Annual meetings of one sort or another are part of the ritual cycle of academic culture. Normally, these are of two distinct structural types: the disciplinary, in which the participants are of a specific group such as anthropologists, historians, political scientists, sociologists, as well as those being enculturated; and the interdisciplinary, devoted to a specific theme or geographical area, in which members and prospective members of the specific disciplines concerned participate. In the second category we may place the annual meeting of the (American) African Studies Association.