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From, the Society for Applied Anthropology Newsletter
Vol, 14, No. 1
REPORT FROM THE HO EDITOR
By Donald D. Stull
<stull@lark.cc.ukans.edu>
University of Kansas
Today issue off to authors for corrections—in six weeks or so you will have a new copy of Human Organization to pore eagerly over as you pass the evening before a warm fire, grateful your holiday shopping is done. This issue is my 16th as editor, and I think it is a dandy. It opens with a provocative essay by David Gow on “Anthropology and Development: Evil Twin or Moral Narrative” and ends with Andrew Gardner’s article “The Long Haul from Deregulation: Truck Drivers and Social Capital in the Louisiana Oilpatch” which won Peter K. New Award in 2000. In between you’ll find out whether marking tone makes tone languages easier to read and that Erin Brockovich doesn’t live in Mobile County, Alabama; you’ll track pastoralist migration in Ethiopia’s Somali National Regional State and see how rapid assessments are being strengthened in Bangladesh and Tanzania; and you’ll discover how native Canadians and anthropologists are putting community back into community based resource management and learn how labor migration is creating unofficial sister cities in Iowa and Mexico. Is that a page-turning lineup, or what?
Coming to the end of my fourth year as editor and teaching a seminar on applied anthropology has caused me to reflect on the significance of Human Organization for applied anthropology. Of course, being informed by Admiral Mike, editor-in-chief of the SfAA’s Flagship Publication, that I damn well better come up with something to say in the next issue, really fired up my synapses and got my fingers to moving.
Actually, ever since I began editing HO in 1999, I have toyed with the idea of a “greatest hits” issue. If the Beach Boys can do it, and Practicing Anthropology can do it, why can’t HO? Sure Human Organization is the “Grey Lady” of anthropological publishing, but if the New York Times can throw caution to the wind and announce commitment ceremonies along with weddings, why can’t we be a little daring. Admiral Mike won’t let me follow PA’s lead and commission a blue-ribbon panel to pore over HO’s 244 back issues to vote on their favorites—so I’ve decided to let Jerry Springer be my guide. I’m going to ask you, dear audience, to tell me your most favorite HO article of all time. Which of the more than 2,400 or so articles HO has published in its 61 years most influenced you? Which is the one you return to time and again for reference and inspiration?
If you’ve been a regular HO reader for a while, you may be hard pressed to pick from among the many smudged, frayed issues on your bookshelf the one that holds your all-time favorite article. I know I’m asking a lot of you, so I’ll go first.
My all-time favorite is not a single article, but rather a symposium, “Values in Action,” published in 1958 (17:1-26). “What kind of science should anthropology be?” That was the question such luminaries as Conrad Arensberg, Homer Barnett, Allan Holmberg, Lisa Redfield Peattie, Robert Redfield, and Sol Tax grappled with when anthropology was trying to find its way in the middle of the 20th century. Anthropologists are asking that same question a halfcentury later. Many of the issues they raised—and the answers they gave—still resonate with me—and with my students. And my work is guided by what Allan Holmberg referred to in that symposium as the pliancy factor: “when a generalization on behavior is communicated to people who are also its subjects, it may alter the knowledge and preferences of these people and also their behavior” (17:14).
To get the ball rolling on my rigorous scientific survey, and to keep the hounds at bay during our weekly HO staff meeting, I asked my editorial assistants for their favorites. Shawn Maloney had this to say:
As a masters student in applied anthropology in the mid-1990s, “The Inventions of Practice,” by Shirley Fiske and Erve Chamber (55:1-12, 1996) was key to helping me better understand the range of ways individuals were conceptualizing practicing or applied anthropology. It was important for me to learn that anthropologists had diverse opinions on what constituted applied work, as well as the manner in which it could or should be used.
This is from Jim Dick, our newest staff member:
