I write this foreword just a month before stepping down as editor of American Ethnologist and three weeks before submitting my last issue (the November 2007 issue) for production. By the time the August 2007 and November 2007 issues mail to subscribers, I will have closed down my editorial operation at the University of Iowa, and my successor, Don Donham, will have launched his at the University of California at Davis. read more >> To all of the authors and reviewers in whose virtual company I have spent time, many thanks for a stimulating and challenging intellectual adventure over the past five years. I have learned a great deal from the substance of your work and even more from your creative, committed, honest, and unending struggle to be grounded, daring, ethical, consequential, open-minded, and critically constructive. I have been privileged to see an enormous range of scholarly work and a consistently high degree of caring, thoughtful, incisive, and collegial critique. Despite the substantial workload, the AE editorship is a position I recommend to all with genuine enthusiasm.

The AE Forum featured in this issue (“Futures We Envision”) beautifully illustrates anthropological daring, vision, and critique. In the core article (“Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time”), Jane Guyer poses unusual questions about temporal orientation, tracks signs of an ongoing conceptual change, and considers what it might reflect. Drawing simultaneously on notable economic ideologies and widespread millennial religious thought, Guyer argues that, increasingly, “the near future” is less the focus of attention than very distant futures, and, provocatively, she finds evidence of this in professional economic thought just as much as in evangelical Christian circles. To the extent that her case is persuasive (and readers will no doubt debate that vigorously in the “near future”), her argument invites serious reflection, testing, and contemplation. Invited commentaries test some of Guyer’s propositions, applaud her visionary impetus, and take the discussion to and through the world of high finance, junk bonds, arbitrage, cerebral imagery, and Christian evangelists in the North Atlantic and elsewhere. Vincent Crapanzano and Joel Robbins extend Guyer’s effort while offering substantial praise. Hirokazu Miyazaki, Caitlin Zaloom, and Richard Wilk applaud Guyer’s openness but question the breadth of her claim and its evidentiary base, including her use of formal economic thinking as evidence of the “evacuation” of the “near future.” Robert Thornton and Jonathan Friedman are unsure of the overall payoff of Guyer’s thinking but are willing to contemplate its possibilities.

I find that Guyer’s unusual proposal also has staying power in unexpected ways. I have found myself, for example, contemplating not the “near future” and its presence or absence in quotidian, political, economic, religious, or technical lifeworlds around me, but its plausible counterpart: “the recent past.” Is there also a tendency, in at least some circles, to skip over “the recent past,” presuming that it is too near to be interestingly different and too dated to matter to current agendas? And if this tendency is not true of all social or professional circles, can we identify those for which it is true and assess the repercussions of distinctions on this point? I have in mind a scale and location not unlike Guyer’s. Her exploration, like my speculation here, concerns worlds in which anthropologists and fellow travelers live and play a visible participatory role, not social worlds that are more distant from most anthropologists’ daily lives, even if our work takes us to them with genuine interest, social concern, and lifelong attachments.

This extension of Guyer’s thinking—looking back rather than forward—is directly relevant in this issue of AE. Under the heading “Anthropological Pasts,” I publish two articles on influential anthropologists, their practices, ideas, changes of direction, and intellectual struggles: a review essay by Nancy Parezo, “Reassessing Anthropology’s Maverick: The ArchAEological Fieldwork of Frank Hamilton Cushing,” and an article by Brian Hoey and Tom Fricke on Roy (Skip) Rappaport that is partly an interview essay and partly a reflection on Rappaport’s intellectual trajectory and passions (“ ‘From Sweet Potatoes to God Almighty’: Roy Rappaport on Being a Hedgehog”). I know that historians of anthropology will enjoy reading these articles and will immerse themselves in the material both as data and as provocation. But will others?

That I have worried about this as I proceed to publish the articles might be idiosyncratic, but I am not convinced I am wrong to worry. Many AE readers have been influenced by the work of noted theorists, critics, and historically oriented anthropologists like Eric Wolf, Johannes Fabian, Sidney Mintz, Marshall Sahlins, Jean Comaroff, Regna Darnell, George Stocking, Ann Stoler, Nicholas Dirks, Bernard Cohn, and George Marcus, but it is unclear to me what conception of time, temporality, chronology, the past, historicity, or the future is in use in the discipline (or what its conceptual range is). Are some pasts (defined temporally and not just spatially) garnering increasing attention among anthropologists, and other pasts, including our own professional one, languishing as a result? Is the “distant past” safer, more compelling, more charged, or more debated than the “recent past,” however these two temporal spans are distinguished or measured?

I publish Parezo’s and Hoey and Fricke’s articles because of what they contribute to anthropological scholarship and knowledge, but I also publish them, paired together, to invite rethinking of the assumptions we make about who matters, whose ideas and struggles matter today, which temporal orientation we perpetuate unwittingly in choosing certain topics and certain theorists, and what could happen were we to open the door wider not just in words but also in our practice. Clearly, I am addressing matters of inclusion and exclusion here, although I think of this issue quite broadly and not just in terms of gender, sexuality, national background, language, class, embodiment, or hierarchically marked social position. But, following Guyer and the seven commentators included in this issue, I am also seeking to highlight the uneven periodization of time in the powerful, seductive intellectual maps that guide us, the way these maps tame temporal flow and fluidity, the difficulty of seeing the unevenness, and the likelihood that our maps have negative consequences for research, writing, policy making, advocacy, criticism, and pedagogy.

The articles in the section “Pragmatism, Moralism, and Traditionalism” show another aspect of this challenge. Both Justin Richland and Akio Tanabe elegantly navigate claims to the past and the precise ways they enter politicolegal arenas. Both articles are impressive in the way they assess the force of claims to “tradition” in settings that highlight both moralism and pragmatism. Both address traditionalism (and the investment in claiming traditionality) while making visible the moral claims to which they are connected.

The juxtaposition of Richland’s “Pragmatic Paradoxes and Ironies of Indigeneity at the ‘Edge’ of Hopi Sovereignty” and Tanabe’s “Toward Vernacular Democracy: Moral Society and Post-Postcolonial Transformation in Rural Orissa, India” is interesting also because of how the articles differ. Richland considers the Hopi Tribal Court and how Hopi sovereignty is enacted in its proceedings, even though much of the structure and practice of the Hopi judicial system simultaneously indexes the large Anglophone state and society within which Hopi sovereignty is officially but partially recognized. Tanabe examines the goal of greater participation in the larger Indian political system and the pragmatic traditionalism through which this goal is conceptualized and enacted. Relatively absent in his account are claims to distinctiveness leading claims to sovereignty and separation.
Under the heading “Experiencing Maleness,” I bring together three very different types of anthropological research and analysis, although all three articles focus very openly and consciously on men, their gendered bodies, and their gendered expectations. What appeals to me is how Fletcher Linder (“Life as Art, and Seeing the Promise of Big Bodies”), Everett Zhang (“The Birth of Nanke (Men’s Medicine) in China: The Making of the Subject of Desire”), and Magnus Marsden (“All-Male Sonic Gatherings, Islamic Reform, and Masculinity in Northern Pakistan”) all treat men as gendered, not just as human subjects. Their articles show men struggling with their male bodies (Zhang and Linder), turning their bodies into works of art (Linder), and creating physical and audible spaces for male sociality that index gendered rules and distinctions but also come close to violating them (Marsden).

Of equal interest, however, are the analytic differences between the authors’ approaches and the presences and absences the articles are likely to highlight in each other when read side by side. Linder works with phenomenology and seeks to promote it as an approach in anthropology. Zhang’s concern is the discursive, systemic, temporal rise of the subject of desire in public and its impact on men’s embodied and social experience. It is both genealogical in a Foucauldian sense and future oriented. Marsden, who focuses on the aural and the social, is at times a good old-fashioned student of social organization and at times a student of performance, sound, and pleasure. It is in relation to these three articles that I chose the cover photo for this issue. The ambiguity in the look and the close-up of this man’s body—dressed for daily life, not for show or documentation—invite thought. Like the articles in the “Experiencing Maleness” section, the photo inspires reflection and curiosity about life in a male body, in a gendered body, as a man in public, a man of a certain age, a worker, a subject, and an agent.

Lastly, articles under the heading “Print Production and Media Flows” stress the spatial, the intercontinental, and the role of the media in producing and circulating texts, images, panic, religious authority, and national sentiment. Amid continuing talk of globalization and growing public clamoring for counterglobalization, the articles by Thomas Kirsch (“Ways of Reading as Religious Power in Print Globalization”) and Vanessa Fong (“SARS, a Shipwreck, a NATO Attack, and September 11, 2001: Global Information Flows and Chinese Responses to Tragic News Events”) exemplify two ways anthropologically inflected research tackles the media productively. Fong illustrates consumers’ engagement with the global and national media through which news of tragedy is framed for local and national consumption. The circulation of information and its framing are central to her discussion along with ethnographic reporting of individual and small-group responses. Kirsch’s title appears to focus on consumption practices as well, but I urge AE readers to notice what Kirsch says about the production of religious texts, the control of that production and of the distribution of texts, and the relative degree of consent churchgoers appear to give to those controlling these processes in religious settings in which reading matters and the printed texts are greatly valued.

Kirsch’s analysis illustrates the link between materiality (in a good number of its senses) and authority, and between consumption of three-dimensional (reading) objects and consumption of a multicontinental sociality. I am reminded of anthropological books and journals and the role they play in the material conditions of production and reproduction of anthropologists, their national patterns, and their more interregional connections and flows. We know too little about this. I hope these articles lead others to contemplate research on this issue. As editor of AE I cannot help but be intrigued by what Fong and Kirsch together could do were they to collaborate on an intensive analysis of the production, consumption, distribution, materiality, multicontinental sociality, and authority of the American Ethnologist itself. Perhaps they will.

VIRGINIA R. DOMINGUEZ
EDITOR