Comparing the situations of anthropologists around the world as to publication and evaluation criteria

In January 2022, the World Council of Anthropological Associations Task Force “Making Anthropology Global” was formed, consisting of Gonzalo Díaz Crovetto, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, P.-j. Ezeh, Shannon Morreira, Yasmeen Arif, Chen Gang, Gordon Mathews (chairperson), and Takami Kuwayama, reporting on Chile, Norway, Nigeria, South Africa. India, China, Hong Kong, and Japan. The task force met via Zoom once a month during 2022 and early 2023, with assignments after each meeting, whereby members wrote about the situation of anthropologists in their own societies.

Initially, the task force focused on the impact of citation indexes such as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) on promotion practices for anthropologists in our different societies. As Kuwayama (2017, 162−63) writes, “as of April 2017, a total of 82 journals are listed in SSCI under the category of anthropology. . . . Of these, the US accounts for 38, the UK 21, Germany 6, Australia 3, the Netherlands, 3, Chile, 2, France 2, Spain 2, Argentina 1, Italy 1, New Zealand 1, Slovenia 1, and Switzerland 1.” This situation is essentially unchanged in the years since, with Anglo-American hegemony an indisputable fact in anthropological journal publishing. However, as we proceeded in our work, we soon realized that SSCI was only one factor in how anthropologists were being evaluated, and so we began to examine the more general situations of anthropologists in our different societies. This brief report summarizes our findings in terms of publication expectations, citation indexes, language usage, and promotional criteria among anthropologists in the eight different societies we represent and also offers our recommendations. A significant limitation of this report is that it covers a small range of societies, albeit from a wide geographic range around the world, and we hope in the future to expand these to cover all the world, but we do sense that the diversity of the societies we represent offers at least the start of a global profile. We begin by providing a country-by-country report. We then provide a comparison of the different issues raised in these reports. Finally, we arrive at a few suggestions for how global problems in publication, language, promotion, and other issues might be alleviated.

In what follows, we present key points both from the preceding profiles of anthropological publishing and evaluation in different societies and from the longer document we produced as a task force.

The following are broad criteria that we have all come to agree upon within our task force. We are well aware that their adoption may be a pipe dream, but we offer them in the spirit of provoking discussion and perhaps expanding imaginations as to what might be possible.

(1) Some form of evaluation of anthropology professors seems inevitable. The earlier situations of Japan and China, where seniority was effectively the only grounds for promotion, is broadly untenable. However, evaluation that is inhumanly strict, as in Hong Kong, is also untenable. We suggest a middle ground. Once someone is hired for an anthropology position, they should be able to remain unless their performance is clearly substandard.

(2) Rating one's publications by the rankings of the journals in which one has published seems absurdly reductive, and yet it does offer a degree of objectivity and transparency that other forms of evaluation may lack—that is, a nonanthropologist might claim, uncomprehendingly, “I've read their publications and they're rubbish!” This is why the young Chinese anthropologists mentioned earlier prefer the current system of evaluation over those in the past. However, if there are ranked lists of journals used for evaluation, anthropologists themselves should be able to set the criteria by which these journals are ranked, or at the very least should have a strong say in setting these criteria, as is the case in Norway, but not in Chile.

(3) Evaluation should take place using not simply one criterion of publishing in certain specified professional journals. Rather, it should encompass other activities as well, such as contributing policy reports or writing for the larger public, both of which are important. This is already the case in China, in terms of writing policy reports, to a degree, but not elsewhere, such as Norway, and most other societies. Writing in languages other than English for a larger public should also be acceptable as both a vehicle for scholarship and popular writing.

(4) Anglo-American domination of citation indexes such as SSCI is deeply unfortunate and can be solved only by anthropologists in a range of societies citing from local, national, and regional sources, rather than from the Anglo-American “core.” However, at present, this situation is the reality. While publication in the Anglo-American core need not necessarily be discouraged, publication within other contexts—the regional, the national, and the local—should be equally encouraged in the anthropological worlds of different societies and should “count” in the evaluation of professors. The fact that Anglo-American journals dominate citation indexes is not a function of the quality of these journals but rather of the fact that the United States and United Kingdom have many anthropologists citing from journals in their own language. Because of the power and prestige of the United States and United Kingdom, many anthropologists in other societies do likewise, but more, they should be encouraged to cite from journals in their own societies and regions. This, of course, is easier said than done at present.

(5) There is a vast discrepancy in pay and benefits as well as in expected duties among anthropologists in different societies, including the societies represented in this task force. Because we have focused primarily on publication, we have not addressed this underlying fact, but it is obvious. Some members of our task force have an annual income 10 times higher than other members of the task force. This cannot be addressed within the narrow scope of our report, but it does, lamentably, color its entire background. It is also very clearly the case that adjuncts and precariously employed anthropologists form a vast proletariat underclass throughout the contemporary world of anthropology. This is the case in every one of the societies discussed in this report. Given economic realities, it is difficult to see how this can be overcome. We can only urge higher pay and benefits for adjuncts in all societies.

(6) The gap between the Global North and the Global South in anthropology is apparent not only in citation indexes but also in places where anthropologists do fieldwork and in how they are funded. Anthropologists from the Global North come to the Global South to do research, but the obverse rarely happens. The implication of the funding disparity is that funders in the Global North do not trust scholars—anthropologists—in the Global South. We hope that funders, and, more broadly, anthropologists in the Global North, can work to overcome this problem.

(7) World university rankings have become ubiquitous and place particular pressure on the Global South. Universities of the Global South, almost by definition, lack the resources of the Global North, and so to place all these universities on a single global scale is problematic. This is especially true of anthropology, since in many countries of the Global South it is under threat as an independent discipline. For example, how many students are willing to go from the Global North to the Global South to study anthropology (as opposed to doing research)? Very few. This can only be rectified in the long term, but it must be steadily worked toward.