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AA editorial policyLee Cronk (CRONK@TAMVM1.TAMU.EDU)Wed, 12 Oct 1994 10:28:20 CDT
Anthropologist. I have written an extremely polite letter to the Tedlocks thanking them taking on a tough job and complimenting them on some of the changes they have made, but also clearly explaining the problems I have with the way they have chosen to edit the journal. I am anxiously awaiting their reply. Second, I've had some more thoughts on why I am bothered by the way they have chosen to edit the journal, and I'd like to run them by the list. In their introductory essay, the Tedlocks say a lot of very nice things about how they want AA to be a place where anthro's "terrific tensions" "can be worked out in a constructive fashion, not in a shoot-out." Sounds good. They also say that they don't want to publish attacks on and dismissals of one sort of anthropology by a practitioner of another. Although when I first read these I liked the sentiments expressed, I wonder if this is really the right tack to take. I wonder, for example, whether some of what I consider the best and most useful pieces published in AA and in other major journals would still have been published if this policy had been in place. I am thinking, for example, of J. Tim O'Meara's 1989 AA article on anthropology as empirical science, a whole slew of interesting pieces on reflexivity and related topics published in CA over the past few years, the exchanges between Richard Lee on the one side and Wilmsen and Denbow on the other over Kalahari revisionism, and even a piece I don't much like, Geertz's "anti-anti-relativism" essay from 1984. These were all, for me anyway, extremely useful and important pieces. If they were to be submitted now, would they be able to get past the Tedlocks' policy? I also wonder whether discouraging critical comments by one sort of anthropologist against another is really as constructive a thing to do as it appears at first glance. It seems to me that, far from accelerating the fracturing of the discipline, exchanges of criticisms and alternative perspectives (as long as they are civil) help to keep the discipline together. Perhaps one could say that although very little binds us all together as anthropologists, one thing that we do all share is our common, if sometimes heated, discourse over central issues in the discipline. If we lose that discourse, we may lose our center as a discipline. My fear is that by trying to avoid fractious comments, the Tedlocks may inadvertently hurt the one thing that we all really do share. I'm setting these comments out for whatever they're worth. They sound good to me right now, but I'd love to hear other people's perspectives on this. -Lee ************************************************************************ Lee Cronk Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-4352 Office: 409-847-9254 Fax: 409-845-4070 E-mail: cronk@tamvm1.tamu.edu ************************************************************************
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