To Wit: Joke Reviews from Anthropology News

By: Lee Drummond, Center for Peripheral Studies

In some of his more relaxed work, Umberto Eco provides a series of hilarious “joke reviews” -- imagined critiques by publishers’ editors that, had they been heeded, would have altered the landscape of belles lettres. James Joyce’s manuscript of Ulysses, for instance, is taken to task for its run-on sentences that pile image upon image until even the most diligent reader (namely, the stuffed shirt doing the review) loses track. Joyce’s reviewer recommends a good grammar-check program and expert editorial assistance, followed perhaps by psychiatric help. Here are a couple of joke reviews crafted for anthropologists.

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Revise and Resubmit I

1) Editor’s review of ms, “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” by Charles Darwin.

Dear Charles,(I do hope I can use this familiar term of address, particularly considering all the

years we’ve corresponded on the subject of your manuscript.)First, I do want to thank you for your Herculean efforts in pulling your

voluminous manuscript together in such short order. I’m sure that your good friends and esteemed colleagues at the Royal Society will arrange for a précis version of it to appear in their Proceedings in ample time to quiet the upstart claims of that uncouth Mr. Wallace to whom you allude several times in your last letter to me.

On the matter of the book-length ms, however, I am sorry to report that the several reviewers to whom I’ve sent it have now written back with very serious reservations, which I now have the unhappy task of communicating to you. Their criticisms apply in rather sweeping terms to the substance, style and scientific merit of the manuscript.

As regards style, which may seem a frivolous matter to you, I assure you that it is a very real concern for all of us in the publishing trade. Living as a gentleman in the country as you have, you may be unaware of the demands of the London reading public, which forms the great majority of our market. All reviewers commented on the unrelenting prolixity of your writing, finding it a great distraction to your argument (one was so forthright as to report that he often found himself nodding off with the ms in hand). Another, particularly detail-oriented reviewer reported that one sentence, about pigeons as it happens, runs to 178 words. I realize that in our correspondence you have mentioned that the present ms in but a small portion of your actual work. Be that as it

may, however, I must urge that any revision we entertain must be greatly reduced and edited to no more than half its present size. Our readers demand accessibility; our budget forbids great tomes. So there you have it.

On the matter of the substance of the argument, two very distinguished reviewers have raised grave claims that I feel you really must address. Both note that the phenomenon of natural selection which occupies the central place in your theory is hardly discussed in the voluminous case material you provide. Instead, you provide (too) copious detail on domestic varieties: sheep, cattle, and, of course, the ever-present pigeon. These reviewers ask how you can possibly claim to have identified a (highly controversial) regularity of the natural world by confining yourself for the most part to English domestic breeds? True enough, there are those intriguing finches from the Islands of Galapagos, but on that score I must interject an editor’s concern: As with the matter of style, I am convinced that our readership will be hardly more interested in the doings of foreign sparrows than in the business of breeding cows, sheep, and, yes, pigeons. For us to look favourably on a revision, I feel it should leave out most of the material on domestic breeds and concentrate instead on rather more impressive creatures -- lions, tigers, elephants, the remarkable gorilla. I am sure our readership will be much more attracted by discussions of these arresting species. In addition, I would think that the habits of these large, dramatic, and frankly dangerous animals would strengthen an argument of yours that we here at the Press would very much like to see brought forward: the theme of “Survival of the Fittest.” We are sure you will appreciate the morally uplifting effect such an emphasis will bring to your work, coming as it will at a time when England’s citizens must display resolve in the face of increasingly restive colonial populations.

Finally, a word regarding the scientific basis or merit of the work. An eminent biologist given the ms to review has proffered a most difficult and unsettling observation: Although you claim that species vary immensely over time and space, with one somehow transmuting into another time and time again, nowhere in the ms do you essay the slightest account of the mode or mechanism whereby those changes occur. Apart from the highly specialized matter of domestic breeding, there is little documentation of actual variation from one species to another over time. Nor, again, and even for domestic breeds, is there any suggestion as to how all this may occur. Our biologist reviewer was uncharitable enough to suggest that some magical transformation could just as well figure into your theory as the wholly ill-defined process of natural selection to which you ascribe.

In consideration of these points, I fear we have no alternative but to ask for a completely redone ms, along the lines suggested here. If that is unfeasible, then I am afraid the Press must thank you for your great efforts but politely reject it for publication.

Yours Most Cordially,Lewelyen St. John-Smythe,Editor-In-Chief

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See below:

Revise and Resubmit II

2) Editor’s review of article ms, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” by Clifford Geertz.

From the Office of the Editor-in-Chief, American Anthropologist

Dear Professor Geertz,I want to thank you for your patience during the lengthy review process of your

article manuscript. As I acknowledged in our recent phone conversation, six months does seem an excessive time for a reviewer to take over a fifty-page ms, but you must appreciate that as Editor I am dependent on scholars whose schedules I cannot control.

That said, I am writing to report that I now have in hand all reviews I requested and that I have studied them all carefully. As you will note from the enclosed copies, the five reviews contain highly diverse recommendations, making my task as Editor especially difficult. After careful consideration of all reviewers’ comments, however, I must inform you that I cannot accept the article for publication in its present form, and must instead urge you to revise and resubmit, taking into account in particular the critical remarks of reviewers 4 and 5.

Please be assured that I do like the article and feel it would have a place in AA if you could revise it along the lines suggested below. That the article has merit is evidenced in the remarks of reviewers 1 and 2, both of whom recommended acceptance: “recommend publication as is” (reviewer 1); and “this lively and lucid essay is worthy of AA and the AA of it” (reviewer 2).

Those positive remarks, however, need to be weighed against the serious objections raised by the other three reviewers, which I feel it my obligation to support in requesting a revision.

Reviewer 3 is the least critical of the three, writing that the style of the essay is “too casual” and “not suited to the scholarly requirements of a major journal such as AA.” Reviewer 3 suggests that in its present form the essay would be an acceptable contribution to a somewhat lower-profile publication, which you might then rework for possible future resubmission to AA. S/he proposes that you submit the piece as it stands to Occasional Papers of Central Kansas State Teachers’ College, where s/he is confident it would be accepted.

Reviewers 4 and 5 raise much more critical objections to the ms, objections which I find are well-founded and must be dealt with in a thorough-going revision. Reviewer 4 observes that “the argument is highly philosophical, relying on anecdote rather than on any substantive empirical data.” This reviewer is deeply troubled, as I confess I am, that you base your call for an entirely new direction in anthropological theory on a fragment from one of your field journals, which itself is not a record of events you observed but instead notes on your conversation with an eighty-year old man about an incident he was involved in fifty-six years previously. Reviewer 5 takes up this problem from a different angle, suggesting that much of your anecdotal discussion of eye winking and its “interpretation” adds nothing to an established and on-going research program on

cognition and learning within evolutionary psychology. That you do not cite that literature or tie your discussion to the issue of cognition leads reviewer 5 to conclude that the ms’s contents are “outdated, poorly argued, and a dead-end approach that will not advance anthropological science – definitely not AA material.”

In the face of these strong and, I find, substantive criticisms, I must ask you to prepare a thorough revision of the ms if you would like it to go out for a second review process. Failing that, I would have to reject the ms on the ground that in its present form it will not contribute to the future development of anthropological theory and method.

Sincerely,******************* Editor-in-ChiefAmerican Anthropologist