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.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill amanthro-literature-positioning --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# 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 ## How AA wants the literature engaged 1. **Engage the conversation, not a citation pile.** Identify the live debate or open question your paper speaks to; cite the works that *constitute* it, including across subfields where relevant. 2. **Four-field legibility.** Satisfy specialists (you know the frontier) *and* a generalist reader — an archaeologist should follow a linguistic paper's stakes and vice versa. Spell out subfie
- When to trigger
- How AA wants the literature engaged
- Cross-subfield engagement (a distinctive AA demand)
- Anti-patterns
- Output format
- Engagement depth AA editors expect, by paper type
- Worked micro-example (illustrative)
- Calibration anchors (hedged)
- Supplementary resources
What does the amanthro-literature-positioning skill do?
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.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill amanthro-literature-positioning --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.