New Orleans is drowning as I write this foreword. The AAA last met there in November 2002. It is now Thursday, September 1, 2005. Looting, gunfire, and civil unrest show up on my screen when I check Netscape on-line or any U.S. television channel. I stare at the screen, horrified and increasingly angry that more is not being done. And I wonder, as another kind of coverage or reflection on the disaster comes to me via e-mail from colleagues abroad and fellow anthropologists in the United States, how and why is the rescue operation going so slowly? The vast majority of those shown on television needing to be evacuated, already hungry, tired, thirsty, and feeling left behind, appear to be African American. They are not a representative sample of the population of New Orleans. How will scholars analyze this catastrophe in the months to come, the years ahead, and the generations to follow? No article included in this issue of American Ethnologist focuses on disasters, relief operations, humanitarian projects, or, what Didier Fassin and Paul Vasquez called in the August 2005 issue of the journal, “states of exception.” Yet what the articles that appear here do discuss and debate feels deeply pertinent. Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, addressed with insight and power in the most visible segment of this issue, the AE Forum, are exclusionary sentiments, practices, and tendencies. I prefer to think of them as exclusionary societal projects and to debate them and think with and through them. For example, one can ask how an “exclusionary project” such as Islamophobia works, how it is sustained, and how and under what conditions it becomes more visible. One can also ask how comparable exclusionary projects are, both within a country or region and across regions. The question raised in the AE Forum by Matti Bunzl and debated by commentators John Bowen, Jonathan Boyarin, Dominic Boyer, Karen Brodkin, Andre Gingrich, Nina Glick Schiller, and Esra Özyürek is whether Islamophobia, especially in Europe today, resembles anti-Semitism, past or present. Is it more intense? Does it occupy a parallel place in the conceptual, legal, visual, political, or economic landscapes of European societies? And what might be gained and what lost by equating the two phenomena (or not equating them) in form, function, or consequence? I decided to name this issue’s AE Forum “Exclusionary Projects and Anthropological Analysis.” I could just as easily have called it “Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism,” and both past and present concerns of many anthropologists (and not just about Europe or the Middle East) would have attracted readers across generations and subspecialties. But the type of question asked and debated, in itself, is as important as the specificity of the nature and (in)comparability of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, even if the latter is contemplated outside of Europe as well as in it. The articles in “Legacies and Futures” can be approached in a similar way. Consider asking which legacy is being manifested in New Orleans in the images of looting on television screens, in the words of the frustrated mayor of that city complaining that the U.S. federal government is doing too little and taking too long to do it, and in the scenes of heart-wrenching rescues and the reports of deeply moved journalists? Which history is relevant? Is any not relevant? Which memory of the city of New Orleans will the children and grandchildren of the survivors hear or seek to incorporate as their own? How will life before Hurricane Katrina be referred to and to what ends in future years? And who will debate all this? Who will feel entitled to debate it? Will they be national units, supranational units, the world’s intellectual and governmental elites, or those relating to the victims and survivors empathetically, despite their current distrust of the United States or their sense of their own society’s smallness or greatness in the world? What kind of impact will this event have—when time passes, whether or not the city is rebuilt—on those whose lives have been drastically changed through injury, family death, destruction of property, loss of livelihood, and displacement, and also on many others? Will it catalyze environmental activism? Will it raise the level of discussion of class and race in the United States? Will it complicate many people’s negative feelings toward the U.S. government, both domestically and around the world, by making painfully palpable the differences between local, state, and federal governments in this country? It is clearly too much to ask or to expect that so much good could come out of so much tragedy, but I am hopeful, and the articles in this issue of American Ethnologist have much to offer toward such a positive outcome. Of special relevance are the articles by Nadia Abu El-Haj and John Eidson, which bravely tackle delicate pasts (Edward Said’s writings, European and Euro-American intellectual complicity, local German histories, local German Nazi histories) and the people who make them matter. How memory is socially reproduced across generations is addressed with a twist by David Berliner, and, although his research concerns Islam in West Africa rather than Islamophobia or anti-Semitism in European societies, his call for an engagement with questions of cognition and affect is worth heeding. A different approach to legacies and their social memories is evident in Elizabeth Krause’s article on changing images of the “peasantry” in contemporary, urban Italy. The romanticization and periodic primitivization of the peasantry is of interest, but key to her article is the declining birth rate in Italy and how perceived legacies help to explain it. George Marcus’s review essay, drawing on Sylvia Yanagisako’s recent book, explores Italian families today, including very wealthy ones, in the explicit context of contemporary capitalism. Here legacy takes on a vividly material feel that is at once deeply social and arguably traceable. Efficacy, instrumentality, worldliness, and self-perception loom large in Laura Graham’s and David Koester’s articles in “Indigeneity and Instrumentality”—at least in my reading of them. Indigeneity matters to the people both authors work with, but in ways not often anticipated. In both cases, people debate, try out, and choose interventions in the countries in which they are located and in those countries’ bureaucratic structures. To somewhat contrasting degrees, they also address or ignore expectations others have of them and of their communities, and this increasingly includes institutions and movements that transcend national borders. Comparing the two cases is instructive. Contemplating them alongside European struggles with legacies, histories, reproduction, instrumentality, worldliness, and collective self-worth is illuminating. “Debating Units” juxtaposes a particular set of Internet users with a particular set of European and Estonian statesmen. The two articles that do so are interesting together analytically as well as topically. Both analyses are deeply “peopled” and simultaneously text rich. In Victoria Bernal’s and Gregory Feldman’s articles, it is the amount of discursive work people do that I suggest readers contemplate, along with their embodied attachment to ideas about a “country” and its “culture” in contemporary life. This is not just a return to an often-cited argument made by Benedict Anderson in the 1980s and 1990s. Of special interest here are the intensity and type of work needed to maintain, or change, constructs of country and culture today. I urge readers to focus on the networks, communities, or circles doing this type of work and the kind of technology they employ in doing so. What kinds of units are they? How technology driven are they? Whose ideas, expectations, institutions, and people are visible? What role do supranational networks, institutions, or expectations play? And do we gain insight or muddy the waters by thinking of them as colonial or postcolonial projects in action, given that so many of the key players are from, or at least in, the United States or Western Europe? I hope readers will find it intriguing and productive to consider these two articles together. I also hope readers will venture out and read across sections, especially given the many ways the articles in this issue speak to each other. Issues of statecraft, instrumentality, legacies, and futures—both outside and inside the United States—loom large in each section, either topically or analytically. I very much hope that the mix of articles and sections we offer here fosters spirited debate about the articles themselves, but also that it helps clarify the kind of concern and analysis now needed in the aftermath of devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the December 2004 tsunami across South and Southeast Asia, and other natural disasters that will no doubt come.