A message from T.J. Ferguson, AAA Executive Board member and incoming chair of the Anthropological Communication Committee:

In November and December 2009, AAA and Wiley-Blackwell are offering free access to over ten years of Anthrosource content, AAA’s online portal for anthropological research.

I encourage the practicing community to take advantage of this opportunity to explore the benefits of Anthrosource as a research tool. In particular, I’d like to draw to your attention some efforts being made in American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of AAA, to make sure this title brings practicing, applied, and public anthropologists and their contributions into this august record of the field.

In June 2009, the journal published a review by Melissa Checker of 2008 literature, “Anthropology in the Public Sphere, 2008: Emerging Trends and Significant Impacts.”   The editor of the journal, Tom Boellstorff, plans to have these annual recaps each year, summarizing key contributions and themes in the documents produced by applied, practicing and public anthropologists.

This same issue features a research article by Timothy de Waal Malefyt, “Understanding the Rise of Consumer Ethnography: Branding Technomethodologies in the New Economy.”

American Anthropologist will also, starting in March 2010, launch a second new feature. The journal will begin reviewing professional reports and other  documents that public, practicing, and applied anthropologists create, but which have not been published by university presses or in other traditional academic venues, and thus have historically been occluded from book review sections.

Because the journal is both widely visible in the discipline and because of its role as an unofficial record of the discipline, I am very excited to see these new efforts featuring the emerging place of practicing anthropologists in our field.

T. J. Ferguson

Anthropological Research, LLC.

Click here to learn more about how to get free access to AAA pubs during November and December.

 AAA members always have free access to AnthroSource as a benefit of their membership. To learn more about becoming an AAA member or to join, visit http://aaanet.org/membership/.

To recommend an AnthroSource subscription to your library, click here. We also offer free subscriptions to Historically Black College and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and First Nation Schools. Contact Dion Dears at ddears@aaanet.org for details.

The third installment of our “Frugal Philly” Guide to the 2009 AAA Annual Meeting  is now available, courtesy of Jeff Maskovsky.

Apparently there’s more to Philly than just cheesesteaks, though they’ve got that, too! Maskovsky provides a culinary guide to places that run the gamut from cheap and easy to fancy schmancy - and of course the best in coffee, cocktails and desserts.

Check out the guide to good eats, plus the previous Frugal Philly guides, and other meeting information on the AAA Meetings page.

We’re looking forward to the artisan gelato at Capogiro…

This November and December we invite you to sample AAA’s publications by offering complimentary online access to more than 10 years of content.

The following journals are available to you via this offer. Simply click on the links below to learn more about any of the titles or to start reading articles online today!

American Anthropologist AA is the flagship journal of the AAA, presenting the highest level of scholarship from the full spectrum of anthropological research. The journal appeals to a broad audience by incorporating research articles from all subfields of anthropology; including archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology.

American Ethnologist Articles in AE elucidate the connections between ethnographic specificity and theoretical originality, conveying the ongoing relevance of the ethnographic imagination to the contemporary world.

Anthropology & Education Quarterly
Anthropology & Humanism
Anthropology of Consciousness
Anthropology of Work Review
Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association
City & Society
Cultural Anthropology
Culture & Agriculture
Ethos
General Anthropology
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Museum Anthropology
National Association for the Practice of Anthropology Bulletin
North American Dialogue
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review
Transforming Anthropology
Visual Anthropology Review

If you’re a fan of Cultural Anthropology (CA), but four issues a year just isn’t enough, make sure you check out the journal’s website at http://culanth.org/

In addition to supplemental materials that go along with each regular issue, the site periodically features Virtual Issues that gather articles from past issues of CA.

The latest virtual issue focuses on security, and highlights five previously published CA articles and supplemental materials on biothreats, refugees in Gaza, corporate social responsibility, and French immigration policy. There is also an extensive list of security-related articles from the CA archives.

As part of our two free months of Anthrosource access, many of these articles will be open to the public during the months of November and December, and supplemental materials are always accessible.

Anthropologist Susan C. Scrimshaw, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and former President of the Society for Medical Anthropology, will be formally inducted into office as ninth president of The Sage Colleges on Friday, Oct. 23, 2009. Congratulations, Dr. Scrimshaw!

The inauguration ceremony culminates a week of community-focused events highlighting Sage’s excellence in academics, arts, athletics, community services and health sciences. For more information on President Scrimshaw, please visit her website: www.sage.edu/aboutsage/president/

UPDATED 10/16:

Leading up to our exciting offer of two months of FREE ACCESS to 10+ years of Anthrosource content this November and December, we recently announced the Top 25 Anthrosource Articles of 2009.

We now invite you to read the Top 10 Articles of 2009 from each of our individual AAA publications. The list of winners from your favorite title can be found at its homepage on the Wiley-Blackwell Interscience platform, or you can connect directly our list of titles below.

To start things off, why not check out the Top 10 Articles of 2009 from American Anthropologist?

AAA members always have access to the full-text of these articles via Anthrosource as a benefit of their membership, and we invite non-AAA members to check out the articles free of charge during November and December.

Click on your favorite title to read its Top 10!

American Anthropologist

American Ethnologist

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Anthropology and Humanism

Anthropology of Consciousness

Anthropology of Work Review

Archeological Papers of the AAA

City & Society

Cultural Anthropology

Culture & Agriculture

Ethos

General Anthropology

Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Museum Anthropology

NAPA Bulletin

North American Dialogue

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review

Transforming Anthropology

Visual Anthropology Review

AAA and Wiley-Blackwell are pleased to announce that we will be offering two months of FREE ACCESS to 10+ years of Anthrosource content, during November and December 2009.

As a preview to this exciting offer we invite you to view the Top 25 Anthrosource Articles of 2009.  

Below are the articles at the top of the list, but we encourage you to view the full list and access the full-text content for each article.

1) Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others by Lila Abu-Lughod

2) How to Get An Article Accepted at American Anthropologist (or Anywhere)  by Tom Boellstorff

3) Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality   by James Ferguson

4) On Recognition, Caring and Dementia  by Janelle S. Taylor

5) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism by Mahmood Mamdani

And don’t forget: full access to Anthrosource is always available to AAA members! We also support broad access to our content by offering free subscriptions to Historically Black College and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and First Nation Schools, and through participation in philanthropic programs like HINARI and OARE.

AAA and Wiley-Blackwell want our journals content to be widely available. To this end, we specifically support five different philanthropic programs to make sure that underresourced institutions have access to our publications.

We participate in HINARI, AGORA, OARE, INASP, and we support free access to AnthroSource for Historically Black College and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and First Nation Schools.

Through HINARI alone, our content is available in more than 4,000 institutions in the developing world!

In addition, Dion Dears (ddears AT aaanet.org) has contacted HBCUs and Tribal Colleges and Universities specifically to spread the word this summer.

If your institution is interested in this program, you can click on the links above or you can email Dion Dears directly to take advantage of our philanthropic programs.

For those cerebral types in the market for a mate, both the New York Review of Books (NYRB) and the London Review of Books (LRB) have personal ads.

But while both publications may attract the intellectual upper crust of their respective sides of the Atlantic (or at least, those who think of themselves as such), the Yanks and Brits have distinctly different ad styles.

According to Stephen Gertz,  in a piece from Fine Books Magazine this spring, “With far too many U.S. personals, it’s all sharing romantic walks on the beach, sunsets, picnics in the park, drives up the coast with the top down, a glass of wine in front of the fireplace. There’s a distinct lack of imagination…The Brits don’t seem to care about optimizing first impressions, marketing themselves and creating positive brand awareness: This is who I am, take it or leave it but I will never bore you!”

Gertz presents a number of LRB ads that originally appeared in 2006’s They Call Me Naughty Lola, a collection  put together by LRB editor David Rose. According to Gertz, the book is “social anthropology at its entertaining best.”

Highlights from the LRB include:

“You’ll regret replying to this ad – its owner smells of peas”

“Tell me your dreams. I’ll laugh at them all and prove how unlikely you are to achieve them.”

“List your ten favourite albums. I don’t want to compare notes, I just want to know if there’s anything worth keeping when we finally break up.”

You can check out some of NYRB’s ads at their personals page, where the submitters claim to have “self-deprecating humor”, but are too busy telling us they are “inordinately literary” and “unexpectedly sexy” to exhibit any of it.

The 2009 AAA Annual Meeting program is now available online, and as you’ve probably heard, we have a number of exciting new features this year, including a personalized online itinerary builder.

While you search through the many panels, papers, and other events offered at this year’s Meeting, don’t forget to consider signing up for one of forty available workshops.

The price of the workshops (which is separate from Meeting registration fees) ranges from free to $80.

Some of the highlights include “Getting Published: A Guide for Students” ($10 for student NASA members), “Ethnographic Writing and Its Discontents” ($20 for students and $40 for professionals) and “How to Find an Academic Job”  (a complimentary workshop hosted by the AAA).

Visit our Workshop website to review the full list of available workshops, or check out the entire searchable program. You can sign-up for workshops when you register for the Meeting, or if you’re already registered, you can sign-in to add the desired workshops. Most workshops have a limited number of seats, so don’t wait to sign-up!