An ear on the cover? AE editorial colleague Steve Moon has come up with a photographic rendition of a man’s ear that is just too good to pass up for this issue of American Ethnologist I hope you will agree as you look through the offerings in the issue and read both within and across sections.

Steve Feld and Don Brenneis have some inspiring things to say here in a special AE Interview about doing anthropology in sound, that is, focusing on sound, on listening, on the sounds researchers pay attention to, and the sounds we don’t. So do João Biehl, Carolyn Rouse, and Julia Paley, although their emphasis, individually and collectively, is on health care delivery, activism, and intervention. Likewise Keith Bletzer and Nitish Jha allude to silences in public knowledge regarding farmwork and farmworkers and highlight constraints on such workers’ ability to have their concerns heard. And compelling articles by Jennifer Cole, Deborah Durham, Deborah Elliston, and Vanessa Fong, largely about young people engaging in actions of various sorts, all consider how youth are heard by others.

Yet journals are silent means of communication, and American Ethnologist is no exception. Most AE readers use their eyes, not their ears, to find out what colleagues are working on, proposing, presenting, and arguing. And most readers typically seek silence and alone time to concentrate on reading the text. Yet much of this issue urges scholars to listen attentively, to focus much more on what we hear around us, both human and nonhuman sounds, both intentional and unintentional sounds. The question for us at AE has been how to stress that here and how to suggest extending the conversations so that they actually involve listening. Putting an image of an ear on the cover of this issue is a gesture in that direction, but it is also just a start.

With the help of AES webmaster Aaron Fox, we are turning to the society’s newly revamped and enhanced website to take us a step or two further. Feld and Brenneis have agreed to put some audible material on the website as an extension of the published interview, and we urge readers to listen to it and to consider it an integral part of the message we have just offered here in print. Current Anthropology already moved in this direction felicitously when Ben Orlove took over as editor and urged authors to post maps, additional tables, photos, and other enhancements to that journal’s website. But my hope with this issue of AE is to do something a bit different, and possibly to go even farther, encouraging readers to take Feld and Brenneis to heart and to find a way of focusing on the act of hearing and the sounds heard while reading a plea for "doing anthropology in sound."

AnthroSource, AAA’s electronic anthropological resource project, is about to be launched, and with it come opportunities periodically discussed by the AnthroSource Working Group, on which I have served since spring 2003. Forum after forum at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association focused on AnthroSource, but many of us there and in leadership positions with the official societies or groups that form part of AAA concentrated, understandably, on the pros and cons of AnthroSource for our respective journals, on the financial risks of joining AnthroSource, and on the potential loss (or, ideally, expansion) of membership in our respective sections of AAA or even in AAA itself. Yet, as several colleagues in this working group luckily remind us from time to time, AnthroSource offers at least the potential to provide much more, both for the readership of each journal and for the communities and networks of scholars seeking more than the journals have typically been able to provide up to now. What becomes of AnthroSource will largely depend on the imagination, creativity, and experimentation of all of us who seek in anthropological exchanges, debates, struggles, and explorations (past and present) intellectual inspiration, a honing of argument, and a sharing of data. AnthroSource is envisioned to have the capability of including much more than the print issues of anthropology journals. Exactly what that content should be is a question AAA members and friends of the anthropological community should embrace. How much of it should be written text? How much of it visual material? How much of it unpublished quantitative data? How much of it sound? Yes, there is an AnthroSource Steering Committee already in place to guide the project, monitor and direct its pace, and field its inevitable glitches. But, inspired by the content of much of this issue of AE, I want to urge others to use the debut of AnthroSource to focus on the kinds of materials privileged in much anthropological research, analyses, teaching, and public presentations, and to ask how much of it is sound, how much of it we acknowledge as sound, how much of it we preserve as sound, and how much more we might have to do if we decided to stress doing anthropology in sound.

Gripping accounts of people trying to prevent the physical, psychic, pharmaceutical, or social death of others they care about constitute the section I have called “Living, Dying, and Being Heard.” I know that these articles were hard to write, both intellectually and emotionally, and that readers are likely to feel compelled to read them from start to finish at the same time that they seek refuge from the pain the pieces communicate. This is especially true of Biehl’s and Rouse’s articles, both of which explore particular commitments to hearing people who are not being heard or who are being heard through learned paradigms and class structures that greatly diminish their chances of being perceived as sane, logical, or reasonable members of society. I have added Paley’s article to this section—focusing on more collective action, its work toward achieving a more “accountable democracy,” its successes and failures—because I think it raises, or reminds us of, issues of scale and because it compels us to ask who is heard and under what circumstances, even in a self-labeled democracy.

"Farm Labor: Who Controls It and How?” brings back to AE important questions about rural labor, both inside and outside the United States, and a level of empirical detail that is quantitative as well as qualitative. My thanks go to Bletzer and Jha for their compelling articles. Who, indeed, decides who works where, for how long, under what conditions, and for what pay? How does the process of labor exploitation actually work with a migrant workforce that includes many undocumented workers? And how does the process of decision making work when labor exploitation is not evident or not seen as relevant or not even articulated, regardless of the possibility of pinpointing a gendered or class dimension to the process?

Our last section, one I have simply called “A Focus on Youth,” includes articles (by Cole, Durham, Elliston, and Fong) on some paradoxes regarding today’s youths—that they are active choice makers now although they are seen as the future more than the present, that the future is theirs but only if they live long enough to see it, and that they themselves constitute, signal, or are perceived as exacerbating critical social problems, from street crime and prostitution to economic decline, the collapse of the family, and debilitating “brain drain.” The mix of societies whose issues these authors articulate so clearly—in Tahiti, Botswana, Madagascar, and China—makes this section a gold mine both for teaching and research. As always, each article we include in AE can stand alone and point in a number of other directions. In this case, for example, Elliston’s article is also very much about contemporary nationalisms, Fong’s about competing desires and visions of alternative (but hierarchically ranked) modernities, Cole’s about sexuality and poverty, and Durham’s about crime. But together they also highlight what Sharon Stephens came to be so passionate about in the years before her untimely death, and what Liisa Malkki and Emily Martin in the May 2003 issue of AE urged readers to pursue, namely, a focus on nonadults, both because of how youths get incorporated into contemporary society and because of how they interpret their roles and the societies they will themselves lead, if they actually manage to stay alive.