A contrast strikes me as revealing. I ask myself if a cartoon in Johannesburg, a murder in Miami, an election in Bolivia, a bombing in Moscow, and an Australian telecommunications giant winning bids to run dozens of newspapers and radio stations in the United States are all about Christianity. To much of the public in North America and Europe, this question would seem ludicrous, unless the cartoon, murderer, electoral campaign, bombing, and corporate strategy made some explicit reference to a Christian symbol, a proclaimed Christian value, or open discrimination against Christians. Even then, I suspect public discussion would focus on activist Christian groups and whether they are growing in visibility and power or expressing disenchantment and marginalization, not on the nature of Christianity or its power to explain most actions taken by Christians. I think quite a bit more would be needed than the examples I just gave to cause North American and European public discourse to frame events and actions as about Christianity, in general.

Some readers might see in this disparity a familiar anthropological truism—that the unfamiliar always tends to be viewed categorically, even if anthropologists spend lifetimes arguing against such Othering and essentializing. Yet the contrast strikes me as worth more thought. Could publication of the controversial cartoon and reaction to it in much of Europe and the United States not be seen as stories about Christianity? Are the cartoonist and the newspaper editors involved not largely or wholly Christian, and is Denmark not a largely Christian country? Could the murder in the Netherlands not likewise be seen as a Christian story, that is, about a Christian country finding room within its own sense of Christianity for gays and lesbians living public and private lives as full citizens? And could Hamas’s parliamentary victory in the most recent Palestinian elections not be seen as a story about Israel and Fatah’s inability to win full independence for a Palestinian state?

AE readers know about stereotypes, prejudice, and long-held perceptions for which there really is little evidence once one takes a closer look. Indeed, many work to debunk those perceptions and make complexity visible and appealing. Yet, as scholars, we still struggle—or we especially struggle—when public stress on one aspect of life in a social setting we study makes it untenable for us to ignore that stress or that aspect of life. We assert our independence as thinkers and researchers, and we insist on analysis, not just description. But what does that mean in practice? How do we, or should we, understand those many countries in the world with majority Muslim populations—by some estimates, one-fifth of the world’s people—and the businesses, music styles, political parties, environmental projects, health delivery systems, literatures, universities, property distribution systems, social problems, and forms of protest found among those populations? How do we, and how should we, as anthropologists, interact with colleagues and friends who live among or who are Muslims? And what if we ourselves are anthropologists and Muslims?

This issue of American Ethnologist includes four articles that explore publics and constituencies in such social circles and settings and that address larger issues and models, as well. South Asianists, Africanists, and Middle Eastern specialists will appreciate Arzoo Osanloo’s article on resourcefulness and “wiggle-room” within the court system of contemporary Iran (“Islamico-Civil ‘Rights Talk’: Women, Subjectivity, and Law in Iranian Family Court”), Richard Wolf’s article proposing a particular poetics of agency and collectivity (“The Poetics of ‘Sufi’ Practice: Drumming, Dancing, and Complex Agency at Madho Lal Husain (and Beyond)”), Dorothea Schulz’s article on what the uses and consumption of broadcast media enable and imply (“Promises of (Im)Mediate Salvation: Islam, Broadcast Media, and the Remaking of Religious Experience in Mali”), and Patrick Eisenlohr’s article on diasporic communities’ handling of authority and anxiety about correctness (“As Makkah Is Sweet and Beloved, So Is Madina: Islam, Devotional Genres, and Electronic Mediation in Mauritius”). These articles are not solely about Islam or even about contemporary Muslims living family lives, income-earning lives, meaning-seeking lives, and geographically dispersed lives. They also concern domesticity and marriage, in general, new and old media around the world, mysticism, spectacle, and “groupness” in the broadest sense.

That they all happen to be based on research in countries that are formally Islamic or in which large numbers of people identify as Muslim is both a bonus and a dilemma here. I intend them to be read together as analyses of publics and constituencies within the very contemporary “Muslim world”—the “umma,” as religious Muslims would say—regardless of official citizenship, language, looks, or actual religious practice. I also hope, however, readers will notice what happens when such articles are framed as stories about Islam, both when this framing occurs among anthropologists and when it occurs elsewhere.

The four articles grouped together under “Islam and Its Constituencies” exemplify the challenge to anthropological practice alluded to above. Osanloo, Wolf, Schulz, and Eisenlohr make Islamic courts, Islamic mysticism and music, Islamic authorities, and Islamic teachings objects of conscious analysis. They also make us wonder about what gets more simply called Islamic “law,” Islamic “clerics,” Islamic emphasis on “tradition,” and Islamic “religiosity.” Each article stretches itself and us as readers. And each article compels us to wonder what a similar grouping of articles on “Christianity” and its publics and constituencies would look like in AE and if it would make sense at all.

Five other articles—wonderful articles—also appear in this issue. I grouped two of them together in “Rurality and Whiteness” for pretty obvious reasons. David Hughes’s “Hydrologies of Hope: Farm Dams, Conservation, and Whiteness in Zimbabwe” and Jane Adams and D. Gorton’s “Confederate Lane: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the Mississippi Delta” explore whiteness in very material, economically grounded ways, Hughes in Zimbabwe and Adams and Gorton in the United States. These articles make space central and palpable, even touchable. We read about land, infrastructure, dams, and farming, and about people moving to and from rural locations, some purposefully and some with little seeming purpose. Both articles address legacies of blatant racism and recent histories of social collaboration and alliances. In “Confederate Lane” hope is not named, but it is the undercurrent. In “Hydrologies of Hope,” hope is sought and expressed, surprisingly so to any of us following recent race-focused turbulence in Zimbabwe.

Materiality takes a different form in the issue’s third grouping, “Materiality and Documentation.” Jennifer Hubbert (“(Re)Collecting Mao: Memory and Fetish in Contemporary China”) wonders about a very tangible form of materiality (and a productive understanding of fetishism) when she thinks through what motivates particular Chinese collectors of Mao badges to pursue their collecting. Gastón Gordillo (“The Crucible of Citizenship: ID-Paper Fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco”) reflects on the materiality of documentos (official identity papers) and the near fetishizing of those papers by people who used to lack them in Argentina. And Barbara Yngvesson and Susan Bibler Coutin (“Backed by Papers: Undoing Persons, Histories, and Return”) experiment with their two seemingly unrelated projects—one about transnational adoptees and one about unwilling deportees—to suggest that the link to a place one is from, or seen as being from, has a palpable materiality (or three-dimensionality) that pulls, rejects, embraces, surprises, and locates one even when the person never expected it. Documents, badges, gadgets, letters, and photos are often data in anthropological or historical research. Yet here they are objects of meaning, significance, reconstitution, success, possibility, rejection, and vulnerability. I hope these articles provoke a vibrant discussion about fetishism as phenomenon and as accusation and about sentiment and its place in social analysis.