Experimenting, improvising, compromising, and intervening? These words appear on the front cover of this issue as well as in the expanded versions of the titles given to the subgroupings I have created (“Experimenting with Ethics, Experimenting as Science,” “Improvising in and through Music,” “Compromising Sovereignty or Modeling It?” and “Intervening in Intimacy”). I intend both the dynamism that these verb forms convey and the built-in ambiguity of not specifying who is experimenting, who is improvising, who is compromising, and who is intervening. The groupings in this issue demand that we as readers ask who is doing what to whom and that we notice ambiguity and even productive tension. At least one axis of tension is apparent in each grouping, a tension that I want to retain for the reader. In “Experimenting,” for example, the question arises of who is doing the experimenting, not just what the experiments are about, what may or may not be experimental about a project, or what the consequences of an experiment might be for different segments of the world’s population in the near or distant future. Here, Michael Chibnik addresses a certain kind of experimentation currently being done by professional anthropologists (“Experimental Economics in Anthropology: A Critical Assessment”), whereas Adriana Petryna addresses experimentation being done outside of anthropology, specifically in the pharmaceutical industry’s clinical trials protocols and practices (“Ethical Variability: Drug Development and Globalizing Clinical Trials”). Readers may gravitate toward one article rather than the other for various reasons, but I urge reading both, back to back. For years, many anthropologists have found their comfort zone in their role as social critics, suspicious of those with the political or economic power to have disproportionate influence in the world, whether in anthropologists’ home societies or in those they have chosen to study with dedication and intensity. Since the last third of the 20th century, however, critique has often turned inward, to the admiration and exasperation of numerous colleagues and students. Those concerned that too much energy might still be devoted to critiques of anthropology by anthropologists might shy away from Chibnik’s review essay despite the author’s professional reputation as an economic anthropologist, not a poststructuralist, postcolonialist, or postmodernist. And those concerned that anthropologists might be devoting too much time to the critique of globalization, multinational corporations, or neoliberalism might shy away from Petryna’s article, expecting a straight critique of capitalism and its opportunistic strategies for moving capital, labor, goods, and markets. But I juxtapose them here to broaden the scope of both articles and of scholarly understanding of the issues they raise. I want to urge readers to ask questions about experimentation both within anthropology and outside it. By the time this issue is in print, a special AE Editor’s session on experimenting, featuring both Chibnik and Petryna, will have been held in San Diego at the April 7–10 Spring Conference of the American Ethnological Society. That session will ask whether social and cultural anthropology has abandoned experimentation beyond that in writing and visual representation, and what the positive and negative consequences of that abandonment might be. I hope this issue of AE will extend that discussion and lead readers to ask who is and is not experimenting, and whether recent outcries within the profession about experimentation in the field mean that experimentation is now largely discredited, if not actually tabooed, within most anthropological circles. In this era of heavy emphasis on human subjects review and safeguards, at least within U.S. universities, is an anthropological attitude, if not consensus, emerging about experimentation? Do anthropologists sense the existence of something Petryna calls “ethical variability” in the practice of other research communities, and do we seek to distance ourselves as anthropologists from it, or might “ethical variability” capture some aspects of past or present research practices within anthropology itself? Even if the question borders on the offensive, is it not important for the community of social and cultural anthropologists (and affiliated scholars) to contemplate the possibility that we might be more implicated than we want to be? And are we sure that heightened professional and institutional awareness of ethical concerns in research involving “human subjects” is a productive one? Chibnik and Petryna compel us to look carefully at what the current climate is actually producing, where, and by what ethical standards. “Improvising” focuses on music—its teachers, students, heroes, critics, canonizers, and writers. But it also focuses on learning to improvise, adopting improvisation, and illustrating the malleability of improvisation—for the sake of art, liberation, or national cohesiveness. The two articles paired here exemplify, and experiment with, improvisation as a learned form and a learned disposition. A productive tension arises in distinguishing between these two modalities, both for the world of music and for the world of scholarship, in general. Where is improvising valued, who is allowed to improvise, when is one deemed ready to improvise well, and what does that level of mastery enable and produce? In “The Soul Danced into the Body: Nation and Improvisation in Istanbul,” Rebecca Bryant reflects on her discovery that becoming the kind of person who can play the saz is much more valued in saz circles in Istanbul than is having the technical skills to play the saz or even knowing a particular repertoire. But what must one learn to become the kind of person who can play the saz or the kind of person who can play with tradition or the kind of person who can improvise within a cultural form? That this kind of improvising can be appealing and strategic is wonderfully illustrated by Michael Titlestad in “Jazz Discourse and Black South African Modernity, with Special Reference to ‘Matshikese.’ ” Partly a discussion of jazz discourse in South Africa as a style of thought and writing that enabled social liberation and the imagination of fundamental societal transformation, it is just as much about improvising itself. Here, too, improvising is not just something to write about but something to learn to do and to do well within a tradition. In Titlestad’s case, the subject matter consists of the jazzlike writings on jazz by a popular black South African columnist, but the structure of the article itself is the product of Titlestad’s own experiments with intellectual improvisation. “Compromising” here takes multiple senses. Some of these are more politically acceptable than others, or less likely to be controversial than others, but I urge readers to look for ways the courageous articles by Thomas Biolsi, Rhoda Kanaaneh, and Adán Quan that I include here all engage, demand, suggest, or compel a careful rethinking of sovereignty. Biolsi’s article, “Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle,” details four ways to understand (and to argue for) American Indian communities’ sovereignty, and most of them involve recognition of partial sovereignty, shared sovereignty, or, in my terms, mutually implicated sovereignty. How should one read his careful analysis and the data he offers? As documentation of a de facto compromise, of a compromised desire, or of a compromising position and, if so, whose? Adán Quan (“Through the Looking Glass: U.S. Aid to El Salvador and the Politics of National Identity”) focuses not only on those who could be seen as compromised—those Salvadorans working for and with U.S. aid organizations in El Salvador—but also on those who may be compromising the sovereignty of El Salvador, even when they see themselves as helping the Salvadoran people, not dominating them. The usefulness of Quan’s incisive yet diplomatic take here, sadly, looms much larger in the wake of the late December 2004 tsunami disaster and the enormous desire on the part of so many, rich and poor, governmental and nongovernmental organizations alike, to help. Should sovereignty be invoked in aid situations? Whose sovereignty is most at stake? Is sovereignty to be negotiated, to be overridden, or to be feared? Rhoda Kanaaneh’s article (“Boys or Men? Duped or ‘Made’? Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military”) intensifies these questions by focusing on Palestinian soldiers voluntarily serving in the Israeli army. Most readers will be very surprised to know that Palestinians (with Israeli citizenship) actually serve in the Israeli military and will read the article for its content. But it is what her discussion raises about taken-for-granted notions of sovereignty (even about more scholarly models of autonomy and sovereignty) that makes Kanaaneh’s article a good one to include in this section along with Biolsi’s and Quan’s. Are young Palestinian citizens of Israel traitors when they choose to join the army that most of their fellow Palestinians see as the army of the enemy, the oppressor, or at least the dominant force in the region? Is the Israeli army compromising the sovereignty of the State of Israel by allowing Palestinians to serve as soldiers in its midst? Are both sides compromising in the sense of making concessions for the sake of being practical, or are both compromising themselves in the sense of putting themselves in politically and socially vulnerable positions? Betrayal and suspicion are strong sentiments. Kanaaneh tackles the apparent breach of loyalty by asking how any Palestinian could compromise himself by serving in the Israeli army while maintaining a strong sense of Palestinianness. One can think of many parallels, past and present, and ask who is compromising what, whose sovereignty is reinforced and whose weakened, and who is being “duped” and who “made.” “Intervening” juxtaposes intriguing articles on intimate relations and those who intervene in them. Readers interested in love marriages and domestic relations will find the pairing of Edward Snajdr’s “Gender, Power, and the Performance of Justice: Muslim Women’s Responses to Domestic Violence in Kazakhstan” and Sara L. Friedman’s “The Intimacy of State Power: Marriage, Liberation, and Socialist Subjects in Southeastern China” provocative. But my hope is that most readers will read the articles for what they suggest about interventions and anthropological analyses of them. Much scholarship lately has focused on governmentality and state power. Has it gone too far or not far enough? Are scholars hitting the right register, looking in the best places, and contemplating the alternatives? Snajdr and Friedman offer terrific case studies through which to frame questions about interventions in love and marriage, abuse and neglect, and reproduction and privacy. [marriage, intimacy, state power, market reforms, women, subjectivity, China]