The Pleistocene Scene – A.P. Van Arsdale Blog

Last week the American Anthropological Association held their annual meetings in Washington, D.C. This is the largest gathering of anthropologists in the world, this year topping 7,000 registered attendees. But of this large group, only a small fraction are members of the Biological Anthropology Section (BAS). This creates an interesting dynamic. On one hand, all of the typical trappings of a large-scale conference are present (including the high price tag), with hordes of people roaming the halls and staking out every available outlet in the lobby, a seemingly endless number of overlapping paper sessions, and that steady background hum of academic conversation. And yet, for someone focused primarily on biological anthropology, the space can feel quite intimate.

This year I was kept busy at the meetings primarily with business work (e.g. conducting job interviews for a search in our department, reviewing BAS student prize submissions, volunteering at a workshop on post-grad school employment), but the past two years I have participated on some of the most exciting panels I have been part of in my career to date.

Last year, it was, “Entangling the Biological: Steps Towards and Integrative Anthropology.” Organized by Katie MacKinnon and Agustin Fuentes, this was an all-star panel (and I do not include myself in that categorization), featuring Jim McKenna, Jon Marks, Libby Cowgill, Kristi Lewton, Lee Gettler, Michael Park, Karen Strier, Michelle Benzanson, Robin Nelson, Lance Gravelee, Erin Riley, and Julienne Rutherford. Rock stars all of them. But also scholars representing a variety of sub-disciplines in biological anthropology and coming from across several generations of scholarship within biological anthropology. Here is proof:

It is hard to have rich dialogues across this kind of spectrum of scholarship at the AAPA meetings, for example, where the concentration of ~3000 biological anthropologists inevitably causes you to drift towards your own sub-sub-fields and colleagues with whom you have worked and spent time with in the field in the past. This is not a criticism of the AAPAs or similar conferences, but only meant to point out the strength of the AAA as a biological anthropologist. The AAAs, despite their size, offer a unique “meeting within a meeting” experience.

Two years ago, I co-organized a panel with Jamie Clark. Our goal, once again, was to bring together scholars from a range of backgrounds within anthropology to talk about modern human origins. We were able to bring together Milford Wolpoff, Frank Marlowe, Julien Riel-Salvatore, Tanya Smith, Marissa Sobolewski, April Nowell, Luke Premo, John Hawks, Eric Heffter, and Alan Barnard…all in one room, all to talk about recent human evolution. Primatologists, demographers, geneticists, linguists, paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, dental anthropologists…all talking together and to one another.

The NSF and Wenner-Gren have funding available to organize invited workshops around particular themes (which are fantastic), but the funding and opportunity is limited. Essentially, we had the opportunity to tailor our own themed conference, piggy-backing on the existing structure of AAAs. The AAAs are expensive, but if you are smart about it, you can generate a lot of intellectual value out of the experience by setting up the kind of interactions that are often impossible in other settings. Following each of the above panels, the panelists were all able to carry on the conversations started during the session to dinner, and for many of us, the bar afterwards. Two years later, I am still productively working on ideas that came up in those conversations.

Why do I bring all of this up now? Well, as it turns out, I am the incoming Program Chair for the Biological Anthropology Section of the AAA. Now is the time to start thinking about panels you might be interested in putting together for next year’s meetings which will be in Denver, and I am the person to get in touch with for feedback on those ideas. The AAAs are valuable, but overwhelming. But the BAS portion of the AAAs?….they are free to be shaped in ways that create a degree of academic intimacy hard to achieve in larger settings. And if you are a biological anthropologist inclined towards the holistic view of anthropology, the BAS is an invaluable professional network and set of colleagues.