Statement issued jointly by the Boards of Directors of the American Ethnological Society and the Society for Cultural Anthropology, on reasonable publication expectations for cultural anthropologists

Members of the American Ethnological Society and the Society for Cultural Anthropology have become seriously concerned about changing tenure norms in anthropology. We acknowledge that qualifications for tenure are variable among different kinds of institutions, depending on the amount of teaching and committee work and the mix of graduate and undergraduate teaching, among many other things. Our current concern focuses on a few recent untoward cases in research universities in which anthropologists were expected to show they had written two books as a criterion of being awarded tenure. We find this expectation unreasonable, if not impossible given the standard research practices in our discipline. In order to give university faculties and administrators greater understanding of what our research requires, we would like to stress that ethnographic research requires long, intensive engagement, usually involving residence of a year or more in the research setting. It may also require serious study of a language, sometimes a language in which instruction is not available in the U.S., as well as archival research in multiple languages. All this is often necessary in addition to developing a research plan, obtaining research funds, gaining research permission, and organizing field materials, before writing a book or articles can finally begin.

Since anthropologists commonly build a comparative dimension into their long-range research plans, their second ethnographic project after the dissertation might well be in a quite different place or with a culturally different group of people, which - for work of high quality - may necessitate a repetition of the full series of activities described above. In some cases, these steps - a funded research proposal, new articles, new languages, preliminary fieldwork, a book contract - might serve as more appropriate indices of productivity than a finished second book. Special factors also affect anthropologists' publishing opportunities. For a variety of professional reasons (including the wish to engage in dialogue with scholars in the countries in which they do research), anthropologists may feel a responsibility (which we support) to publish in a language other than English and/or in journals published outside the U.S. Partly because of the very small number of peer-reviewed journals in the field, as well as the multi-disciplinary nature of anthropological problems, anthropologists also often seek opportunities to publish in journals in adjunct disciplines, such as sociology, geography, literary criticism, gender studies, or history, as well as in edited collections of papers, which in this field are commonly peer-reviewed publications.

It is our hope that university tenure committees will take these professional research expectations into account when deciding what kinds and amounts of publications can reasonably be expected of cultural anthropologists.

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