Category: Linguistics

Every year, for the past several years, I’ve been tracking the number of jobs listed on the American Anthropological Association job postings as of September 26. That date is somewhat arbitrary and I chose it for historical reasons, but a slightly different date wouldn’t really change much with the overall trends. As a proxy for the health of the job market in anthropology, though, the AAA listings are ideal, since, at least historically, most tenure-stream positions in the discipline get listed there (but see below). So here we have it, including the 2012 figure:

2006: 190
2007: 186
2008: 168
2009: 78
2010: 112
2011: 117
2012: 109

While this looks like a slight decrease from last year, I actually think that actually there are around the same number of jobs, or possibly even trending slightly up, for several reasons:

First, there are definitely fewer postdocs or nationally-advertised one-year positions listed on the AAA site than in the past.    In the past, upwards of 20% of jobs posted were postdocs or visiting positions or jobs outside the academy; this year, fewer than 10% of the posted jobs are non-tenure-track.  So that’s a good sign.

Second, I’ve noticed a lot more institutions posting tenure-track anthropology jobs on more general sites (like the Chronicle of Higher Ed or Inside Higher Ed) rather than the AAA.  One possibility is that this may reflect a decline in the AAA’s prestige, but I don’t think that’s too likely.  Alternately, I’ve heard that the their AAA’s job listings are quite pricey, so maybe they’re just getting priced out of the market. 

Third, my sense (anecdotal, admittedly) is that while formerly many if not most jobs were posted in September, now lots of tenure-track positions get posted in October or later.  This may partly be because deans/provosts don’t approve searches as early, although I’ve heard that jobs in English lit are decidedly up already by this point, which would work against that idea.  More significantly, anthropology departments are definitely less likely in the past to interview candidates at the November annual meetings (relying on Skype or phone interviews instead), because of the cost of national searches and the ease of video interview.  Thus, positions can be advertised later and with a later closing date.   This will be confirmed or refuted within a few weeks as we see how many new postings come in October.

Check out this fascinating trailer for a forthcoming documentary: Chasing Voices: The Story of John Peabody Harrington.  Harrington was one of the most enigmatic and interesting anthropological linguists of the 20th century and a recorder of data on hundreds of California languages.   Obviously most of us don’t do work quite like this anymore, collecting and documenting virtually for its own sake, but you can’t possibly dismiss its value.   I will be interested to see how much his ex-wife, the anthropologist Carobeth Laird, whose memoir Encounter with an Angry God (1975) recounts much about their troubled marriage and Harrington’s own troubled personality, features in this new film.    I know of Harrington’s work most directly not through his work on California, but from his ethnographic comments on modern Maya numeration (Harrington 1957), published late in his life.  Martha Macri at UC Davis is the PI of an NSF-funded project on his life and work.

(H/T: Mr. Verb)

Harrington, John P. 1957. Valladolid Maya enumeration. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 164, no. 54, pp. 241-278. Washington: United States Government Printing Office.

Laird, Carobeth. 1975. Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of My Life with John Peabody Harrington. Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press.