This issue’s AE Forum: Are Men Missing? is a lively discussion of contemporary anthropological approaches to family, marriage, household, and the role of men in myriad social contexts. As I read it, it focuses on what Evelyn Blackwood believes to be the continuing intellectual complicity of much anthropological thinking and writing in the privileging of men at the expense not just of women but also of other models and frames of understanding social and economic forms of organization. This proposition is discussed, debated, and defended with useful intensity here. The possibility that it may even be true in some, or possibly most, of the scholarship on heterosexuality and heteronormativity, in queer theory, or in feminist rethinkings of kinship and marriage is enough to arouse the passion and ire of a number of our commentators and to lead to a detailed articulation of the theoretical or conceptual state of early 21st-century anglophone anthropology. I asked 11 colleagues I thought likely to have important reactions to Blackwood’s provocative essay to consider submitting written commentaries for publication here. I was delighted to have seven of them accept my invitation, most of them immediately and some of them within what seemed like minutes. The speed and, in some cases, length of their engagement with Blackwood’s essay are worth noting, especially because the respondents are among the busiest and most senior scholars in our profession. Represented in this group are experts on Indonesia, gay/lesbian/sexuality studies scholars, feminist scholars, and kinship and marriage scholars. Some clearly applaud Blackwood’s position, some come close to hating it, some wonder if Blackwood is saying anything really new or not yet resolved, and some suggest ways she has not gone far enough. It is a wonderful AE Forum, Blackwood’s feisty and articulate “Rejoinder” included! “Currencies and Circulation” brings people trained as linguistic anthropologists (Andrew Arno and Flagg Miller) together with an economically oriented colleague (Douglas Rogers). Audiocassette poetry, ritualized hand gestures, and moonshine all fit here, and neither “currency” nor “circulation” will ever look the same again. Arno expands the notion of “currency” to include cultural currency, in a move meant to extend, complement, and critique much contemporary use of the notion of “cultural capital.” Rogers sharpens and modifies the notion of “liquidity,” as used by economists but also among contemporary anthropologists increasingly working on the financial markets. Miller sees major implications for understandings of authorship in ongoing changes in media usage and technology, especially for orally circulating genres of art and communication. Although his careful analysis details the circulation of audiocassette poetry in and around Yemen, Miller, like Arno and Rogers, illustrates how the fact of circulation ought to be examined more generally and how it probably works in many other cases simultaneously as a culture of circulation and “an economy of sentiment.” “Moving Bodies, Rethinking Places” concerns people coming and going. Some are long-time residents of a single metropolitan area, some are tourists and tourist seekers, some are migrants, and some are outsiders invited in as “helping professionals” (and then rejected) by residents of particular areas. I have enjoyed placing all four of these articles in one section here, rather than under more familiar topical headings such as “migration” or “race” or “tourism.” The juxtaposition of these four works focuses intellectual attention on issues of movement at a different level of analysis, and it allows American Ethnologist to showcase some of the importantly different ways in which movement is currently being examined in anthropology and in related scholarly communities. For example, a compelling phenomenological slant distinguishes Cecilia McCallum’s experimental article on racialized bodies and the relevance of space to the everyday experience of “race.” And a different kind of phenomenological engagement characterizes Sally Ann Ness’s exploration of “locational violence” and what she calls “the landscaping of consumption.” Much more visually oriented and constituted than McCallum’s, Ness’s article adopts a presentational style not usually associated with American Ethnologist but one that is highly evocative and appropriate given its message linking manufactured visuality with locational violence. Very different from both of these discussions in argument as well as in presentation is James Smith’s article on what he calls the “development imagination” at work in the Taita Hills in Kenya. Historically presented as an account of a particular kind of “witch hunt” drawing on the expertise of outsiders, Smith’s is largely an exploration of mixed reactions to neoliberalism and to the development professionals who convey the ideas, encourage the movement of goods and people, and promote rethinking of the social and economic organization of many places. And it is history itself—arguably a spatially rooted kind of diachrony—that stands out in Jonathan Amith’s article on “the tactical engagement of indigenous peasant migrants with the colonial Mexican state.” That the vast majority of Amith’s material required archival research on pre-19th-century Mexico is a reminder that good anthropologists ask questions that may only have answers if researchers think flexibly and carefully about where and how to seek them. Amith is right on when he argues that his exploration of “place breaking” “reveals the unstudied strategies and processes of place making in a colonial migrant community that bear relevance for indigenous struggles today.” I have dwelt here on the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical contributions of articles within the three sections I created for this issue, but I also want to add that clear (although quite unintentional) links might fruitfully be made between the second and third, and at least one intriguing way exists to see all three sections in conversation with each other. In retrospect, it occurs to me that I could have presented this whole February 2005 issue as a special issue on movement and circulation; after all, both “Currencies and Circulation” and “Moving Bodies, Rethinking Places” address movement and circulation—some articles more vividly showing the weightiness of location and some the breaking of that presumed or experienced weight of place. Here, readers get to feast on the movement, circulation, liquidity, sociality, translocation, landscaping, place making, place breaking, currency, and visuality of goods and people, genres and signs. And here we all get to ponder exactly how place matters amid all this movement and the expectations that people nearby or far away have of particular places. My last thought comes from contemplating all three sections of this issue together. Adding the AE Forum about “missing men” to the mix—in other words, focusing on what might arguably be called the question of tacit but enduring virifocality (my term inspired by Blackwood) in contemporary anthropology—leads me to think of presences and absences, how one conceptualizes them, and why. What, for example, counts as a presence and what as an absence? When is the movement of goods, ideas, signs, currencies, or people seen as a loss? When is such movement seen as a gain? When is it seen as a sharing, or as a co-optation, a conquest, an accumulation, or an absorption? When is it best seen as the normal state of affairs for large numbers of people for whom it is something neither good nor bad but, rather, just the way things are? And is this the way to consider intellectual virifocality, if Blackwood is indeed right? If one asks whether men are missing, does one ironically make men a presence, highlight their absence, or, as some will no doubt prefer to say, ensure their place as an absent presence?