Foreword

This section of American Anthropologist was planned as a Q&A about museums from the perspective of anthropologists around the world who work in museums. We are very pleased to have Joseph Weiss's answers to our questions about his work at a major Canadian museum, but we want to mention that we speculate we did not receive a robust number of replies to our queries because the work of an anthropologist is very political and major museums operate in a very public context that is always subject to national politics and often closely scrutinized. If this has indeed played a role, it is highly significant and it signals that work in national museums is even more subject to poltiical pressure than work in universities. We consider this an ongoing concern for the exercise of anthropological academic freedom within the museum setting.