GENERAL ANTHROPOLOGY DIVISION

Annual Report: 1 January 2004 - 31 January 2004
Submitted by Peter J. Brown, GAD President

I. Accomplishments for period covered
A. Membership: Gad membership has fluctuated between 2,000 and 2,500 during this period. Historically, this represents a continued decline since AAA restructuring. The GAD EB is concerned that the 2004 AAA meetings problems and the new availability of Anthrosource will hurt membership.
B. Financial balances: continue to be between $50,000 and $60,000.
C. AAA Meeting activities
-Planned Presentations: There were more session submissions than last year (32 vs. 30), and more individual paper submissions than last year (80 vs 57). After organizing the individual papers into 44 sessions were forwarded to the AAA program committee. There was a significantly lower acceptance rate (60% ) than last year (89%). Four invited sessions were identified; there are questions of fairness in the procedures for obtaining invited session status. (From the report of Susan Buck Sutton, Program Chair for 2004).
-Effect of AAA Meeting Change: After the change of date and venue, approximately 60% of the planned sessions were cancelled. There were many sessions still indicated on the program, however that were not held, not just for GAD sessions. In a systematic check of sessions in the Thursday afternoon, 4:00 time slot revealed the following: 20 sessions had originally been scheduled; 10 still showed on the program; only 3 actually occurred. (From the report of Susan Buck Sutton, Program Chair for 2004).
-GAD Sponsored Teaching Workshops. The planned 4th Institute on Teaching Anthropology was cancelled. The COTA teaching roundtable on area studies were very well subscribed, reflecting much interest in the topic, but were also cancelled.
-The General Anthropology Award for exemplary cross-field scholarship was selected for an article by Robert Proctor, Stanford University, for an article appearing in Current Anthropology entitled "Three Roots of Human Recency: Molecular Anthropology, the Refigured Achuelean, and the UNESCO Response to Auschwitz" but the award could not be given because of the cancellation of the GAD Business Meeting.
-The GAD Distinguished Lecture by Margaret Lock was re-scheduled for next year.
D. Publications - Peter Brown, President-Elect, edited the GAD column in the Anthropology News, although there were months with nothing to report. Susan Sutton Brock took over this task as of the AAA meeting.
- Pat Rice and David McCurdy continued to edit General Anthropology, the successful newsletter of GAD.
- John Rhoades and Paul Grebinger publish the FOSAP newsletter and plan to expand publication.

2. Committees: The two most activity committees within GAD are FOSAP (Federation of Small Anthropology Programs) and COTA (Committee on Teaching Anthropology).
- FOSAP (Federation of Small Anthropology Programs) was very active: they organized three symposia for AAA; organized a worksop on teaching outcome assessment for AAA; published two newsletters; were requested to supply external reviewers for small programs undergoing review; updated their website (now much nicer than GAD's); and conducted their annual business meeting with a discussion with AAA office laison. This group remains a key to all GAD activities, and their annual report can be found at their websitehttp://www.aaanet.org/gad/fosap/index.htm (from report by Cate Cameron and Bob Meyers).
COTA, The Committee on Teaching Anthropology, organized the Wine and Cheese roundtables for the AAA meetings.
CASTAC, The Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, has not been very active this year.
HAC - History of Anthropology Committee, the newest committee under the GAD wing, has not been very active this year.

3. Future plans:
GAD has three main challenges for the coming year. First, given the situation with the AAA meetings in September and October, we realized that the EB does not have an effective mechanism for communicating with the GAD membership. We plan to investigate the Anthropology Commons in terms of this function. Secondly, there is a great need for an expansion and development of the GAD website. The development of the website is probably our highest priority. Thirdly, the EB does not have a good sense of what future activities our membership wants to pursue, and we need to do some self-assessment and research on this topic.

In general, GAD plans to develop teaching workshops, and look forward to working with the standing AAA committee on teaching. In this regard, we plan (under the leadership of Karl Heider) to organize an Institute on Teaching Anthropology that has the theme of undergraduate research for the next AAA meeting. We also will continue to award the General Anthropology Award, now limited to an exemplary journal article of cross-field scholarship. Finally we will continue to nurture the special interest committees.