Society for Medical Anthropology: minutes 2004
SMA Board Minutes
November 19, 2004
Canterbury Hotel, San Francisco
Recorded by Arachu Castro
Attendance
Carolyn Sargent, Wenda Trevathan, Pam Erickson, Linda Hunt, Lesley Sharp, Janelle Taylor, Elisa Sobo, Linda-Anne Rebhun, Kari Olson, Marcia Inhorn, Craig Janes, Vincanne Adams, Arachu Castro.
Awards
The awards are presented tonight, and in Santa Fe we will announce the 2004 and 2005 awards. Arachu will request that the controller to send the checks directly to each recipient. For the Eileen Basker Award, we discussed the items presented by Helen Lambert. We had a motion for each item and we voted not to accept nominations from publishers, not to give honorable mentions—but to have books that are strong being nominated for a year later—and to exclude edited volumes. We also voted for announcing CAR awards at the SMA board meeting. There were twelve books nominated this year. Virginia Domínguez would have the final word, and Craig will ask advice from Helen. We also discussed a new book award on medical anthropology, chaired by a SMA board member who constitutes a committee. For the Lifetime Achievement there were four nominations and will keep the other three open for two years. For the Practicing Anthropology there were about a dozen nominations, of which four were short-listed. We vote to change the name of the Lifetime Achievement to Career Award on Medical Anthropology, for senior scholars. We suggest to add the Practice Anthropology winner of the year before to the committee. Elisa will take over the Rivers, Hughes and Polgar awards from Vincanne.
Program Committee
More submissions than in 2003, but a third were rejected. We discussed whether to select and organize sessions in another way. Hours for invited sessions correlate to the number of section members. SMA had 7.5 hours (five sessions). We will ask sessions organizers that if they have a slot, they will be asked to include another highly ranked paper. We can also suggest that if there are highly ranked but orphaned papers, they could be reassigned to the AAA to a non-SMA session. The Program Committee will elaborate some guidelines that would help session organizers—and prepare them to accept rejections. All the 2004 invited sessions were cancelled for Atlanta. Carolyn suggests that we re-invite four of them and ask the fifth one to submit directly to the AAA. There was a motion and this was approved. We could ask the AAA to increase the number of sessions listed as invited—while reducing those that are non-invited. The SMA will continue to co-sponsor the SfAA meeting every two years.
Spring Meeting
Craig proposes to have the SMA board meeting twice per year, whether it is at the SfAA or somewhere else, that would be funded by the SMA. One year could be the day before the SfAA and the next year would be in a university campus. We voted in favor. We have budgeted $10,000 for this purpose, with a maximum $500 per person. We voted in favor.
Budget
The SMA fund balance was $135,127.83 on December 31, 2003, and $137,667.25 on July 31, 2004. The Basker Prize (maintained as a separate fund) balance was $10,593.54 on December 31, 2003, and $10,843.20 on July 31, 2004. Revenues for 2004 were projected at $74,017 and expenditures were projected at $82,819; thus, the projected deficit for 2004 was -$8,802. We have 1,416 members compared to 1,400 at the same time last year. Pam suggests that the MAQ pay a nominal fee of $50 to each reviewer. This proposal was not discussed further at this time.
New Board Members
Three board members need to be replaced. Lesley Sharp will coordinate this with Wenda and Marcia.
Special Interest Groups
Arachu will ask Joao to confirm with each group chair whether they are canceling the meeting in Atlanta and send the information to the AAA.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Pam discussed the high rejection rate (about 75%) and, mostly, the need for reviewers.