The Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA) invites applications for the next Co-editor of the section’s peer reviewed academic journal, Museum Anthropology. The three-year term runs from January 2026 through December 2028. Please contact journal co-editor Johanna Zetterstrom- Sharp (j.zetterstrom-sharp@ucl.ac.uk) or CMA President Christina J. Hodge (christina_hodge@brown.edu) to discuss this opportunity. Please submit a letter of interest indicating your experience and ideas for the journal, along with a recent CV, to Hodge by 31 December 2025. [RFP continues after the image]
The Journal: Over its 50-year history, Museum Anthropology (MA) has become a leading voice for scholarly research on the collection, interpretation, and representation of the material world and global cultures. Through critical articles, provocative commentaries, thoughtful book and exhibit reviews, and new publishing formats, this peer reviewed journal reflects the diverse, vibrant, global, and transdisciplinary work of museums. Situated at the intersection of practice and theory, MA advances our knowledge of the ways in which material objects are intertwined with living histories of cultural display, economics, socio-politics, law, memory, ethics, colonialism, heritage, conservation, and education.
MA is published by Wiley-Blackwell through the end of 2027. CMA is actively negotiating for a new press and contract, which will start in 2028.
The Role: MA editors have independent editorial responsibility for the journal. MA is produced by two co-editors with staggered three-year terms, ensuring continuity of knowledge and production and shared responsibilities. MA is supported by an editorial board of six international scholars in museum anthropology and allied disciplines.
The incoming MA Co-editor will contribute to the publication of a journal that enriches and diversifies scholarly and professional museum settings by: (1) soliciting and evaluating high-quality manuscripts and peer-reviews from a diversity of experts in relevant fields; (2) maintaining academically rigorous and ethical standards of publication, as well as timely management of review, submission, and publication processes; (3) constructively working with AAA and press staff, as well as the MA editorial board and CMA leadership.
The Co-editors serve as non-voting members of the CMA Board, participate in quarterly Board Meetings, and provide annual reports to CMA’s members at its annual Business Meeting (held at the AAA annual meeting). Co-editor is not a paid position, but financial support typically includes some travel expenses to the AAA meeting and some copyediting services.
The CMA Student Travel Awards are designed to support graduate student travel to the annual AAA meeting to present papers and/or posters. Students and recent graduate degree recipients (those who have defended within the year of the award) are eligible to apply. Each year, CMA will award two prizes of $1000 each.
Application Packets
Application packets (maximum 5 pages) must include: a brief letter indicating the applicant’s student status and explaining how this project reflects the student’s graduate work; a copy of the abstract for the proposed paper or poster (and for the session in which they will be presenting, if known); and a letter of endorsement from an academic advisor at the student’s most recent institution of study.
Evaluation Criteria
Creativity: Is the paper or poster a unique and novel contribution to museum anthropology?
Commitment: Does the student demonstrate a commitment to the field of museum anthropology?
Impact: Does the paper or poster have the potential to develop into a work that could more broadly impact the field of museum anthropology?
Student Travel Award recipients will be presented with a check for $1000 and a certificate of the award.
We’re delighted to announce the winners of this year’s Council for Museum Anthropology awards!! We thank the CMA Awards Committee (Lijun Zhang (Chair), Jason Jackson, Amanda Guzman, Sowparnika Balaswaminathan), and the CMA Book Award Committee (Cara Krmpotich (Chair), Molli Pauliot, Lijun Zhang) for their dedicated work on this.
[CMA@AAA Award Ceremony Details Omitted]
CMA STUDENT TRAVEL AWARDS:
Congratulations to this year’s CMA Student Travel award recipients, Amanda Sorensen and Haley Bryant!
The CMA Student Travel Awards are awarded to students who are going to present papers or posters at AAA meeting that present novel contribution to museum anthropology and have the potential to develop into works that could more broadly impact the field.
Amanda Sorensen and Haley Bryant have co-organized a panel for the 2024 AAA meeting which explores software and technologies used in museum practice. In the panel, Sorensen and Bryant will present papers to discuss digital technologies, software development, human labor, anthropological archives, and museum practice.
CMA MICHAEL AMES AWARD FOR INNOVATIVE MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY:
We are excited to share the news that the 2024 CMA Michael M. Ames Prize for Innovative Museum Anthropology is awarded to the exhibition project Mnaajtood ge Mnaadendaan: Miigwewinan Michi Saagiig Kwewag Miinegoowin Gimaans Zhaganaash Aki 1860 / To Honour and Respect: Gifts from the Michi Saagiig Women to the Prince of Wales, 1860. The project researches on and displays baskets made by women at what is now Hiawatha First Nation (HFN) in Ontario and gifted to the Prince of Wales in 1860. The exhibition enables Michi Saagiig community members to reconnect with their ancestors and visit their creations.
Congratulations to the co-curators Lori Beavis and Laura Peers as well as the HFN community members who have been involved in the project. See their amazing work here: https://www.tohonourandrespect.ca/
CMA BOOK AWARD
The CMA Book Award for 2024 is awarded to Balgo: Creating Country by John Carty, published by University of Western Australia Publishing in 2021.
The Nomination for Balgo: Creating Country highlights Carty’s skill in combining a rich ethnographic account with the methods of art history and an appreciation of the importance of collections and archives. Drawing on vast sources, Carty studies Balgo art from various perspectives, including art history, anthropology, economics, religious study, statistics, and gender studies. Balgo: Creating Country seamlessly integrates an art historical understanding cultivated through the study of changing forms over time with an understanding of the social processes represented in those changes, made known through sustained and ethical research relationships.
Balgo: Creating Country is the fruit of years of original research with close and insightful examination of Balgo art, history, individual experiences, community life, and the living world. It situates desert art and the creative process in complex historical, economic, and political dynamics. Balgo: Creating Country successfully navigates the scale of art practices, attending to over 15,000 artworks all the while being attentive to the artists at a very human scale. A distinguishing and innovative aspect of the book is Carty’s use of kinship relationships and kin diagrams to analyse and demonstrate the aesthetic and stylistic relationships between paintings over time.
CMA’s Book Award Committee wholeheartedly agreed with the Nomination that Balgo: Creating Country “exemplifies the unique contribution museum anthropology as a discipline is able to make to the understanding of world art, by challenging received Western categories yet at the same time bringing different art histories into dialogue with one another.”
Upon learning of the Award, Balgo artists shared this message with CMA:
“We are very proud of this book, and we are happy that other people can see its importance through this award. Our art is more than art, more than painting, it is our Country – who we are as people. It takes a lot to see what we are painting. This book tells that story: from the early days before whitefellas, to the mission days, and now today, where we are strong people who have built a new life for ourselves in Balgo. That’s what’s in our painting. It’s a big book, but it tells an even bigger story. (Warlayirti Artists, Balgo, Australia.)”
My parents raised me to worry about hurricanes and hurricane season. I grew up on the coasts of Florida, as did my parents themselves. Floridians, but not of the Florida Man variety, hurricane season was for them about making plans and preparations. This involved learning about, and mitigating risks, making plans, getting supplies, having shutters, marking storm locations on maps printed in daily papers, watching the weather news and much more. These kinds of preparation were not abstract, as my family weathered numerous actual storms of greater or lesser impact. While our home was never severely impacted, we had access to plenty of examples of how devastating tropical storms could be, both pictured on the local news and in family oral tradition.
As if the job of leading a scholarly society is not challenging enough now on other fronts, society leaders have—like my parents when I was growing up—to think about such things as hurricane seasons, fire seasons, and the practical implications of anthropogenic climate change. Leaders of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), for instance, know this because many of them experienced their own 2018 annual conference in San Jose, California. Here is how then first-time attendee Ian Pollock described it afterwards in December 2018
Darkening the sky, hanging in the rafters of the convention center, and stinging the throats and eyes of everyone who came, the smoke of the major fires ravaging California was an inescapable presence. The AAA president, in his opening remarks, acknowledged the forensic anthropologists from Cal State Chico who were at that moment assisting in the recovery and identification of bodies from towns destroyed by the fire. Zoe Todd was among many who commented on the smoke, calling it a kind of message: the land itself telling us about the violence of the settler colonial structures on which California is built.
I was reminded of Kim Fortun’s recent interview on The Familiar Strange podcast, in which she talked about living in toxic times. She argued that anthropologists can respond as a disaster unfolds, and not just in the aftermath. I also thought of a recent workshop at Deakin University in Melbourne, called “Writing Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene.” As the organizers wrote in their call for participants:
[Block quote in block quote] ‘Slow disaster describes the long process of environmental and infrastructural degradation produced by inadequate risk assessments, industrial regulations, and the political narratives that shape design decisions of human-environment relations. The longer temporal perspective provided by slow disaster can help index political, infrastructural, and social dynamics in relation to the new terrains and atmosphere emerging in the Anthropocene. Writing slow disaster draws attention to, and works through, the entanglements of climate crises, structural violence, and the legacies of industrialism.’
San Jose, after all, is basically an adjunct to Silicon Valley, home of techno-utopians and their confidence that every problem can be solved with a technological solution, and a concentration of wealth like the world has never seen before. The fires that sent up the smoke choking San Jose were distant still, but creeping ever closer. No blue-sky thinking could dispel the haze.
Beyond the structural lessons of such episodes, there are also just the practical realities. Sometimes the show, or the annual meeting, just must go on, but it goes on in such a way that falls far short of its organizer’s hopes for reasons not within their immediate control. One can have, for instance, a bad meeting where everyone is talking about bad air or a meeting that loses money and thereby impedes other work.
Or, sometimes scholarly meetings have to be cancelled. COVID led to this dynamic on a vast scale and I was involved as an organizer for the 2020 American Folklore Society (AFS) meeting that eventually was realized in Tulsa in 2022. Hotel contracts and meeting plans loom as the most mission critical, financially significant, and ultimately risky undertakings that scholarly societies pursue. They are where the largest amount of staff and volunteer labor, and member activity and expenditure, resides for most of the societies in the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Natural disasters, pandemic diseases, and, strikes and labor actions (three real world matters that are linked at a deeper level) are all threats that scholarly society leaders wind up needing to understand and manage to the best of their ability, but they cannot directly prevent or control them. The best that they can do is to seek to mitigate risk and impact.
It has been a long time since I first started tracking these issues. Meeting locations, meeting contracts (which are complex and involve varied actors), the implications of locations and contracts for both society members and local people, including local scholarly and cultural organizations, as well as local workers are, and have long been, matters of great concern within and beyond scholarly societies. But today, they are weighted with many additional concerns. The AAA has witnessed some of those additional concerns and their impacts as AAA members have passionately debated the pros and cons of holding its meeting this year in Tampa, Florida (and the pros and cons of attending). I bracket out those for now and just focus on the newest facts known to me on the morning of October 8.
I hope that Hurricane Milton, presently a major storm spinning over the superheated Gulf of Mexico and headed towards a coastline centered on Tampa Bay petters out quickly and causes no damage or harm to anyone or anything, but Florida (and Georgia and North Carolina and Tennessee) has not yet recovered from the devastation of recent Hurricane Helene. The work of Helene recovery makes Milton even more dangerous as the Tampa area is piled high with debris ready to be blown or washed away, aggravating further any damage that Milton might otherwise cause if/when it makes landfall. This matters for the AAA leaders because the 2024 annual meeting of the AAA, which was already under great stress for sociopolitical reasons, is only 43 days away and set for Tampa. I want Milton to produce no injuries, no destruction of infrastructure, no negative impacts of any kind. As an expected attendee at the upcoming meeting, I want only good things for my fellow AAA members and the people of my home state. As a member of the Council for Museum of Anthropology (CMA) board and thus a minor AAA elected leader, I am worried not only about the “regular” human risks, but also about the risks to the AAA as a society. A whole generation of vexing and difficult annual meetings (not just San Jose in 2018) have already impacted AAA membership and AAA finances. Like so many institutions, scholarly societies have been being ground down by a range of contemporary processes and dynamics. Massive fires are a climate change part of this that we can discuss from experience, but there are scholarly societies right now, on the day that I write this, who are cancelling their annual meetings specifically due to Hurricane Milton (Google it for evidence and for Helene cancelations as well). I hope to be in Tampa for a great AAA meeting, but it is only prudent, as with my parent’s yearly preparations and close attention to the weather, to be cognizant that Hurricane Milton could impact the AAA meeting set for November 20-24, 2024. And the Tampa meeting has already faced challenges increasingly typical of the current gestalt.
In the series of posts that this one joins, I am trying to think out loud about the newer challenges that leaders of scholarly societies generally, and of my scholarly societies particularly, are facing, and that they have no choice but to face. Severe weather and natural disasters are not new, of course. And scholarly societies have weathered such things before and will do so in the future. But the political, economic, social, and organizational environments are worsening, and anthropogenic climate change is making the weather more variable and, in the case of massive fires and powerful storms, more dangerous. It would be a significant thing if this were the only change to which scholarly society leaders needed to help their organization adapt, but it is just one on a long and growing list.
I wish for only good things for the people of Florida and I appreciate all that the elected and professional leaders of the AAA and AFS are doing to keep these societies mission-focused and effective in vexing time. That work is not easy.
Unbury the Lede: Here I reflect on the ways that the crises of the current moment make the older Whac-A-Mole problem something more and more risky for scholarly societies and those they serve. No moles are harmed in this post.
Wikipedia has a solid entry on Whac-A-Mole and how the arcade game became a colloquial expression “to refer to a situation characterized by a series of futile, Sisyphean tasks, where the successful completion of one just yields another popping up elsewhere.” Almost everyone I know lives, at times at least, in this Whac-A-Mole state of being. I do not propose to diagnose or assess that. In a more focused way, I want to reflect on the ways that elected leaders and professional staff in scholarly societies are today particularly stressed by Whac-A-Mole dynamics and evoke the consequences in the particular time and place that we are in (at least in my neighborhood of the North American scholarly, public humanities, and applied social science world). As in the previous two posts, my frame of reference is primarily the American Folklore Society (AFS), secondarily the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and tertiarily all of the scholarly societies of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS). These levels relate to my degree of direct experience, with my knowledge of scholarly societies in general being informed most heavily by the situation of the AFS.
I do not want to suggest that society leaders never faced the Whac-A-Mole dynamic in the past. Surely, they did. I do not want to suggest that others in the world or in academia, the public humanities, and the applied social sciences do not also face real challenges of the sort that I am evoking. Clearly, they do. But the focus of these reflections are the societies that I know, the AFS in particular. Some of what I reflect upon here is, I think, more generally applicable.
What scholarly society leaders—lay and professional alike—generally wish to do is to have a sound strategic plan and to work it. Even in good times, this is a challenge. There is always too much to do, and resources are almost always scarce. Money is the resource that gets discussed most often, but time and attention may be the most valuable resources of all. Whether a work week is forty hours or fifty hours or more hours, there are only so many hours to devote to the work. Elected (and appointed) leaders have “day jobs” (usually quite demanding ones) and can only devote a part of their work effort to the governance, or just basic service, tasks associated with their professional society. If a scholarly society is large and organized enough to have a professional staff (as both AFS and AAA do), the staff members will have many day-to-day duties to fulfill. Even if no unexpected problems were to ever arise, they would face challenging decisions related to the balance of work between tending to immediate tasks relative to advancing longer term goals arrived at in discussion between the elected leadership and the Executive Director. Sorting this out is a basic aspect of everyday leadership.
But in practice, matters are usually still harder than this. And I argue that they are harder today (much harder today) than they were fourteen years ago when I was elected to the AFS Executive Board or nineteen years ago when I was (as editor) an ex-officio member of the Council for Museum Anthropology Board (and thereby attending with special focus on AAA governance issues). Whac-A-Mole is the vernacular expression for the problem that is now, I believe, severe.
As a matter of planning, how much time should a paid or elected society leader set aside each week to deal with unexpected, but inescapable, problems that will arise unlooked for? How does a professional or elected society leader do triage in real-time when the day-today and longer-term-work still needs to be done, but the unexpected problems keep popping up? And what about when those pop-up problems are less “regular” and more existential? Even the conscious choice not to deal with a pop-up challenge can, and often is, time and attention consuming. And choosing not to tackle a pop-up challenge, while perhaps justified in context or on principle, can often generate still more pop-up challenges.
This dynamic has some reoccurring elements that can be isolated and described. Even in non-dumpster fire times, there is the problem of asymmetry. Membership organizations are comprised of numerous members and a small number of elected leaders and usually a still smaller group of professional staff. At any one time, there is only one Executive Director and only one elected President. This is an inherent design feature of these organizations, and I would certainly not wish to change this, but it means that many voices can be (and usually are) trying to be heard by a very small number of ears. Devoted to serving the membership that has entrusted them with leadership roles, society Presidents and Executive Directors are going to do everything they can do to respond to all who seek to engage with them, but as most professionals in my world experience, email (for instance) is also asymmetric. It is very easy to send a question or to state a demand or to make a suggestion via email, but it is almost always a bigger task for the recipient to reply and an even bigger task to do what the email sender wants or to address substantively the concern or suggestion being raised. As many of my colleagues who worked before and after widespread email can report, email is, in part, a means by which strangers (and friends) have direct access with which to write things on someone’s to do list. Some among us can ignore (or have no other choice, given time limits, but to ignore) email (and other communications channels), but a society President or Executive Director really cannot do this. Writing a letter on a typewriter and mailing it was once a laborious barrier to entry in this communicative economy, but despite efforts such as the slow email movement, expectations for immediate replies and easy communication, have intensified the Whac-A-Mole problem considerably.
That was true without dumpster fires (another contemporary idiom explained by Wikipedia), but now we are living in a time of near constant, and usually overlapping, crises and are doing so in crisis-saturated social environments. A scholarly society (AFS for instance) might set a strategic goal of working with members to establish new graduate programs in its field. In an AFS context, this is a perfectly reasonable goal to consider pursuing. I know individuals in folklore studies who would like to do just this thing and who work in contexts in which such an endeavor is reasonable and do-able. But in the world of Whac-A-Mole and of interconnected and endemic crises, there can be a difficult calculus. If a particular already extant graduate program in a field is in trouble and members (understandably) call upon their scholarly society to help make the case to, for instance, local university administrators, that is pressing work, and it very well may displace giving attention to the project of supporting the creation of new graduate programs. And under conditions in which crises are arising constantly and society members are expecting their society to respond, constantly, strategic goals—even strategical goals aimed at preventing crises from arising in the first place—can be forced, by the unfolding of human events in real-time, to the back-burner.
Even if everyone—all members of a society, for instance—had abundant knowledge and clear insights into the state of various matters, and of the world as a whole, this dynamic would be hard, but it is harder still because such perfect knowledge is not how things are. Different people know, or think that they know, different things. And regardless of what they know and don’t know and think that they know, they have different priorities. An Executive Board, for instance, can assess and rank priorities, but some possible goals can be simply incompatible with other goals. And very few Executive Boards devote time (or have time to devote) to setting general priorities for addressing specific crises that emerge unlooked for. What tends to happen in most organizations, is that leaders fall back on what they understand to be shared values and historical precedents for dealing improvisationally with emergent challenges in their field.
(For an example that is actually unfolding now…) If a AAA member is understood by a significant number of AAA members to being treated unfairly by their home institution, the general value of supporting members and the historical lessons of earlier instances of AAA interventions in support of other AAA members under threat kicks in. I am not saying that it should not be thus. What I am flagging is the general problem that some elected leaders of a scholarly society and some professional staff of a society in this situation will wind up devoting time to the emergent problem and in doing do, other work will be hindered. Pursuit of strategic goals are part of what gets hindered in the world of Whac-A-Mole.
The basic problem relates to the fact that almost no organizations in which we work and few individuals working within them, budget “slack time” for addressing unexpected crises. I see this in my own College at my own University in which my Executive Dean is working almost around the clock to address profound structural problems, but each day he is handed a raft of pop-up problems, the addressing of which is unavoidable but the addressing of which will not solve or ameliorate the structural problems that are on his agenda. I have writing group colleagues who set aside a few hours each week for pop-up problems, but the pop-up problems of an individual faculty member and those of a whole scholarly society and field (or College) are of a different order of magnitude.
Returning to the different priorities of individual members and constituent groups within societies, they can not only have different priorities and hopes and needs, but they can also have different levels of expectations of both norms and of service. For instance, one of the hardest problems for societies right now is that senior members often expect the maintenance of, or enhancement of, both quality and coverage of services and activities. (Doing fewer things, doing things less well, etc. is a choice that very few individuals are willing to openly endorse, but older members (a group I am in) especially bring “historical perspective” to the matter.) Senior members also often expect—as experienced members who have served their societies in various ways over extended periods—to have gained from this (1) direct and regular access to current leaders and (2) that their expectations for what the society is attending to will be given due weight. This would just be a familiar social dynamic under less crisis-filled conditions, but it makes hard problems harder under present ones, when demands for change, demands for stasis, and vigorous demands for active responses to crises—some contradictory, irresolvable, or lose-lose in character—are constantly being called for. This is just one more part of the Whac-A-Mole calculus. One could offer a companion analysis of the parallel special demands of younger members and the ways that they get expressed through other channels. Similarly, the contribution of an ever-changing digital social media landscape to Whac-A-Mole could be discussed. The problem comes from all sides through many channels.
Will Whac-A-Mole get worse? I cannot see how it will not get worse, at least in the short term. If one society member is being subjected to a doxing campaign today (a real example on my mind today), chances are pretty good that two or three will be so threatened sometime soon. While such new, sometimes completely unprecedented, crises emerge and have to be addressed by society professional staff and elected leaders, the endless stream of less dramatic but still insistent emails and text messages will also continue. Society leaders don’t stop fielding calls for more online meetings and fewer online meetings, the restoration of print conference programs and the elimination of print conference programs, the restoration of more rigorous screening practices for conference participation and the lowering of barriers to entry to the conference program, etc. In such circumstances, my response has been to try to cultivate empathy for those who take up the work of scholarly societies, even when they are pursuing policies that I do not favor, or not taking up the tasks and challenges that I would myself prioritize as urgent. We are contemplating the lives and work of human beings who are trying, usually trying their best, to serve others.
Empathy can help, but it is also not enough to get societies through the multiple and intersectional crises that they and the fields that they serve are now facing. Members have, I think, to more actively give society leaders a break and grant them some time (which means perhaps letting some things slip for a while) to sort out and prioritize not just strategic goals and tactical plans, but also to sort out day-to-day workflows and—this is most difficult—the mission and values-based frameworks by which (and this hurts) they will decide on our behalf what not to do and not just what they will (with us as members) do. As my posts on the potential banning of public funds for scholarly societies and on the impacts of forced change in general education were trying to suggest, giving society leaders some space to learn about emerging risks is one of the things that we collectively can be doing. The way that we would do this would include individually learning more about what our societies (and fields) and their leaders are up against and, also, engaging in a bit of triage ourselves. Do I need to send this email? If I need to send it, do I need a reply and if I do not need a reply, can I tell my recipient this and then not feel bad if they take me up on my offer of not replying? You get the idea.
One key role placed by scholarly societies is to monitor the health of a field on a local, national and international level. Knowing what the state of affairs is, is a prelude to formulating field-wide programs or targeted interventions aimed at addressing local or systemic problems. While I will not stress it here, a joy-rich upside of keeping up with a discipline from a society perspective is that society leaders learn not just about problems but also about successes and victories worth celebrating and hopefully emulating. But here my focus, unfortunately, is on the problems and not the many accomplishments one might consider. Building on my previous post, here I am again considering the national situation in general (in the USA) as it relates to the work of the American Folklore Society (AFS), my primary disciplinary home, and the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in which I am also active, including as a board member of the Council for Museum Anthropology, a AAA section.
I urge readers of this post to read the IHE story and then to begin exploring other reporting on the impacts of SB 266. Read the legislation itself and study the situation. Here, I note that Florida education leaders had already removed a statewide introductory sociology course Principles of Sociology from all general education offerings and “declared the discipline inherently liberal (Moody 2024).” (See also Hartocollis 2024). My concern here is general, but this is also personal, as general education sociology courses that I took at the University of Florida and what is today Palm Beach State College (then Palm Beach Community College) were the stepping stones that I took to becoming a BA sociology major. Being a sociology major (and anthropology minor) student in turn was the basis on which I sought and earned master’s degrees in folklore and anthropology and ultimately my PhD and my life and career. I use what I learned in those general education sociology courses every day. I am who I am because of them.
What Inside Higher Education has called “A Battle Over Florida’s General Education Courses” has reached a new stage, as reported on yesterday (10/3/2024=Moody 2024). Public universities in Florida, the state where I was born, raised, and educated (University of Florida ’90) are grappling with [Florida] Senate Bill 266, a far-reaching law that is now central to the transformation of public higher education in Florida. I will not unpack all aspects of it, but key to what I am evoking here are the ways that the legislation constrains and controls general education courses. As reported by IHE:
Florida International University’s Board of Trustees voted last week to drop 22 courses from the core curriculum, including Anthropology of Race & Ethnicity, Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies, and Sociology of Gender. The move follows last year’s passage of SB 266, a sweeping higher ed bill that, among other things, limits the scope of general education courses permitted at public universities.
Removing Principles of Sociology was a foretaste of the larger situation now. Because legislators and system leaders have construed large swaths of the humanities and social sciences to be inherently political and thus biased, these courses are moved out of eligibility for general education credit. Those who work in colleges and universities know the ways that such shifts will ramify (/are already ramifying). General education courses serve whole campuses. Some undergraduate students gain basic knowledge of disciplines through them and then move on to other majors and minors and interests. That is as it should be. But some students, as I did, come to find their home and stick with the fields that they first meet through the fulfilling of general education requirements. A general education course becomes a discipline and perhaps also the basis for a career. No humanities or social science department wants to, or expects to, see every general education student become a minor or major student, but they usually find that some do do this. General education impacts the lives of every general education student and general education courses also help students find what they are most passionate about and most interested in. There is a kind of triangular shaped demographic pattern present here. At the top, a relatively small number of students will follow me, and those like me, all the way up the ladder from a general education course to a doctorate and a place in the research university or research museum (etc.), but there are layers all the way from the relatively large auditoriums in which my colleagues and I teach general education courses to this small peak. Many students begin in such courses and climb further up and make meaningful lives and careers for themselves on the basis of BA/BS majors, BA/BS minors, and MA/MS degrees. A system that has been tweaked and adjusted based on shared governance principles at the department and campus and institutional level for decades is now being thrown completely out of whack. By forces above and beyond these levels. The consequences of politicizing general education are great.
From the perspective of disciplines and the scholarly societies that serve them, the new approaches to the politicization of general education are another existential threat. Fields like sociology, anthropology, and folklore studies have no choice but to understand, and seek to address, what is happening and what is likely to happen. Such fields are viable, in part, in universities because of their contribution to general education. Those currently experiencing the transformation of higher education beyond Florida have already seen the ways that approaches being pioneered in Florida (or Texas or North Carolina, or…) are being transferred to other states. This is not just emulation but is a matter of common tactics being formulated and promulgated to the states by national advocacy organizations.
What is my takeaway here? My purpose in this post (and the previous one) was to raise these issues relative to scholarly societies. Scholarly societies do not possess the kinds of resources that national think tanks, bill mills, and political parties possess, but these matters are fundamental to the very existence of, and future of, scholarly fields and the scholarly societies that support them. To be perfectly clear, folklore studies, as an academic discipline in the United States, would not survive the removal of folklore studies courses from undergraduate curriculum in the states where our field lives inside public colleges and universities. If what is happening now in Florida reaches its intended conclusion there and if it is repeated elsewhere, there will be, to use a new metaphor, an extinction event.
This is hard. It is hard if you teach courses now being targeted. It is hard if you are a department or program chair. It is hard if you are faculty leader on an impacted campus in an impacted state system. It is hard if you are a faculty leader on such a campus in such a system. It is hard too if you are a student who wants to take an impacted course, for whatever good reason, and it is being pulled away from you in a context in which there is already ever more pressure for students to not explore but to instead knuckle-down and speed into the “talent pipeline” that awaits outside the graduation ceremony.
Facing such things is not what motivates teachers to teach or elected leaders to try to serve their scholarly societies, but there is really no choice. It is another situation like that attributed to Rabbi Tafron, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” None of us will fix, or see an end to, the systemic and intersectional problems that we presently face, but if those who can do something don’t try to do something, whatever is to come will surely be worse. For fields, like folklore studies, that serve broad publics, these matters are not just academic, they ramify and impact those communities that we serve and all of those diverse populations, left and right, up and down, that we support and partner with close to the grass roots.
Unburying the lede: This post is about efforts to sever the financial, and therefore mutual aid, links presently connecting scholarly societies and universities (etc.). It is thus about an existential threat to both scholarly societies and those institutions and publics that they serve.
I grew up on the coasts of Florida which means I grew up with hurricanes. When a hurricane has made landfall in your coastal city, it is too late to bother with raising the warning flags.
To sustain the scholars and practitioners, and broader publics, that they serve, scholarly societies in the humanities and the social sciences have no choice but to focus on emerging storms on, and beyond, the horizon as well as to take account of changing weather and climate patterns that might be making storms more frequent, more powerful, and potentially more destructive. While ensuring that things go well on a day-to-day basis, during sunny and partly cloudy days, scholarly society leaders need to also focus on identifying and preparing for the storms that are likely to come. Societies that are aware of, and that have been prepared for them, are better positioned to weather what comes. If we set aside the weather metaphor, in some cases, societies may be able to mobilize and prevent, and not just prepare for, the threats they face.
In dialogue with colleagues, I have been trying to enumerate some of the challenges that seem to threaten scholarly societies based in the United States. While the American Folklore Society (AFS) is foremost on my mind in this context, I am a presently a board member of the Council for Museum Anthropology, a constituent section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and thus I have AAA on my mind also.
Scholarly societies, such as those that (like AFS and AAA) are members of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), are in close relationship with college and universities, as well as with other institutional settings in which academics, public humanists, and applied social scientists work. These other settings include museums, archives, public folklore agencies, federal, state, and local government agencies, NGOs, and other kinds of public-interest organizations. Most obviously, scholarly societies provide manifold opportunities to their members and these opportunities benefit those individuals who work in these organizations. They thus benefit the organizations in which we work and those we serve. Some obvious examples include providing venues for research exchange, professional development activities, disciplinary and interdisciplinary networking, scholarly publication venues, and basic infrastructure for healthy disciplinary work. I am capturing just a fraction of the benefits that scholarly societies provide to their members and to the fields and workplaces in which they serve. I know any readers that I find here know these things.
Scholarly societies rely upon their members in manifold ways, of course, but they also depend on the organizations that those members work in, and serve. Here, I will identify just a four of the most obvious points of reliance and connectivity.
Scholarly societies are publishers and key purchasers of those publications are the libraries maintained by universities and other institutions. Institutional funds thus support publications while publications in turn support students, faculty, curators, etc. within these institutions. This relationship has long been central to the work of scholarly communications. Societies need library subscribers and libraries serve their constituents through these subscriptions (or through institutional participation in open access alternatives).
In numerous but (I know, I know) not all contexts, institutions subsidize staff or student participation in scholarly society conferences. This can take various forms, including such things as internal student travel grants for graduate students or full or partial travel funds allotted to university faculty members or institutional staff members (as at museums). The bottom line is that some attendees at an AFS meeting have been partially or perhaps fully supported in their attendance. Usually, such subsidies are tied to the individual presenting new research at the meeting or participating actively in some other fashion on the program of the meeting. Such individuals often need to report on their participation to their colleagues afterwards to help further spread the benefits of this investment.
In some settings, those employed by in-field institutions will have their scholarly society membership paid for with research funds or other funding made available to the faculty member or other relevant staff members. I am well-aware of the variation existing on this point and I know that a society such as AFS has numerous members who lack access to such support, but as a matter of fact, such support exists. It is valuable both to those who receive it and to the society as a whole. Just as journal subscriptions help support journal publication and meeting subsidies support the production of a successful scholarly meeting (for everyone), dues subsidies contribute to the very existence of a scholarly society and make it possible for that organization to serve its membership, its field, and its publics. Whether paid for by employers or by members themselves, dues make scholarly infrastructure and scholarly connectivity possible.
Finally, scholarly societies are frequently hosted by specific institutions. This is not always so, but for smaller societies, this local hosting is often crucial. It can take two forms, both of which are relevant to AFS (and one of which [i.e. 4B] is quite relevant to AAA). (4A) A scholarly society’s home office can be based at a university or other institution. For instance, the AFS office is based at Indiana University Bloomington where it is affiliated with the College of Arts and Sciences and partnered with the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Such relationships are ideally durable across extended periods. To exist and endure, they always involve mutual benefit, with society resources advancing host institutional goals and, reciprocally, university (etc.) resources helping advance society ones. (4B) Shorter-term are instances when institutions host journal editorial offices. In this mode, one (perhaps more than one) institution agrees to assist the work of one or more of its faculty members in “taking on” the work of editing or co-editing a society journal, usually for a handful of years. In this mode, for instance, George Mason University has contributed in important ways to “hosting” the editorial office for the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), the primary peer-reviewed publication of the AFS. The JAF editorial team is comprised of George Mason University and the university leadership there has seen the value in helping the local faculty succeed in their editorial work. (More generally, institutions can allow for, and encourage students, faculty, and staff to take on other service roles within scholarly societies.)
Why have I spent over 1000 words laying this out? Because the things that that I have just described, which have never been in rock solid shape or universally observed, are now fundamentally in question. I am not speaking of familiar “budget challenges” but of an newer and more fundamentally existential matter.
To understand that which to I refer, I direct readers the American Enterprise Institute’s report “Scholarly Associations Gone Wild: Stop Publicly Funding Scholarly Groups that Trade Academics for Advocacy” (Greene and Hess 2024a, 2024b). There has been surprising little coverage of this report in higher education circles but it is starting to be talked about and those presently leading scholarly societies in and beyond the humanities and social sciences have no choice, I think, but to consider it and related initiatives that will begin as think tank reports and that will likely manifest as state-level legislation.
Responding will not be so simple as, for instance, just stopping issuing statements that others deem political. It does not really work that way under present conditions. It may or may not be a good idea for scholarly societies to issue statements deemed political by their members or by others, but every scholarly society ultimately has a domain of expertise, whether that is Icelandic poetry, southern barbecue, or nuclear arms control. Every area of expertise is subject to being framed as political and yet every scholarly society has a fundamental obligation to leverage and share the expertise of its members for the public good. This emerging storm is riddled with lose-lose dynamics. To change metaphors from storms to software, these dynamics are a feature and not a bug. They are part of a larger contest for the future that is well underway. And they are connected closely to still wider problems that scholarly societies, and other nodes in our networks all face. These are old problems taking new and more vexing forms: questions of free speech and civic discourse; questions of purpose in both universities and public service organizations; the nature of facts, knowledge, and expertise. They unfold in a degraded, and degrading social, and also literal, environment—locally, nationally, and globally and the co-occur with other unprecedented problems from those being raised by artificial intelligence (LLMs have already been built on the writings of members of ACLS societies) to climate change (which is not only impacting members of ACLS societies but is also impacting the basic, collective work of all scholarly societies).
Scholarly society leaders now cannot lose sight of the need to cultivate joy in their members, to boost morale, and to celebrate the good work that those members, and their societies, do, day in and day out. But the work is getting harder and those charged to lead scholarly societies, both as staff and as elected leaders, really have to choice by to make sense of, and try to adapt to, a very complex and unhealthy institutional environment. The AFS, the AAA, and any other ACLS society would be diminished in massive ways if even some U.S. states adopted no-funds-for-scholarly-societies legislation.
I am eager to share the following call for CMA award nominations. Check it out and nominate the wonderful colleagues in your world. –Jason
Michael M. Ames Award
The Council for Museum Anthropology is seeking nominations for the Michael M. Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology. The award is given to individuals for an innovative project in museum anthropology. Examples include: outstanding single or multi-authored books or published catalogues; temporary or permanent exhibits; repatriation projects; collaborations with descendant communities; educational or outreach projects; multimedia works, and other endeavors. Individuals can be nominated by any member of CMA (self-nominations are not permitted). Deadline for submissions is August 1, 2024.
The Council for Museum Anthropology is seeking nominations for the Lifetime Achievement/Distinguished Service Award. The award recognizes CMA members whose careers demonstrate extraordinary achievements that have advanced museum anthropology. These achievements might include: collections work, community collaborations, exhibitions, publications, public programming and outreach, teaching, policy development, etc. While many anthropologists distinguish themselves through their works, this award is meant to single out those who, over the course of their careers, have truly helped to define and or reshape the field of anthropology in and of museums. Nominees are expected to have spent at least 20 years working in the field of museum anthropology. Deadline for submissions is August 1, 2024.
Please note that the Lifetime Achievement/Distinguished Service award was awarded in 2023 and is usually done on a biannual basis. Nominations may be carried over and considered for an award in 2025.
The Council for Museum Anthropology is seeking applications for the CMA Student Travel Award. The award is designed to support graduate student travel to the annual AAA meeting to present papers and/or posters. Students and recent graduate degree recipients (those who have defended within the year of the award) are eligible to apply. Each year, CMA will award two prizes of $1000 each. The deadline for submissions is August 1, 2024.
The Council for Museum Anthropology is seeking nominations for the CMA Book Award. The award was created to recognize and promote excellence in museum anthropology, and is awarded to a scholar within the field of museum anthropology for a solo, co- or multi-authored book published up to five years prior to the award date, and will be considered for the award 2 years after nomination. Edited books will not be considered. The CMA Book award will be given to the author(s) whose work is judged to be a significant and influential contribution to museum anthropology. Books that did not receive the award but are considered exceptional will receive honorable mentions at the award ceremony at the AAA Annual Meeting.
If you are an academic author or aspire to be one, I hope that you will check out the series organized by Ilana Gershon and published on the Anthropology News site of the American Anthropological Association. As the AAA sets it up: “Ilana Gershon asked eight anthropologists for their approaches to the many daunting tasks of publishing an article in a journal, based on questions generated by Sandhya Narayanan.” It was fun to be one of those respondents and interesting to see what the whole panel had to say. Here are the items published to date. I will add to the list if it grows further. Special thanks to Ilana for producing the series and for including me.
It is our pleasure to award the 2020 CMA book award to Daniel Swan and Jim Cooley for their 2019 book, “Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community” (Indiana University Press), and to give an honorable mention to Solen Roth for her 2018 book “Incorporating Culture” (UBC Press). Both books exemplify the range of work that the Council of Museum Anthropology promotes.
Swan, D. and Cooley, J. 2019. “Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community: A Giving Heritage.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
It is with great pleasure that we award the CMA book award to Daniel Swan and Jim Cooley. “Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community” is an exemplar of what museum anthropology can and should be. The book is the result of long-term collaborative work with the Osage Nation, and uses archival, ethnographic and ethnohistorical methods to reanimate museum collections of Osage heritage. Doing so, the book is a highly accessible multi-media examination of change and continuity in Osage wedding traditions and clothing. Through its attention to material culture the book demonstrates not only the rich vibrancy of the Osage wedding traditions but also demonstrates the sort of work that can only be done through what Ray Silverman termed “slow museology”, which is work built on mutual respect, collaboration, and trust. This is a book that transcends its subject matter and helps us all see the possibilities of museum anthropology.
Roth, S. 2018. “Incorporating Culture: How Indigenous People are Reshaping the Northwest Coast Art Industry.” Vancouver: UBC Press.
We are delighted to award honorable mention for the CMA book award to Solen Roth. “Incorporating Culture” is a unique ethnography of the “artware” industry. Solen coins the term artware to describe commodities decorated with Pacific Northwest coast images that circulate inside and outside of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. The book examines the array of values these objects accumulate as they transition between these sites. It is a sophisticated historical and multi-sited ethnographic look at the intercultural phenomena of the artware industry, which is an example of what she terms ‘culturally modified capitalism.’ The book helps shed light on a compelling and important feature and dynamic of the intercultural object-world and economy in the North West Coast.
In addition to the CMA Book Award, I am also happy to note that Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community: A Giving Heritage was recently recognized during the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society’s Folklore and History section, which bestows the annual Wayland D. Hand Prize given for the best book combining historical and folkloristic methods and materials. The biennial prize honors the eminent folklorist Wayland D. Hand (1907-1986). Wedding Clothes was given the honorable mention in the 2020 Hand Prize competition. The prize itself went to Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018) by Guy Beiner. As reprinted on a Facebook post, the Hand Prize committee said the following about Wedding Clothes.
The beautifully illustrated volume explores through history and folklife research the ways that gift exchange, motivated by the values of generosity and hospitality serves as a critical component in the preservation and perpetuation of Osage society.
Congratulations to all of the Osage Nation citizens who worked on the larger Osage Weddings Project (which included a major traveling exhibition) and to Dan and Jim as authors. Special thanks go to the Indiana University Press for investing tremendous care in the making of an extraordinary book.
Shreds and Patches 