President's end-of-year letter
Stephen Chrisomalis
SAS members, colleagues and friends,
It’s been a great year for the Society for Anthropological Sciences, and it’s been my privilege to serve in this, the first year of my term as president. I’m writing to share just a few notes and thoughts on the year to date and looking forward to 2023 (with apologies if you receive this email twice).
SAS has seen enormous growth in its registered member numbers, from under 150 to over 400 over a 12-month span. While that’s fantastic, we also know that the major reason for that is that we eliminated student member dues (one of only a few sections to give students free membership). Now our goal has to be to turn some of that student registration into student enthusiasm. SAS must be a modern scholarly society with the goal of supporting the future of scientific anthropologies – not just in the short term (2 to 5 years) but on a generational scale. Now what we need is to shore up and reinforce our membership among the professional category – non-students who are practicing or academic anthropologists, who can provide networking and mentoring opportunities for students as well as for one another, and so that’s where our membership efforts will focus in 2023.
It was fantastic to be able to hold three hybrid meetings this year: Salt Lake City with SfAA in the spring, Vilnius in the summer, and just last month in Seattle with the AAAs. For a long time, SAS (like many other sections) has relied on in-person meetings (with the AAA, with SCCR and later SfAA, and in Europe) as the principal vector by which we provide value to our membership. Given the realities of “post”-pandemic travel and, frankly, the great difficulty for students to travel to any meetings at all, we know that online events and workshops must be a big part of that strategy. Liz Bingham Thomas, one of our student board members, has run a student writing workshop in 2021 and 2022, to great success, and we’ll be repeating and expanding that this summer. We ran a networking/mentoring event for graduate students in May 2022 and we expect to run more of that sort of thing next year too. New in 2023, we’re going to run a workshop aimed specifically at undergraduates and early-stage graduate students about planning a professional career in anthropology. And, as available, online mentoring workshops aimed at specific skills and techniques will be offered to all SAS members interested in improving their skillsets.
One major upcoming project for the latter half of 2023 will be to fundraise earnestly to increase our student award fund, to ensure that we are able to give out six awards per year (our H. Russell Bernard paper prizes and travel grants) in perpetuity. You should expect to hear more about this fundraising campaign, which will be both within SAS but also extend outside it with AAA support.
We’re looking forward to seeing folks in March in Cincinnati in conjunction with the SfAA. But (and it feels almost silly to raise it) it’s now to the Fall meetings in Toronto with the AAA that we’re looking already. It is not too soon to be thinking about panels, and our program committee will be reaching out actively to seek panels that can be sponsored or co-sponsored by SAS. Our aim is for our footprint at the Toronto meetings to be larger than ever as we aim to spread the work about SAS and its activities.
Other than that, the next communication you’ll likely be getting from us is about our 2023 election. But I’ll leave that for a separate time and for our nominations committee to handle.
All the best,
Steve
Stephen Chrisomalis (he/him)
Professor of Anthropology, Wayne State University
President, Society for Anthropological Sciences
3019 FAB, 656 W. Kirby, Detroit, MI 48202
chris...@wayne.edu