This issue of American Ethnologist inaugurates a new era in AAA publishing. It is the first issue of a AAA journal to be produced in partnership with the University of California Press. It also represents the first step toward the full-fledged development of AnthroSource, the ambitious electronic anthropological resource project-spearheaded by AAA Publications Director Susan Skomal, AAA Executive Director Bill Davis, and the entire AAA Executive Board-that will greatly enhance the availability of AAA's scholarly journals to anyone with access to the Internet. We at AE are delighted to serve as the official "guinea pigs" in this transition.

A prominent feature of this issue is its visual content. Although many anthropologists are concerned with how people read or consume visual images of women, poor people, and non-Europeans, many of us also work with images, we care about those who produce them, use them, want them, and appear in them, and we problematize their use, their sale, and their display. Not to include visuals in our publications because we fear how others may see them or use them is to draw an unfair and unrealistic distinction between the visual and the textual, one that most readers of AE know fails to work, given the long process of selfcritique that characterized social and cultural anthropology in the last two decades of the 20th century. Textbook publishers have long solicited photos to appear in massmarketed introductory anthropology textbooks, and all introductory textbooks I have seen have them. Regular scholarly books in anthropology are more mixed in this regard. Photos accompany quite a number of them, but in many cases in recent years the absence of illustrations has been noteworthy, and I personally know, as many AE readers probably also do, authors who have thought long and hard about whether to include photos in their books. In my present position as editor of AE, I am struck by how many authors do not include visual materials when they submit manuscripts for our consideration. Although few provide long explanations citing ethical, political, personal, or even economic considerations, I sense the concerns between the lines.

Indeed, I have long shared many of those concerns. But the content of this issue is a reminder that we, as contemporary anthropologists and anthropologically oriented readers, must engage with the issues head-on, not by stepping back and disengaging altogether. Art production, regulation, experimentation, and consumption demand our attention and often involve us as researchers, admirers, critics, and buyers. Whose intellectual property should be recognized and protected, and whose side does one take when the work itself is claimed, challenged, sold, copied, collected, and experimented with? The producers of images consumed as "art" and of objects explicitly made for middle-class, urban markets largely located in prosperous countries may or may not be "saints," may or may not care about cultural nationalism, may or may not participate in Fourth World activism, and may or may not be overly concerned with how their images-their dreams, their experiments, their productions-are perceived, used, consumed, debated, romanticized, or dismissed in those national or multinational markets. But visual productions are still their creations. We must make a point of looking at the imagery, reacting to it, and thinking about it and its creators, even when our own anthropological task is less clear. Indeed, as the articles in this issue show, especially Fred Myers's spring 2003 presidential address to the American Ethnological Society in Providence, Quetzil Castaneda's experimental article on art and ethnography, and Walter Little's analysis of Maya art sellers' complex positions on Maya nationalism, knee-jerk understandings of art producers and distributors in populations with active politicized indigenous movements may lead us astray. Is Walter Little being disloyal when he argues that many Mayans whose work keeps them constantly in touch with outsiders are not, in fact, really supporters of Mayan nationalism? Is Fred Myers walking a fine line when he fails to condemn the non-Aboriginal artist who paints in the style that has come to be thought of as Australian Aboriginal? Has Quetzil Castaneda simply crossed the line when his art project in Guatemala actually commissions and recruits artworks and even takes them on the road? The authors in the section "Contemporary Art Worlds and Their Productive (In) stabilities" write about artists and art dealers, some of whose beliefs and practices may raise eyebrows. The artists and the three authors who write about them, then, force us to focus on artists' choices, on the contexts in which they make them, and on the quite plausible reasons for artists' actions.

The "Performativity" section extends the discussion by focusing on popular forms not usually considered part of anyone's real "art worlds)"-popular cinema, Christian worship, literary fiction reading, and cultural self-depictions-and by suggesting ways to appreciate challenges to state authority as well as to textual authority, inherited knowledge, and hyperprivileged aesthetic styles. The contemporary contexts for these explorations range from middle-class, middle-aged England (Adam Reed) to Ghana's new public sphere (Birgit Meyer), the contentious Brazilian interior (Suzanne Oakdale), and a Zimbabwean Christian community that purposely does not read the Bible (Matthew Engelke). The issues here are performative in multiple senses of the word and on multiple scales. Two articles engage with performance in the more common sense of the word. Suzanne Oakdale persuasively argues that local frames of reference need to be "considered in assessing the significance and meaning of cultural performances, even when the staging of indigenous culture is performed principally for a nonlocal audience,"and Matthew Engelke offers a conceptualization and valuing of the performative itself in a particular Zimbabwean religious community.

A larger scale is evident in Birgit Meyer's analysis, and a more personal one in Adam Reed's. When Birgit Meyer argues that a new public sphere has emerged in Ghana that can no longer be fully controlled by the state and is "all the more indebted to Pentecostalism,"Pentecostalism appears as a liberal force performing democratization and a particular kind of self-labeled modernization. And when Adam Reed drains us to the performance of solitude and simultaneous sociability that characterizes the members of the Henry Williamson Society in England, he shows us something more intimate, more individual, which demands a reconsideration of the attribution of agency, especially in thinking about art, artists, and the products they create that others may cherish.

I end this issue with two special essays that come at intimacy from very different angles. Both cover engaging, useful books, concerned with reproductive technologies (Janelle Taylor) and domestic violence (Madelaine Adelman) and the challenges those issues present to us as citizens and analysts. Feminist analysis is both explored and extended here, critiqued where necessary, and extolled for how far it has come since the early 1970s. I have chosen to present these two pieces more as position papers than as simple review essays because their aim is to propose directions for further engagement and research just as much as it is to engage with the books they treat as their primary subject matter. What can feminist anthropological scholarship become, what should it become as it explores the knotty problems presented by the definitional expansions and debates concerning "domestic violence" and the technological expansions and debates concerning "reproductive technology?"

Creativity clearly occurs in multiple arenas and flourishes with varying degrees of success-in recognized art worlds, belief worlds, science worlds, activist worlds, and professional worlds. The essays in this issue compel us to foreground the creative and the performative and to ask what happens when we do so, whether or not we see ourselves as personally or professionally drawn to the arts. I believe they address important aspects of authority, intentionality, resistance, judgment, scale, audience, involvement, and commitment that are of wide concern to readers of AE. But it is also my hope that a fruitful crossreading of these essays will lead readers elsewhere-including to greater degrees of playfulness, experimentation, and thinking outside the box.