Individual skill

amanthro-literature-positioning

Use when positioning an American Anthropologist (AA) manuscript against the literature so it reads as a four-field contribution. AA readers span sociocultural, archaeology, biological, and linguistic anthropology, so the paper must engage the conversations they expect and decenter a US/Anglophone-only canon. Stakes the contribution and citational politics; it does not write the lit review.

American-Anthropologist-Skills/skills/amanthro-literature-positioning/SKILL.md

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# Literature Positioning (amanthro-literature-positioning)

At AA, positioning is not throat-clearing — it is how a four-field readership sees the gap and the move.
The goal is to place the paper in a **live anthropological conversation** that a reader outside your
subfield can recognize, while practicing the **citational politics** AA explicitly values (lifting
marginalized voices and knowledges, not only the usual canon).

## When to trigger

- Drafting or revising the introduction and the "contribution" paragraph
- A reviewer said you "missed obvious work" or "don't engage the debate"
- Your subfield literature is solid but the paper doesn't connect to anthropology broadly
- You need to distinguish your contribution from the closest prior ethnographies/studies
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