Date: Mon, 01 Apr 1996 14:08:54 -0800

ASA statement on the CUP Affair

Several weeks ago, I invited colleagues to indicate their support for a motion of censure on the C.U.P., to be presented to the annual general meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth. A motion was duly formulated, and its terms - entirely consonant with the highly focused arguments made by Stephen Gudeman and Michael Herzfeld - were made known to the senior management and the Syndics of the C.U.P. At a meeting on 19th March with Cambridge colleagues in anthropology and archaeology, the Press committed themselves to a comprehensive review of their procedures in very largely the terms we had been seeking, and to consulting widely with expert and authoritative opinion in anthropology and beyond.

We therefore withdrew the motion of censure, and proposed the following amendment in its place. This was adopted by the Association which will also return to the matter at their 1997 annual meeting, both to consider the CUP review, and to approve a set of principles to be followed by the Association in comparable circumstances, should they arise again.

I am most grateful for the very many expressions of support given by subscribers to H-SAE. Your support has been of tremendous importance, and has manifestly weighed with the Press in persuading them to make these commitments. All anthropologists owe a great debt of gratitude to Stephen and Michael, both for their courage in pursuing their protest, and for the restrained, constructive and judicious ways in which they conducted it.

Tony Cohen.

"The undersigned, who are members of the ASA specialising in the anthropology of Europe, urge the ASA to express their support for the protest made by Stephen Gudeman and Michael Herzfeld, against the conduct of the C.U.P. in their consideration of the book, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood, by Anastasia Karakasidou. We recognise the proper concern which the C.U.P. has for the well-being of their staff in Greece and for other institutions in Greece associated with the University of Cambridge. However, we regret the Press's deviation from the normal procedures and considerations of academic publishing which has resulted in a process of decision-making inconsistent with the propagation of fine anthropological scholarship in general and of the anthropology of Europe in particular.

We endorse the efforts of Professors Gudeman and Herzfeld (our fellow members respectively of the Association and of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe) to contain the justifiable expressions of outrage against the Press by focusing their protest constructively on the procedures used by the Press for refereeing and adjudicating work submitted for publication. We welcome the commitment made on 19th March to our Cambridge colleagues by representatives of the Press to make the Press's processes of decision-making on manuscripts and projects submitted to them the subject of consultation with interested and expert learned bodies. We believe this process of consultation should result in an explicit undertaking by the Press to reinstitute the primacy of the criteria which normally govern publishing decisions in academic publishing houses."

Prof. A.P. Cohen,
Department of Social Anthropology,
University of Edinburgh.

Tel. 0131-650-3933
Fax. 0131-650-3945