradd Shore, and Carol Worthman, the series issued its first contract for a book on American Individualism. The series currently has three additional titles under review.

Prizes
The Stirling Prize, redefined last year as best published work in psychological anthropology (book or article) was awarded to Carmella Moore, Kim Romney, and Ti-Lien Hsia for their jointly authored article, "Cultural, Gender, and Individual Differences in Perceptual and Semantic Structures of Basic Colors in Chinese and English." The prize was awarded during the banquet dinner of the Biennial Meeting in San Diego.

The Boyer Prize for best publication in psychoanalytic anthropology was awarded to Brian Axel for his paper, "The Diasporic Imaginary," Public Culture 14(2):411-428. The prize was awarded at the SPA business meeting at the AAA meetings in Chicago.

The Condon Prize for best student paper in psychological anthropology was not awarded because the committee felt that none of the submissions emerged as a clear choice, meeting the standards of past recipients.

The board also passed a resolution authorizing a fundraising campaign to fund a $10,000 endowment for the Stirling prize (as is, in fact, now required by AAA By-laws for new prizes initiated by sections). The Board will submit a request to the finance committee of the AAA board for approval of the campaign.

Activities at Annual Meeting of the AAA [submitted by R. Desjarlais, SPA Program Chair]
The SPA sponsored four invited sessions at the annual meeting of the AAA:
* "Toward an Anthroplogy of the Will," Invited Session organized by C. Jason Throop and Keith Murphy
* "Seeking an Anthropological Dialogue between Social Constructionism and Phenomenology: A Critical Engagement with the Body and Life," Invited Session organized by Everett Zhang and Robert Desjarlais.
* "Histories of Emotion/Discourses/Regimes," Invited Session organized by James Wilce.
* "Revisiting Shame and Society," Invited Session organized by Katherine Frank and Mark Padilla
The SPA also sponsored or reviewed seven other panels:
* The Political Economy of Childhood and Adolescence
* Suffering and Belonging: Displacement and the Production of Idioms of Pain and Resilience
* Women and Everyday Conflicts in Sri Lanka
* "Well-Being" in Cross-cultural Perspective
* Identity, Self, and Subjectivity
* Mental Illness, Suffering and Questions of Abnormality
* Sociocultural Context and Psychological Anthropology
Linda Garro will chair the program committee for SPA contributions to the 2004 AAA meeting. Rob Lemelson, Jason Throop, and the new Anthropology News editor will also serve.

Website [submitted by Stephen Leavitt, SPA Electronic Publications Editor]

http://www.aaanet.org/SPA/index.htm

This year saw the successful implementation of the online registration process for the Biennial SPA Meetings. The SPA contracted out the work on the registration form, hiring AAA web site coordinator Lorie VanOlst. We have posted the meeting program along with abstracts of all papers presented. The web site also displays 25 photos from the 2003 Biennial Meetings with a new handy slide show format for viewing photos. The web site now has a preliminary list of graduate programs in psychological anthropology. Also, over the past year SPA web site has added 20 new titles to its list of recent books of interest, bringing the total to some 160 books. The Ethos archive has been updated to include issues from 2002, with an index by date and by author.

Future Plans - Looking ahead, the Electronic Publications Editor recommends integrating the Ethos site into the SPA web site directly or expanding the Ethos site itself. Perusal of web sites of other sections shows considerable attention to section-related publications. In addition, we hope to expand the SPA site as a better resource to psychological anthropology students. We currently have detailed descriptions of some psychological anthropology programs, but need to identify additional options for students interested in studying psychological anthropology but who might prefer to attend more general programs. One way would be to have a list of links to departments that at least offer our subfield for graduate students. The Electronic Editor would also like to add features on ongoing research projects, and link to other sites and services of potential interest to psychological anthropology students.

General Info - The SPA web site is maintained as a resource for current SPA members as well as a source of information for people interested in learning more about SPA. It is comprised of the following:
• instructions for joining and quitting the SPA listserv
• description of SPA's new Culture, Mind and Society book series
• archive of all Ethos article titles, from 1973-2002
• catalog of descriptions of 160 recent books of interest
• list of some 180 recent articles of interest
• manuscripts in progress for download
• links to some 40 syllabi in psychological anthropology
• descriptions of graduate programs in psychological anthropology
• full text online of the SPA Leadership Handbook
• bylaws of the SPA
• SPA officers
• descriptions and past winners of Stirling, Boyer & Condon prizes
• SPA Biennial Meetings info with online registration
• photos from 2003 Biennial SPA Meetings
Use of the web site has steadily improved, with some 3200 hits over the last year, up to 8200 total as of November 2003.

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