I visualize multiple “crossings” when I reflect on the articles in this issue of American Ethnologist and on the groupings I have created (“Crossings—Artistic, Aural, Digital,” “(Un)Employment and Its Compromises,” “Religious Work and Ethical Labor,” “Visions and Critiques”). As usual, I have resisted pairing articles by geographic region or even going for the most obvious pairings. Less immediate connections between articles invite readers to cross into less familiar territory and experience the surprises. In this issue, for example, I chose not to pair Sally Price’s and Kamari Maxine Clarke’s articles, although both analyze particular cultural processes taking place in the African diaspora in the Americas. Likewise, I resisted pairing Jennifer Johnson-Hanks’s article with Daniel Mains’s article, although both examine fascinating socioeconomic decisions made by many young urbanites in Africa concerning work and family. These pairings would have worked well enough, especially for readers who are Africanists, Afro-Americanists, or Caribbeanists, but I thought that the analytic moves entailed by more challenging groupings offered here could prove more intriguing for others and, in the end, productive for all.

I see crossing, too, as a theme in the content of many of the articles as well as in authors’ approaches to their material. It is most obvious in Steve Striffler’s wonderfully readable article (“Neither Here nor There: Mexican Immigrant Workers and the Search for Home”) about people crossing national borders in search of steady work (in Arkansas) and redefining home along the way and in Ilana Feldman’s engaging article (“The Quaker Way: Ethical Labor and Humanitarian Relief”) on the internal struggles of Quakers who traveled far from their homes in the North Atlantic to engage in what they considered “ethical labor” in Gaza, when it was under Egyptian control in the late 1940s. But it is there as well in more subtle form in other articles.

I see it in Price’s account (“Into the Mainstream: Shifting Authenticities in Art”) of “shifting authenticities” in art production and consumption within the world of the African diaspora. The cover photo for this issue is a brilliantly colorful product of such “shifting authenticities,” which refuse to be grounded in a seemingly isolated and unchanging past. I also see crossings in Clarke’s documentation (“Transnational Yoruba Revivalism and the Diasporic Politics of Heritage”) of the expanding transnational world of Yoruba religion, in which geographic locations have multiplied as have Internet sites, at least in the United States. Likewise, I see crossings in Matt Tomlinson’s discussion (“Publicity, Privacy, and ‘Happy Deaths’ in Fiji”) of Anglophone Christian missionaries’ desire to prove the success of their proselytizing in faraway lands and that Fijians who had embraced Christianity found “happy deaths.” These crossings, of course, involve past and present travel of people, their goods, values, and ideas, and a wonderful crisscrossing of beliefs, everyday things, wealth, designs, knowledge, and conceptions of this world as well as of “the world beyond.” And in all of these articles, the notion of “crossing” resonates clearly, its presence noted (albeit sometimes quietly), along with its potential to spread, inspire creativity, and even create instabilities worth considering.
Johnson-Hanks (“Women on the Market: Marriage, Consumption, and the Internet in Urban Cameroon”) and Mains (“Neoliberal Times: Progress, Boredom, and Shame among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia”) offer different examples of crossings, their vibrancy, and their relevance for everyday life, and not just in contemporary Africa. Carefully researched and amply documented, these articles report on existing, desired, ingenious, and very practical connections young, urban Africans make and desire to make with people elsewhere. In Johnson-Hanks’s case, women look very seriously for marriage partners on other continents, using the Internet at cybercafes. In Mains’s case, men pursue a kind of imagined, virtual, and sometimes real solution to the dilemmas of having too much time on their hands because of unemployment, despite decent levels of schooling in Ethiopia.

A literal crossing of a very different sort is recorded in Stefan Helmreich’s unusual article (“An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography”) reflecting on his experience—as a fieldworker within the world of marine biology—traveling deep underwater with scientists for whom such submersion is a way of life. Here Helmreich’s immersion in a very large body of water is a kind of passage or crossing that is just as palpable and audible as it is philosophical in its impulse and reflection.

Even the four review essays included in this issue actively or implicitly involve crossings, between or across different professional worlds, their premises, concerns, and language. Andrew Willford (“ ‘The Truest Belief Is Compulsion’: Othering, the Unconscious, and Ethnographic Inquiry”) sifts through psychoanalytically inclined anthropological scholarship to make a case for psychoanalytic work on Othering having much to offer even the skeptics within the discipline. Marcel Vellinga grounds architecture in Southeast Asian studies and also revisits anthropological conceptions of house and home through architecture in “Anthropology and the Materiality of Architecture.” And, although neither Emily Martin (“Violence, Language, and Everyday Life”) nor Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld (“The Tenacity of Enchanted Things”) dwells on crossings per se, they both offer a texture of everyday life and a palpable material experience of it that can shed light on the many different examples of crossings, the tensions and compromises they sometimes entail, and the periodic desire to make such crossings stable and graspable.

Perhaps it is my own impending crossing that highlights this way of reading so much of this issue of AE. Within days of my writing this foreword in late June, the AE editorship will have moved to the University of California, Davis, and Don Donham will have the pleasure of guiding authors and shaping the journal’s content in his role as editor of American Ethnologist. I take this opportunity to remind readers that this will be my last issue of AE and that I am deeply grateful for the dedicated and inspired work of my own editorial board; our many authors, reviewers, and readers; and especially my warm, knowledgeable, good-humored, and utterly professional staff over the past five years. But I prefer to end my tenure (and this foreword) with some sense of the measured hope I see in crossings.

Crossing entails some kind of intersection, some divide that can be bridged, a space of possible redirection, a momentary mingling of people’s paths not otherwise marked by others. Crossing in this sense is grounded but not oppressive, located in space and time but not necessarily suffocated by location. It is also about making connections and envisioning being influenced, even if to a small degree, by those who have passed by us, crossed alongside us, or even resolutely taken a different turn at the crossing. Much of the late 20th and 21st-century academic language around us seeks, I believe, to capture some aspect of what I call “crossings” here. It is there in talk of hybridity, transnationalism, creolization, diaspora, globalization, glocality, Americanization, agency, and, yes, even multisited ethnography. People have always been on the move and have influenced each other in particular ways as their paths have crossed (whether face-to-face, through reported speech, or even via extensive hearsay or gossip). But to highlight for ourselves and others the analytic consequences of such crossings may be a new perspective, or what may be new is how widespread this analytic impetus is right now. The world has probably always felt both small and quite big, both very close and quite distant. How scholars capture that simultaneity is the tough question, but not an impossible one, as the insightful articles that constitute this issue attest.

[foreword, crossing, (un)employment, compromise, religious work, ethical labor, vision, critique]

VIRGINIA R. DOMINGUEZ
EDITOR