AE Forum: Are Men Missing? Provocation Wedding bell blues: Marriage, missing men, and matrifocal follies Evelyn Blackwood In this article, I revisit debates about so-called matrifocal societies as a way to critique the centrality of heteronormative marriage and family in anthropology. Using gender as a tool of analysis, I argue that anthropologists have relied on the trope of the dominant heterosexual man, what I call the ‘‘Patriarchal Man,’’ to create and sustain concepts of ‘‘marriage’’ and ‘‘family.’’ By examining the discourse on matrifocality in studies of Afro-Caribbean and Minangkabau households, I show how it is the ‘‘missing man,’’ the dominant heterosexual man, who is the key to the construction and perpetuation of the matrifocal concept and, by extension, the motor of marriage, family, and kinship. This fixity on the dominant heterosexual man has led anthropologists to misrecognize other forms of relatedness as less than or weaker than heteronormative marriage. I suggest that, rather than positing a foundational model for human sociality, intimacy, or relatedness, researchers look for webs of meaningful relationships in their historical and social specificity. Commentaries Good-bye to all that Ellen Lewin Text, subtext, and context: Strategies for reading alliance theory Roger N. Lancaster Missing men Marilyn Strathern Marriage today John Borneman Replacing heteronormative views of kinship and marriage Louise Lamphere Diagnosing difference: Anthropology’s heteronormativity Tom Boellstorff The king is dead; long live the queen! Michael G. Peletz Rejoinder The specter of the Patriarchal Man Evelyn Blackwood Currencies and Circulation Cobo and tabua in Fiji: Two forms of cultural currency in an economy of sentiment Andrew Arno Cultural currency, defined in performance terms, is a highly specific medium for the deployment of sentiment in community life, and it can be usefully compared with varieties of material currency. Sentiment, as a cultural system, is an intellectual rather than a material property, and, like all property, it is defined by social relationships and obligations. Cultural currencies are performances that are constrained in use by meaning and identity, rather than by physical possession. Research on the cobo and tabua in Fiji represents an ethnographic case study of cultural currency that has implications for investigating the relationships among culture, sentiment, property, and mode of production generally. Moonshine, money, and the politics of liquidity in rural Russia Douglas Rogers In many areas of rural Russia after socialism, moonshine serves as a local currency. In this article, I trace the intersecting circuits of moonshine, rubles, labor, and U.S. dollars in a Russian town to outline an approach to exchange that concentrates on the politics of liquidity—conflicts and inequalities rooted in the relative degrees of exchangeability associated with different transactables. I explore emerging axes of stratification after socialism at several junctures: between husbands and wives; among units of extended families; between moonlighters and their employers; and, through an analysis of ruble–dollar exchanges and Russia’s “August crisis” of 1998, between rural households and international currency speculators. Of songs and signs: Audiocassette poetry, moral character, and the culture of circulation in Yemen Flagg Miller A problematic of authorial subjects, character (tibac) has long provided a generative reflexive template in Yemeni textual practice. As contemporary vernacular poets and singers consider the benefits and costs of an audio-recording industry for the integrities of political speakers, they use a graphic alienation inherent to a trope of character to articulate moral ambivalences over, and expressive possibilities of, authorial iteration. In this article, I propose a framework for considering the moral entailments of a culture of circulation. Moving Bodies, Rethinking Places Racialized bodies, naturalized classes: Moving through the city of Salvador da Bahia Cecilia McCallum In this article, I describe racialization processes in Brazil’s third-largest urban center, Salvador da Bahia, focusing on a broadly defined field of social practice. In a cross-class ethnographic portrait of the city, I examine the situated, embodied production of meanings about the body, as subjects move through urban space and time. I trace the emergence of racialization from residents’ microhistorical passages through the metropolis as these sediment into a shared, if partial, knowledge about difference and identity. I argue that it is such knowledge, borne by subjects as they ceaselessly reconstruct themselves, that grounds the mutual constitution of whiteness and of blackness in the city. Further, these processes generate knowledge of the naturalization of class. Thus, if a uniting factor underlies the diversity of discourses circulating in the city, it is the embodied by-product of subjective experience. Tourism–terrorism: The landscaping of consumption and the darker side of place Sally Ann Ness Tourism destinations are increasingly subject to locational forms of violence that enable certain conceptualizations of terrorism. This enabling is undermined to some extent when touristic landscaping is understood from a phenomenological perspective and the darker side of its placelike character is illuminated. Touristic landscapes are capable of producing injurious, traumatic forms of disemplacement via their consumption-oriented spatializing of preexisting cultural places. One Philippine luxury destination, Pearl Farm Beach Resort, a target of locational violence in 2001, illustrates how the landscaping of tourist destinations can serve to embed and to signify potential sources of locational violence. Buying a better witch doctor: Witch finding, neoliberalism, and the development imagination in the Taita Hills, Kenya James H. Smith In this article, I examine the efforts of a Kenyan community to make sense of, and to act on, structural transformations associated with economic and political liberalization and globalization. To locate the sources of its conjoined moral and economic decline, the community employed the witch finder Maji Marefu to expose the real circuits of power and abuse underlying the false appearances of everyday life, thus making the institutions and practices long associated with “development” real again through the ritualized public exposure of new forms of witchcraft. Maji Marefu’s “movement” sought to revitalize institutions that were iconic of an earlier model of development, coming to life in the vacuum that a retreating, downsized state left behind. Yet Maji Marefu ultimately came to epitomize the foreign vices he was hired to rid the community of, and the state and church were revitalized to intervene on the citizenry’s behalf so as to control this “criminal” menace. Place making and place breaking: Migration and the development cycle of community in colonial Mexico Jonathan D. Amith Although scholars increasingly recognize that community survival depends on ongoing processes of renovation and innovation, and not simply on the persistence of past identities into the present, the historical processes of community formation and fragmentation in colonial situations is seldom documented. In this article, I examine both the tactical engagement of indigenous peasant migrants with the colonial Mexican state over spatial rights and the migrants’ emergent sense of place in a newly settled locale. I suggest that place making involves place breaking, and I seek to add a diachronic dimension to understanding of indigenous societies and identity politics.