President's remarks : AAA meeting 2003
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 was clearly in the process of making changes. Some of these changes had been long needed, others driven by economics, and still others opened up by new technologies presenting exciting possibilities in this era of intensified globalization. Let me briefly report on three initiatives and then go on to describe SMA Board responses to them during the past year. In an upcoming newsletter our current president, Craig Janes, will provide a vision statement describing where he hopes to lead the SMA during the next two years.
Two years ago, it was clear to me that in order to remain relevant, as well as to grow, the AAA was going to have to go digital in its publishing of journals and its outreach to global communities of scholars tapping into the World Wide Web. Last year, SMA member Mac Marshall took up a leadership position helping the AAA develop a plan for a portal (Anthrosource) and the digitization of all publications. This initiative made leaders of many sections of the AAA nervous because it involved offering all publications to AAA members in a digital form for the price of AAA dues. Some members questioned why anyone should want to join an AAA section and receive a paper version of a publication, if a digital version was free with a general subscription and archives were readily searchable? Clearly, one might want to join for reasons above and beyond receiving a journal. What did members want? To find out, in 2002-2003 I interviewed a sample of 40 SMA members ranging from graduate students and professors of anthropology to established and fledgling practicing anthropologists . These SMA members provided me with a wish list of things they wished the SMA could provide, the most commonly cited item being a resource rich website serving the needs of both academic and practicing medical anthropologists and students. I will return to this expressed desire for a website shortly. For the moment let me return to other changes afoot within the AAA.
To move beyond the rhetoric of being a community of practice that recognizes the importance of both academic and practicing anthropologists, efforts have long been needed to better recognize engaged anthropology on all fronts. Opportunities need to be identified and created to mobilize academic and practicing anthropologists around common objectives. Two initiatives toward that end have been talked about for quite some time. One idea discussed even before an AAA public policy committee was constituted three years ago, was the need to create a public policy institute. One virtue of creating some such an entity (be it brick and mortar or virtual) is that if could provide a space where academic based and non-academic based anthropologists could join forces toward the end of addressing public policy issues. If anthropologists want to be seen as contributing to national and international issues of import, we need to make our views more visible and we need to be more forthcoming as an organization in contributing to public dialogue. We need to be proactive as well as reactive and we need be seen as an expert body worth consulting. The public policy “institute” vision is only in its formative stages and in order to take shape, organizational “experiments” need to be conducted to determine how best to mobilize action sets around issues, and how to train AAA members to be public policy researchers and when required, advocates. Hard thinking needs to take place about the core functions of an institute in light of two objectives. The first is increasing anthropology’s visibility and legitimacy in the policy arena. This requires us to establish a reputation for presenting balanced and insightful views on issues in a timely manner. Here we have considerable work to do in demonstrating and marketing our “comparative advantage” in a world where disciplines like psychology dominate opinion and resources. Our advantage clearly lies in the areas of being transdisciplinary (across our broad subfields at least), providing reports based upon both micro and macro analysis, being close to the ground and the pulse of local populations as well as global trends, being sensitive to all manners of population differences and disparities, and being attentive to history. Objective one requires us to demonstrate that we bring something new to a table which is often already quite full. The second objective of a policy institute agenda involves training our members to be more adept at presenting information and lobbying effectively.
A third initiative that has been spearheaded recently involves a commission constituted to look into better ways of serving practicing anthropologists in the greater anthropology “community”. The AAA and SFAA created the Commission for Applied/Practicing Anthropology two years ago to investigate how to better integrate practicing anthropology within the AAA and across organizations serving practicing anthropologists (e.g such as NAPA ). The number of anthropologists working in non –academic environments full or part time has been steadily increasing. The AAA increasingly recognizes that it needs to expand its services and attract more anthropologists working outside of academic settings if it is to grow and remain relevant. Support for these anthropologists requires building better networks as a means to access existing resources and identifying gaps in resource bases and training that need to be attended to by various organizations cooperating through an information portal. Also needed is greater exchange of information to stay abreast of lessons and opportunities in an ever changing market where particular sets of skill are in demand and new market niches are being identified. Noel Chrisman chairs the commission, and several other committee members (e.g. the current president of the SFAA Linda Whiteford, Jay Schensul, Denis Weidman, myself ) are medical anthropologists.
So what has the SMA done this past year that embraces these three initiatives? First, we have attempted to respond to our members most important resource and communication needs. We have created a resource rich website having an interactive forum. The website has been far more successful than even we imagined during the past year with over 100,000 visits –and that without much publicity. We have gone beyond the experimentation stage and the SMA Board voted to support a webmaster to keep the website current. Because we have seen that many members are not comfortable with web- based forums, we are in the process of creating a listserve -based communication network and have just become members of the prestigious H-Net academic community. Today, we will begin recruiting members from SMA’s special interest groups to become editors of our new list serve. We have had a great start in building an interactive virtual community. Substantial resources are on the website, but we need far more people to get involved in keeping the site current and growing the site in new directions. One thing that I am requesting is for people to adopt special topical areas and to keep up –to- date resource and reference lists in these topical areas. Think of this endeavor in kinship terms. I am asking individuals and special interest groups to adopt a topic and parent or co-parent the topic by nurturing growth of a resource list (reference lists, links, important discussions on H-Net).
In terms of the second initiative, the SMA has begun experimenting with a process by which to engage issues having important policy implications. Called the “SMA takes a Stand initiative”, we dedicated the past year to exploring different aspects of the political economics and ethics of conducting and outsourcing clinical trials seen from the vantage point of multiple stake holders. Our challenge has not just been to characterize the issues, but to consider what medical anthropology may contribute to policy level debates regarding the most ethical way of carrying out trials as well as anthropology’s role in monitoring them. A SMA “Takes a Stand” task force was convened to look at this issue and a special session will be held at the SMA conference in Texas in March laying out its deliberations. A working paper will be put on the web and the task force will invite commentary from the SMA membership as a next step toward generating a document laying out the different areas where medical anthropologists feel they can contribute to the critical assessment and practical business of conducting ethical clinical trials.
Steps are also being considered by the SMA board about how best to respond to emergent policy issues such as political challenges to NIH’s mission to carry out research on sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases, and the doctoring up of scientific reports toward political ends. Responding to McCarthyism in the form of ideological scrutiny is something many members of the SMA feel we should do. In keeping with the AAA’s agenda to be seen as an expert body, we are resisting an immediate knee jerk reaction to these issues and looking into ways of collecting and posting the facts, inviting membership commentary, and then presenting balanced and informed opinion in a timely manner. Toward this end we are also looking into ways of joining forces with other sections of the AAA and other professional bodies as a coalition. Looking at our response to this issue as a prototype for responses to future issues, we are also looking for ways of helping our membership learn to become better advocates at various levels (local, state, national). Upcoming columns in our newsletter are being planned toward this end.
With respect to AAA’s third initiative, the SMA has taken steps to identify and acknowledge excellence in practicing anthropology through the creation of two new awards –one a career award, and the other an innovation award. We have also taken steps to make our web site as useful for practicing as academic- based anthropologists. We have endeavored to take the lead in providing our members with the resources and support they need to be successful in the marketplace as well as the grantsmanship arena.
In short, over the past year the SMA has placed itself at the vanguard of changes occurring in the AAA. Before presenting members of the SMA Board who will bring you up to date with respect to the business of the SMA, let me offer you a second proverb this evening.
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
--Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), paraphrasing John Philpot Curran (1808)
These are troubled times on many fronts, times which demand our vigilance and active participation as scholars of the body as well as body politic. I sincerely hope that members of the SMA will rise to the challenges that are emerging. We can not afford not to engage.
Mark Nichter, November 2003