On linguistic anthropologists in AAA offices

[Laura Miller]

Thank you Jim, for pointing put my oversight.  I was very remiss not to have mentioned the years of hard work on the part of the SLA Nominating Committee in making sure we have linguistic anthropologists represented on the larger AAA committees. I know we all are appreciative of their efforts in supporting linguistic anthropology.  Jim Wilce forgot to mention his own service on that committee as well.

Sorry to keep harping on this, but I'll add one more quibble with Galey Modan's comment that:
	"....promoting an identity as linguists *also* seems to work to bolster our credentials vis-a-vis the rest of anthropology, as people who have difficult technical skills which are critical to the work of anthropology (something along the lines of, you need us, otherwise anthropology will have no rigor, so we're worthy of respect)."

For anthropology departments which have biological anthropologists and archeologists, there isn't any sense that they need linguistic anthropology in order to have rigor.  From the perspective of people in those subfields, linguistic anthropology is often conceived of as little more than cultural anthropology with some additional interest in language, or as linguistics that might just as easily be taught in the linguistics department instead of within anthropology. This is why we need to have linguistic anthropologists on association-wide committees, and why we need to remind people that there is a subfield of linguistic anthropology.



>>> Jim Wilce <jim.wilce at nau.edu> 04/22/03 15:42 PM >>>
Hi:

Following up on something Laura Miller very appropriately mentioned the
other day in this venue, I just wanted to mention others who had worked
hard  in recent years to try to get  linguistic anthropologists elected
to AAA offices*efforts that have been quite successful.

In addition to the work of our great presidents, past (Susan Gal,
Sandro Duranti) and present (Elinor Ochs), members of  the SLA
Nominating Committee such as Mary Bucholtz, Bill Hanks, and Stanton
Wortham (still on and currently its chair) deserve a lot of credit,
too. Kit Woolard and Debra Spitulnik are working hard on these matters
along with Stanton now.

I mention this in part to keep before you the idea of being nominated
for office.

Best regards,

Jim Wilce