Comparing the Situations of Anthropologists Around the World

This document was created by the World Council of Anthropological Associations Task Force “Making Anthropology Global,” consisting of Gonzalo Diaz 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 the year 2022, 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 Science Citation Index on promotion practices for anthropologists in our different societies; but 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 is the document we have come up with. The chief limitation of this document is that it covers a small range of societies, albeit from a wide geographic range around the world. It is also limited by the fact that different members of the task force joined at different times, leading to some degree of inconstistency in the data presented. We hope that in subsequent versions of this document, we can cover many more societies, to arrive at a full portrayal of the situations of anthropologists everywhere in the world.

We look forward to your comments on this document!