‘‘Culpability,’’ ‘‘Desire,’’ and ‘‘Discourse’’ are the headings I have given the three article groupings in this issue of AE. "Culpability," "Desire," and "Discourse" are the headings I have given the three article groupings in this issue of AE. Through them, I mean to evoke powerful connections I believe readers will find worth making as they read the selections in each section. Of course, each article is but an entry point to debates and explorations that draw many of us in from different angles and different regional or topical expertise. Each, however, seems especially timely as I write this foreword in March 2004.

In the section I call "Culpability," Nandini Sundar, Charles Briggs, and John and Jean Comaroff write about situations, violations, and processes on three separate continents. Yet, they all engage matters of blame, offering not just case studies but also ethical and theoretical exhortations. Finger-pointing is described, but it is also implied—at local, institutional, regional, and broader systemic geopolitical and economic levels—and in each case, the reader is led to confront the crucial need to track issues that do not always succeed in getting our scholarly attention: the discourses of blame, the emotions that fuel them, and the undeniably violent actions that affect the lives of many. These are articles that I find hard to put down but that I also find hard to read. They require a willingness to experience vulnerability and debate complicity and to track both on the part of groups, institutions, societies, and organizations. They may also engender debate, even heated debate, among readers. These are essays that invite soul-searching just as much as analysis and critique.

"Desire" juxtaposes David Lipset’s careful, thoughtful, but, no doubt, controversial article on Papua New Guinean modernity with Florence Babb’s consideration of analyses of nonnormative sexuality. As countries on both sides of the North Atlantic debate the moral high ground and the role of "traditional" marriage in self-respecting societies, both of these articles will be useful to think with. Lipset is firm in arguing for practices and understandings between men and women that are very modern but that are not propelled by notions of romance. His piece is not intended as a theory, or even a description, of all desire, courtship, or processes that lead to marriage, but it calls attention to two common, persistent assumptions. One is that marriage in "modern" societies entails (or should entail) romance, the other that it is sad when marriages fail because spouses have fallen "out of love." Is it too mischievous to contemplate that many AE readers might themselves be members of modern societies without romance, indeed, societies much more like the one Lipset examines here than may be imagined by those invested in defining civilization in a particular way? Consider this possibility in the light of Babb’s thoughtful critique of contemporary books on nonheterosexual sexual desire and the struggles of activists, detractors, participants, and analysts to determine how to approach it. Should the focus of attention be desire or marriage, love or sex, entitlement or resources, the etiology of difference or the consequences of difference? It is not clear how central any of these aspects should be, as evidenced by the gay marriage phenomenon that began in San Francisco in February, which highlights love, commitment, and romance over desire itself.

"Discourse" brings together articles that foreground talk, its perceptions, its practices, and its ideologies as structuring and revealing social, economic, and political phenomena, and not just as data. Intriguingly, all three authors zoom in on diversity, not in the coded sense of that word in the contemporary United States, but in memory, in usage, and in ideology. For Susan Philips and Andrea Smith, the compelling question is one of organization: in one case, of ideologies of language in and for nationalism in the Tongan courts, and, in the other case, of memories through language that structures, limits, but can still reveal great diversity of experience of discrimination, assimilation, tension, and conflict in social life. Whereas Smith works with memories of French-based, former North Africans who were more a part of French colonial society than local Algerian society during the preindependence era, Michèle Koven makes us think about contemporary France’s own structures of discrimination, even in the wake of European unification or, perhaps, especially, because of it. Where does Portugal fit in? Who and what is really European, and how do structural economic as well as legal and linguistic inequalities shape the experience of those Europeans who fall somewhere between the truly privileged and the truly disadvantaged? As the European Union expands both south and east, whose memories, whose ideologies, whose languages, whose legal systems, and whose social experiences will the rest of us notice when we praise or criticize Europe or, perhaps, especially, when so many people in so many different parts of the world invoke "the West"?

[language practices, immigration, return migration, transnationalism, language ideologies, Europe, France, Portugal]