The photos on the cover of this issue are gifts. They are also personal, direct, powerful, and hard to disengage from.

     They are recent photos of Jadwiga (Jadzia) Lenartowicz Rylko (Barbara Rylko-Bauer’s mother) and Menachim (Miguel) Mendel Waserstein (Alisse Waterston’s father). They appear by permission of all concerned, most importantly, Jadzia and Miguel.... read more »With the help of AE Visual Consultant Steve Moon, we show them side by side but disconnected, an intentional visible tear between them. Jadzia is Christian, Miguel Jewish. She is Polish and American; he is Polish, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and American. She was interned in Nazi concentration camps in World War II; he was not. My interest lies less in this “surprise” than in the question of how we, as scholars, can draw on individual lives that have dealt with horror, guilt, suffering, and survival, along with the much more mundane aspects of everyday existence, to get at systemic political and economic issues, especially when those lives belong to people we already know well and who know us all too well.

     I am quite taken with the engagement I feel with Jadzia and Miguel each time I look at their photos. I keep recalling the image of Roland Barthes’s mother—actually Barthes’s experience with his mother’s photo—in Camera Lucida (Hill and Wang, 1981). Drawn almost inexplicably to that photo, he meditated on the experience, the role of the photograph and the power of its composition, and, most profoundly, the virtual encounter of one embodied human life with another. Barthes might well consider the punctum in these images of Jadzia and Miguel. I feel their gravitas, their gift of engagement and of vulnerability, fullness and complexity, love and anger. They also take me to Rylko-Bauer and Waterston, their experiment with each other, their parents, and analysis and writing; their engagement with courage and vulnerability; and their direct and vicarious experiences with love and anger.

     They remind readers of anthropologists’ long-standing conundrum—that we place great value on actual people’s lives and experiences and on our respectful, long-term encounter with them while still overwhelmingly privileging systemic understandings, social analysis, and cultural theory in our professional production. Rylko-Bauer and Waterston walk a careful line here in making a case for the possibility (and vibrancy) of doing both at once.

     Much of this issue does the same or works, I hope, to produce that effect in readers, to remind readers of the double pull. It is about people managing information and managing the desire for information they do and do not have. At stake are matters of evidence, secrecy, conspiracy, time, historicity, genealogy, the past, temporality, history, memory, forgetting, and the suspect but compelling nature of all of these. Among the issues addressed are military violence, narrativized cover-ups, and narrativized counteractions—in Indonesia, Germany, Malaysia, and Brazil—as well as Communism, Nazism, and slavery. The articles here do not present a united front but, in them and through their juxtaposition, readers will grapple with lives that do and do not survive periods of inhumanity and militarized force and with living human beings who fend off anthropological interest in their remembering and their forgetting. There are surprises, too. Survey work and questionnaires acquire currency, becoming objects of genuine desire—and not just by trained researchers. Secret rituals are videotaped—and not always surreptitiously. And historical legacies of structural inequality, racism, classism, and distrust are found not to be at the forefront of embodied experiences in certain kinds of social spaces.

     Yes, Nazi Germany committed atrocities and most readers of AE know of long-standing German efforts to prevent the future reproduction of such horrors, but how should information about individual participation and implication be managed? Violent pasts are tragically common. Should they all be researched and analyzed, invoked or left alone, leaked or exposed publicly, witnessed, elicited, recorded, or renarrativized? And when journalists, tribunals, government ministries, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), local municipalities, museums, amateur historians, or those aspiring to land claims are the ones requiring particular understanding of the past, does our answer change? Should it change? As countries that have recently adopted a “truth and reconciliation” process, most notably, South Africa, can attest, truth claims may or may not be truthful, confessions may be self-serving, healing may happen for some but not for others, and national reconciliation may be proclaimed even when the crime rate soars and nonstate violence takes over.

      Curiosity looks different as one contemplates these issues. It becomes a necessary object of observation, analysis, and reflection. I have in mind anthropologists’ curiosity, of course, but also other professional researchers’ curiosity, NGO workers’ curiosity, lawyers’ curiosity, enterprising townspeople’s curiosity, state tribunals’ curiosity, journalists’ curiosity, and even children’s curiosity, to return to Rylko-Bauer and Waterston’s challenge to themselves and to AE readers. Is curiosity a disposition, a quirk, an admirable personality trait, a condition of being, a learned experience, a value to be passed on to students, a commitment that should trump institutional review boards and audit cultures? Would there be history, as scholars think of it, without curiosity? Does the history we do have reflect it? Do peace and reconciliation in any setting require more of a narrative than a truth commission, more exhaustion than new revelations, more talk or less talk, more or less sharing of public space, more or less transparency, and more private spaces of alterity?
     
      For this issue, I have created groupings I hope compel strong reactions, heartfelt doubts, lengthy thought, and vivid debate. In “Violent Pasts and the Management of Evidence,” for example, I seek to highlight willful or strategic silencing and framing, especially of very violent pasts. Liability, the interpretation of behavior as exceptional, and the reading of evidence are especially prominent in Elizabeth Drexler’s “History and Liability in Aceh, Indonesia: Single Bad Guys and Convergent Narratives.” In Dominic Boyer’s “Conspiracy, History, and Therapy at a Berlin Stammtisch,” personal, professional, interpersonal, and national responsibility for complicity with state violence looms large, but it is the small-scale nature of the talking group and its members’ long-standing casual conversations that play the more effective role in keeping some knowledge silenced and other knowledge always discursively there. In the third article in this section (“Buried Alive: Imagining Africa in the Brazilian Northeast”), Jan Hoffman French takes on the contemporary currency of Brazil’s long history of plantation slavery. Providing a glimmer of hope, she documents entrepreneurial or activist families’ use of the contemporary Brazilian legal system (and ongoing ideological reconsiderations of the notion of “Afro-Brazilians” in Brazil) to reclaim or establish an economically advantageous position for themselves over a century after the abolition of slavery in Brazil.

      In the section I call “Unexpected Convergences,” I highlight the dramatic imbrication in shared space of bodies whose past experiences and historical positioning make such sharing surprising. Exemplifying such drama on many levels is Deborah Kapchan’s “Talking Trash: Performing Home and Anti-Home in Austin’s Salsa Culture,” one of two articles in this issue that focus on contemporary performance spaces in which the clientele defies expectations. Dramatic in a different way is Henry Goldschmidt’s “The Voices of Jacob on the Streets of Brooklyn: Black and Jewish Israelites in and around Crown Heights,” motivated by the author’s impatience with scholarly practices that arguably continue to treat “religion” and “race” as productive analytic categories. It is in this section that I choose to place Waterston and Rylko-Bauer’s “Out of the Shadows of History and Memory: Personal Family Narratives in Ethnographies of Rediscovery.” I do so to call attention to the unexpected convergences of their own anthropological journeys and their parents’ counterintuitive divergences.
     
      In the third section, “Research, Secrecy, and Control,” I juxtapose articles that examine nonprofessionals who do research and how and why they come to do so with articles on anthropological researchers and their push for access to, even knowledge of, violent past events and jealously guarded religious knowledge. Key here are the management and appeal of controlled, even privatized, information. Exemplifying this is Julia Elyachar’s “Best Practices: Research, Finance, and NGOs in Cairo,” which focuses on nonexperts who take on the research enterprise itself (including questionnaires and surveys) to further access to, funding for, and democratization of local NGOs. Elyachar’s article can be usefully paired with Trevor Stack’s “The Skewing of History in Mexico,” in which local research on local and regional history puts the spotlight on research itself, the centralizing, institutionalized kind typically given primacy, and the relative irrelevance of those accounts to social and economic relations. Finally, to keep the focus on issues of information management and control, and not to exceptionalize the anthropological research enterprise, I choose to include in this section Mattijs van de Port’s “Visualizing the Sacred: Video Technology, ‘Televisual’ Style, and the Religious Imagination in Bahian Candomblé” and Kee Howe Yong’s “Silences in History and Nation-State: Reluctant Accounts of the Cold War in Sarawak.” Although van de Port’s article about video technology and Brazilian soap-opera styles makes intriguing observations of likely interest to visual anthropologists and new media scholars, I do not want readers to miss the larger issue about the management and appeal of controlled, private information. I urge a reading of van de Port’s and Yong’s articles against each other and in conjunction with Elyachar’s and Stack’s. Van de Port’s and Yong’s tenacity in pursuing deeply privatized, secret, or deliberately buried knowledge is coupled in each case with a strong commitment to reflection on such knowledge, the pursuit of such knowledge by outside researchers, and the struggle to be ethical while doing so. These are not, of course, unusual dilemmas for anthropological research. It is the clarity and openness these two scholars bring to the discussion that makes their articles especially worth reading. Should research be done even when a local group does not want it? Should questions be pursued even if they cause interviewees pain? As more and more people on the planet turn to social-science research techniques to further their chances for social, communal, linguistic, political, religious, or economic betterment, will we (formally trained anthropologists and fellow travelers) arrive at different conclusions?

VIRGINIA R. DOMINGUEZ
EDITOR

[foreword, history, research, secrecy, evidence, convergence, control, violence]