The articles in this issue were not commissioned to address these disasters. Most were already in draft form when the deadly tsunami hit so many coastal regions of the Indian Ocean at the end of December 2004, and all were in various stages of copyediting as the worst of the 2005 hurricanes ravaged low-lying lands along the Gulf of Mexico and the land shook mightily in northeastern Pakistan and northwestern India last fall. Yet their concerns, arguments, and explorations could not be more opportune.

What is a humanitarian act, many of them ask, and how do these acts as well as humanitarian desires, interventions, and responses vary? Who responds to disasters and why? What range of response is evident, promising, embarrassing, inspiring, self-serving, or critical? And what range of analysis exists or should exist that focuses not only on the immediacy of action but just as much on the feelings, motivations, hopes, philosophies, politics, and economic privileges of the helpers? I have created groupings in this issue as I do with each quarterly issue of AE because I believe doing so sharpens our experience of reading and, in some cases, points to contrasting approaches to a question or problem. Here, articles directly addressing organized humanitarian interventions and the structural contexts in which they occur appear under the heading of “Humanitarianism, Mediation, and Intervention.” Articles on the perceived values of life and death—in the contexts of prison life, kidney transplants, and traffic accidents—appear as “Valuing Life, Weighing Death.” And articles on intermediaries—from military brokers to self-improvement marketers to anthropologists negotiating unexpected encounters in the field—appear in “Inter-Mediation and Self-Interest.”

But, like those in the November 2005 issue of AE, all of the articles included here are in play, at least indirectly, with each other. Their units of observation and analysis differ, as does the balance each offers between analysis and critique. But all concern people helping people, people saying they are helping people, or people believing they (or others) should be helping people. This issue is both about humanitarianism (in its various definitions) and about something far broader.

Consider Ellen Moodie’s desire, in “Microbus Crashes and Coca-Cola Cash: The Value of Death in ‘Free-Market’ El Salvador,” to get people to notice traffic fatalities. Individual grief and pain are evident in this article, but the argument leads us elsewhere. Is there really, as Moodie argues, a differential value placed on death and dying, at least in post–civil war El Salvador, that makes wartime deaths feel meaningful and traffic fatalities feel mundane, even insignificant? Is this unequal valuation just unfortunate and a source of additional pain to those whose loved ones have died apparently “meaningless deaths,” even when they outnumber those who died in wartime? When a city or country notes the death of its citizens only briefly or in passing, what reaction besides outrage is appropriate?

And what about state interventions that are explicitly labeled humanitarian? Miriam Ticktin explores one such case in “Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France,” wherein the state offers certain sick people the chance to stay in France while receiving medical treatment they may not be able to get in their usual country of residence. A critique of this kind of intervention is unsurprising if the complexity of the phenomenon is not noted and if the possibility that some aspect of this kind of intervention may deserve praise is not examined with care.

In Ticktin’s article, as in Erin Koch’s “Beyond Suspicion: Evidence, (Un)certainty, and Tuberculosis in Georgian Prisons,” those who are the target of medical humanitarian interventions take risks—grave risks, even crazy risks, that look suicidal to those of us whose material circumstances are nowhere as dire. When prisoners, such as those incarcerated in the Republic of Georgia, choose to take sputum from other prisoners infected with tuberculosis to convince the medical staff to transfer them to medical prison facilities offering decidedly better conditions, everyone looks culpable or at least complicitous. State institutions are implicated as are international health protocols, in-house prison hierarchies, individual prisoners themselves, and those inside and outside Georgia contributing to the maintenance or worsening of social disorder and structural inequality in Georgia and for Georgia.

How widespread such “traps” are and how to analyze them productively is taken up by Veena Das, thinking with, through, and against two daring books and their courageous authors: Paul Farmer and Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs. Both sympathetic and questioning, Das uses her review essay to direct readers beyond the specific works she considers to think broadly about “Poverty, Marginality, and Illness.” This fine balance between praise and critique, empathy and analysis is present, too, in Peter Redfield’s article on Doctors Without Borders–Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), entitled “A Less Modest Witness: Collective Advocacy and Motivated Truth in a Medical Humanitarian Movement.” Anthropologists will be especially interested in Redfield’s analysis of how and why MSF has always sought to distinguish itself from the International Red Cross and what MSF regards as its compromises. That witnessing, factual analysis, and hands-on interventions go hand in hand within MSF, albeit always discussed and debated, is key, and Redfield makes a terrific case for the value to anthropologists of seeing a different professional, intellectual community navigate itself—as a collectivity—through witnessing, recording, and helping modes.

Individuals are much more the unit of analysis in articles by Peter Cahn; Sharon Kaufman, Ann Russ, and Janet Shim; Richard Feinberg; and Lawrence Bragge, Ulrike Claas, and Paul Roscoe. At times in these articles, individuals appear more as brokers than as helpers, but the cases do not support an easy distinction. The easiest case to be made involves the locals who worked as brokers for foreign expeditions in the interior of Papua New Guinea in the first half of the 20th century. Bragge and colleagues deftly present new data on these intermediaries in “On the Edge of Empire: Military Brokers in the Sepik ‘Tribal Zone.’ ” The historical value of this material alone is significant, but of special importance, as well, is how the coauthors of this article handle the delicate question of culpability for violent acts by self-appointed brokers—past and present, especially under unequal political, military, and economic conditions that characterize imperial and military interventions.

A less clear case concerns Cahn’s health-products “salespeople” in Mexico, who do little actual selling. The company marketing the products is clearly profit oriented and transnational capitalism the obvious context within which it operates and through which it is likely to be understood. But in “Building Down and Dreaming Up: Finding Faith in a Mexican Multilevel Marketer,” Cahn suggests that this frame is analytically inadequate if we are to understand the large numbers of “salespeople” who seem to see little contradiction in how they approach this work—believing that they are doing something appropriate that helps all and promotes sales, even when their own self-improvement is highlighted. Likewise, Feinberg recounts a role he played—as unexpected intermediary or awkward broker—while doing fieldwork 30 years ago when a Taiwanese fishing vessel visited the Pacific island community that was his field site at the time. His story, recounted in “Early European–Polynesian Contact Reenacted: Anutan “Handling” of a Foreign Fishing Vessel,” explores empathy and misunderstanding, reveals excitement and anxiety, and exudes warmth amid moments of hilarity. Taken from field notes and now revisited in light of more current anthropological concerns, Feinberg’s frequently disarming story invites serious reflection on the contours of collective self-interest and interpersonal mediation.

But, ultimately, in its most positive moments, self-interest may be more an act of naming than something separate from humanitarianism. I urge readers to consider Kaufman and colleagues’ article on “Aged Bodies and Kinship Matters: The Ethical Field of Kidney Transplant,” which thinks about people donating kidneys to parents, grandparents, or other elderly victims of renal disease. Why would, why do, young and middle-aged people put themselves at some risk for years to come to extend the life of someone in his or her seventies or eighties? The sale of organs is not at issue here, even when financial issues play a role. Neither is simple parental control, coercive love, or compromised standards of consent. We may see donors’ choices as admirable or foolish, idealistic or tragic, curious or disturbing, but Kaufman and her colleagues show them to be carefully thought out and informed. What kind of anthropological question does this demand and what kind of analytic approach must we make sure to maintain in our tool kit to allow this kind of phenomenon to be seen?