Founded in 1902, the American Anthropological Association is the United States’s largest scholarly and professional organization of anthropologists. The Association is dedicated to advancing human understanding and applying this understanding to the world’s most pressing problems.

While 75 percent of AAA’s members are employed in higher education or are students of anthropology, about 25 percent of our members work in the public, private, and non-governmental sectors, beyond the academy. The Association is organized into 40 sections, each reflecting specialized domains of knowledge.

 

 

The Association is proud to belong to a number of inter-organizational collaborations, including the World Council of Anthropological Associations, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, the Consortium of Social Science Associations, the National Humanities Alliance, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

The first anthropological society in the US was the American Ethnological Society of New York, which was founded by Albert Gallatin and revived in 1899 by Franz Boas after a hiatus. 1879 saw the establishment of the Anthropological Society of Washington (which first published the journal American Anthropologist, before it became a national journal), and 1882 saw the American Association for the Advancement of Science established an anthropological section.

 

 

In 1901 the AES and ASW sent members to attend the meeting of the AAAS anthropologists in Chicago in which discussions continued and there was general agreement that a national society should be formed.  At its incorporation, it assumed responsibility for the journal American Anthropologist, created in 1888 by the Anthropological Society of Washington (ASW).

According to americananthro.org and en.wikipedia