I write this on July 4, more by accident than by design, and, hence, contemplated not mentioning the date in this Foreword. But I realize how odd that would feel to me, especially given that this issue will, in all likelihood, reach subscribers and AES members right around September 11 and that, in it, we have chosen to feature a set of articles in our second AE Forum under the rubric of "Grounding September 11."

Time, sentiment, imaging, and memory. How can one ignore them in connection with September 11 or fail to contemplate them on July 4? Any rejection of the current relevance of these topics would seem forced; any act of embracing or affirming them is understandable, even if, as scholars, we question our own ability to approach them with judgment and wisdom of a more distant, learned, analytic sort.

Geoff White argues in this issue that anthropologists have been relatively quiet in print concerning September 11. Of course, there have been notable exceptions, among them Fran Mascia-Lees and Susan H. Lees’s choice to include a set of reactions by anthropologists to September 11 in the September 2002 issue of the American Anthropologist. But nearly two years have passed since that issue went to press, and many of the reflections and commentaries it contained were written in the weeks and months following September 11, 2001. Has enough time passed to allow the destruction of the World Trade Center and the deep emotions connected to it to become an object of anthropological analysis? Are there specific insights from anthropological training, theory, and practice to be derived? Should one care whether one discipline does a better job of engaging this momentous event than another? Does anthropology have a particular responsibility for such engagement, forgoing any sense that the topic remains too sacred to subject to critical scrutiny?

Will the articles published here definitely settle these issues? I ask the questions and invite thoughtful debate and responses. As Marita Sturken, Setha Low, and Geoff White prepared revised versions of their original articles for publication, they had to deal with reviewers who asked some of these questions I have just posed, and I, as editor, had to decide how far to push for responses.

An Associated Press story ("Construction Starts Sunday on WTC Site") in yesterday’s local paper (the Iowa City Press-Citizen) reminded me once again of these three essays and of the societal and professional contexts in which they were written. "Nearly three years after the twin towers fell," the article’s first line reads, "a 20-ton block of granite will be set in place Sunday to mark the official start of construction on the 1,776-foot tower that will rise on the site of the World Trade Center." Readers are told that the height, in feet, is deliberate—"a height meant to symbolize the year of America’s independence," that the building’s name is the Freedom Tower, and that it will be "the tallest skyscraper in the world." Evoking July 4, 1776, aiming to arouse an emotional response, and channeling much of that response through imagery, the AP news item had readers visualize the towers falling, a new building rising on "the ruins of a parking garage," and progress being visible in a few months, even though the item claims that it will take five years to complete the project. Amid the temporal evocation of palpable emotional memory, readers find references to feuding architects and a recent trial over insurance proceeds.

Indeed, the AP story was not a scholarly intervention, but its journalistic struggles to find a proper tone and style of coverage of September 11–related events may not be all that different from anthropologically inflected ones. What, after all, are appropriate data in thinking about September 11, how much sentiment should one acknowledge and reveal, and how central should the sharp articulation of an analytic argument or theoretical point actually be? Feuding architects, public debate, and legal proceedings will appeal to some of us as good sources of data, but others may find the focus on this type of aftermath disrespectful, and still others may consider these phenomena to be secondary events that keep scholars from addressing crucial issues of personal, municipal, national, or international mourning, culpability, or complicity.

In choosing to include Eyal Ben-Ari’s informative and insightful Review Essay on the U.S. military and militarization in this set of four articles for analysis and debate, I mean to highlight the question of context, not to limit it. Are U.S. military bases and direct action in the Middle East more or less appropriate as a context for considering September 11 than the visual memories of that day depicted by children in lower Manhattan, the visits of Japanese tourists to the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor before and after September 11, or the competing (and competitive) architectural visions (both U.S. and non-U.S.) of a 21st-century New York City skyline post–September 11? What if we draw on Annelise Riles’s insights about "Real Time" or Nurit Bird-David’s gentle reminder to scholars not to be taken in by all-too-familiar assumptions about the relevance of "the past?"

Are Joe Masco’s and Esra Özyürek’s articles here, highlighting visual imagery and their everyday, scientific, and institutional uses among U.S. nuclear scientists and among contemporary Turkish citizens, only useful in the most general sense as part of the necessary analytic context for understanding September 11, or is there a more direct relevance? Cannot the same be asked of Fei-wen Liu’s and Ana Mariella Bacigalupo’s explorations of people’s creative, if not altogether long-lasting, ways of expressing deep feelings of loss or fear or survival?

The articles I have chosen to include in this issue of AE in addition to those presented in the AE Forum section deserve other kinds of readings as well. Masco and Özyürek invite readers to notice imagery outside intentional artistic environments, both very high-tech and seemingly very low-tech. In reading those essays together, I invite readers to reflect on what arouses awe and reverence in local, national, institutional, and organizational settings, what sustains such reverence, and what undermines it. Likewise, I invite readers to read Riles’s and Bird-David’s essays back to back, to question how reliably, consistently, consciously, or productively anthropologically oriented analyses handle time, address time, or even notice time. Johannes Fabian and Eric Wolf may be widely read within professional anthropological circles, but with what impact and among which networks or communities of scholars and training? Has historicizing become too accepted or not accepted enough?

Lastly, I invite readers to read Liu and Bacigalupo together for the way these two discussions capture and analyze nonhegemonic practices of everyday life, sexuality, pain, sadness, and joy. Although gender and gender transgression (and transgression even within that the latter sphere) anchor these articles in provocative ways, I hope readers will remember these articles at least as much for the inventiveness and dedication—many would say agency—evident in their gripping accounts of people handling and expressing feelings.