Almost three years have gone by since I took over the editorship of American Ethnologist, and I want to thank authors, manuscript reviewers, book reviewers, readers, and production specialists both at AAA and at the University of California Press for their support, patience, ideas, rigor, discipline, and dedication during that time. I have introduced visual, procedural, and production changes at AE with the help and support of the Executive Board of the American Ethnological Society and my lifeline, the associate editors of AE, whose advice I seek with some frequency. As AnthroSource alters our scholarly community’s reading and sleuthing practices over the next few years, more changes will no doubt be needed, and I hope to have the wisdom in the immediate future to continue to make adjustments to serve us all better.

The AES Executive Board has asked me to extend my term as editor of AE, and I thank board members for their vote of confidence. I have agreed to do so for an additional period of two years to work with many authors currently revising their submissions and many more who I hope will think of AE as their journal of choice, even if they have not done so in the past. As I have said from the beginning of my term, I seek to show in the pages of AE the range and quality of contemporary anthropological engagement, its range of methods, and its varying audiences all over the world, both “inside” and “outside” anthropology. I have enjoyed publishing articles with quantitative tables as well as articles that would make no sense without their accompanying photos. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading manuscripts from nearly every quarter of the social, cultural, legal, linguistic, economic, political, and historical anthropological world and from outside the formal ranks of anthropology. I take pleasure in seeing increasing submissions from other circles, too, and in publishing articles on music, literature, psychiatry, medical dilemmas, educational institutions, and the practice of science itself. And I hope that the pairing or grouping of articles—not because of the region of the world they may specifically address but because of the analytic, theoretical, ethical, political, or interpretive issues they highlight—results in a reader-friendly journal that shows the landscape of contemporary anthropological engagement and debate.

I want to take this moment, as well, to recognize the two people without whom I would absolutely not be doing this job: Linda Forman, AE’s staff associate editor, and Steve Moon, AE’s editorial assistant and visual consultant. Fellow journal editors and “recovering editors” (Don Brenneis’s wonderful phrase for those who have gone on to do other things) will know why I am so appreciative of Linda’s and Steve’s roles in our operation. And I suspect that the thousands of you who have been in e-mail communication with either Steve or Linda over the past years about a manuscript you have submitted, a review we have asked you to do, or an idea you want to pass on have an inkling of why I feel they are so good at their jobs.

But you may not realize that I could not be doing my job without Linda’s able counsel, diplomatic skills, perennial wisdom, and relentless dedication and reliability—not to mention her truly impressive intellectual range, evident to all of you who have had the sheer pleasure of having her copyedit your manuscripts. Copyediting will never mean the same to any of us whose writing she delves into, whether the topic is pain (physical, psychological, or collective), tragic life-and-death choices, labor exploitation, intellectual property, mining, schools, antiwitchcraft practices, contestations about modernity and modernities, or U.S. law. I have here picked out topics addressed in this issue of AE, but I could just as easily add bioprospecting, jazz, high finance, audiocassette poetry, matrifocality, sovereignty, culpability, and ethical variability to the mix. Likewise, you may not realize how many e-mail messages Steve handles a day, how many books he processes each year for possible review, how many anxious authors and potential authors he soothes and encourages, how many technical legal, electronic, and visual problems he solves for us, and how many more he avoids by his careful diligence and know-how. In fact, my willingness to stay on as editor for an extended term depends almost totally on the willingness of these two wonderful people to continue working with me (and us) to make AE exciting and important not just to anthropologists but also to a larger public whose terms of debate, discourse, information, range, and action we seek to influence as a community of thinkers, teachers, and researchers.

I have, therefore, asked Linda and Steve for short bios and photos to include in this foreword, given that the two of them are otherwise invisible, even on the Web. The photos they came up with say a great deal about them, and I hope you will enjoy them. I think Linda’s photo may suggest something of her abiding affection for all things Maya (the ruins in the background are those of Tulum on the Yucatan Peninsula). It will probably surprise most people to know that Linda and Steve are both archeologists by training, though archeologists of the anthropological sort, making their engagement with AE’s range interesting, even compelling. Linda came to AE after four years as managing editor of Medical Anthropological Quarterly, when my colleague Mac Marshall served as MAQ editor. She also worked for an even longer period as editorial assistant for the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology during her association with the Office of the State Archeologist of Iowa. Born in Texas and still a proud Texan (despite years of living elsewhere, including in Veracruz, Mexico, when she was a child), she now lives in Beloit, Wisconsin. The Web makes it possible for her to continue working as staff associate editor of AE from her home office in Beloit (surrounded by her “creature comforts”—both canine and feline). Steve and I would love to see her more often but are deeply grateful for the opportunity to work so closely with her “by remote.”

Steve is an accomplished photographer, not to mention a librarian and information specialist as well as an archeologist and a serious caver. He holds four master’s degrees, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he picked up more before he retires. If Linda is an animal lover, Steve might need to be described as an animal enthusiast! He and his wife, Cassie, live with several dogs, cats, birds, and three fish aquariums, and have just bought a small farm some 25 miles from Iowa City so that they can also have their two llamas living with them. Somehow in the midst of all this, he keeps me and Linda out of trouble (most of the time) and in good spirits. For this I consider myself blessed and very, very lucky—as I do when I think of the enormous privilege I have of being able to read the range of intellectual engagement you authors and reviewers send our way.

This issue’s contents illustrate this range well. In “(Mis)Recognition: Seeing, Not Seeing, and Mis-Seeing,” I have grouped three seemingly unrelated articles—one on chronic pain, one on the continuing perceptions and entanglements of San people in southern Africa, and one on the anthropology of modernity. I do so to highlight the conditions, assumptions, institutions, and practices that Jean E. Jackson, Renée Sylvain, and Maia Green and Simeon Mesaki analyze as forms of mis-recognition (in medicine, policy, tourism, NGOs, and anthropology itself). Encouraging readers to spot ways of seeing, not seeing, and mis-seeing that exacerbate the social pain of chronic pain sufferers, Jackson pushes us to return to liminality as a concept, expanding its reach and its potential usefulness significantly. Likewise, Sylvain refocuses attention in very unromanticized ways on those people in and around the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa that so many anthropologists and students of anthropology (and even casual fans and users of anthropology) often associate with their first encounters with the discipline. Who is seeing and not seeing what becomes clear in her article, as does a sense of the material consequences of differing perceptions. Similarly, Green and Mesaki insist that important aspects of the contemporary world that are invested in the concept of “modernity” continue to elude anthropological attention or to be mis-read.

“States of Exception” calls attention to the incorporation of the nonroutine in organized routines and structures of human life—to accidents, disasters, and other extraordinary events and to places, people, actions, and behaviors treated institutionally, militarily, legally, or economically as exceptions to the rule. Didier Fassin and Paula Vazquez and Susan U. Philips specifically compel readers to examine the place of proclaimed exceptions in democratic societies, the role of “states of emergency” (even in cases of horrible natural disasters), and the suspension of “routine” laws and structures for palpably, or at least officially, persuasive reasons. In her review essay, Philips thoughtfully and carefully calls attention to the aftermath of such “exceptional” events of a century ago and their continuing relevance for the 21st century.

In “Precious Matter,” readers will find two well-told stories, one by Elizabeth Ferry and one by Haidy Geismar, about seemingly small operators (or communities) who produce objects that circulate and are valued in ways that are not always intentional and who participate with far more awareness of international markets and international law than most people (or they themselves) would assume. Yes, it is possible to read these articles as further contributions to arguments about degrees of agency or about the appropriation by richer nonlocals well-situated in today’s capitalist world of the actual labor of artistically minded people in small communities. But what I like about both articles, individually and together, is that they make typical analytic binaries of this sort look both stale and inadequate and that they demand research strategies that do not separate the “local” from the “global” or the “national” or “production” from “exchange” and “consumption.”

Finally, in “Values, Markets, and Social Transformations,” Chaise LaDousa and Jennifer Patico make readers ponder the aspirations of middle-class professionals and those who aspire to be middle-class professionals in large-scale societies experiencing significant geopolitical and market changes. When national political economies grow, change, or decline significantly, what role does education play, and which forms of cultural (or linguistic) capital get advanced, waylaid, ignored, or organized into the partly unseen hierarchies of jobs, roles, languages, materiality, and knowledge that sustain and demand the coexistence of markets? Although LaDousa and Patico address these questions with particular attention to India and Russia, respectively, I cannot imagine readers of AE in the United States, the older and newer countries of the European Union, South Africa, Israel, the Persian Gulf, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Australia, Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere not seeing the resonance of those questions for their own national or supranational work settings.

I know that I do, as I sit in the United States contemplating language policies and practices here, not to mention the status of the humanities, the arts, the liberal arts, and the nonapplied social sciences in this country. I suspect LaDousa’s notion of multiple coexisting language markets may prove illuminating here, too, and that it could prove useful to those of us in higher education in the United States to imagine ourselves, much like the teachers Patico interviewed in St. Petersburg, engaged in a vital but also possibly losing battle over changing cultural values at our own schools and universities.

[value, consumption, postsocialism, capitalism, globalization, Russia]