Although the NYC MRC has the potential to assist the health care system in the event of a disaster, NYC hospitals will need clarification of the clinical and legal issues involved in the use of MRC volunteers for patient care.

In Native Tours, Erve Chambers (2000) challenged anthropologists to move beyond studying local peoples ("hosts") as "passive recipients of a touristic dynamic." This issue of Practicing Anthropology builds on three sessions I organized for the 2004 and 2005 SfAA annual meetings, in which contributing anthropologists shared aspects of their collaborative work with local peoples. These partners were actively involved in considering, debating, exploring, and guiding tourism development in small towns, rural regions, and hamlets in the United States, Africa, Mexico, Nepal, and Ireland.

It is August 2007, and I am sitting a few rows up and to the side in a partially darkened auditorium, looking down on a rectangle of folding tables. Beside and behind me are perhaps a hundred museum staff members. Around the tables, men and women in business attire gather, arranging folders, notepads, and laptops. Two fiddle with the PowerPoint projector, while others wait, sitting quietly, or whispering to a neighbor. The meeting is called to order, introductions made, the printed agenda handed around, and protocols for commenting are laid out. With the two teams now facing each other, presentations by the contracted design firm begin, with points raised by and clarified for the museum team in between. Today's presentations explain the firm's general design plans, their own team leaders' duties and deadlines for exhibit content development and design production, and preparatory assignments and deadlines for Museum staff in its anthropology and history sections for their respective content development deadlines.

Collaboration with indigenous peoples has been a hallmark of ethnology since the mid-19th century, and throughout the 20th century numerous anthropologists acknowledged indigenous and local cultural specialists as co-producers of project results and knowledge. In recent decades, converging and co-mingling influences from inside and outside of anthropology - including action anthropology, community heritage studies, and passage of the Native American Graves, Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) - have led increasingly to wide-ranging kinds of consultations and partnered collaborative and participatory projects being conducted within or from museums.

In 1983, I began a one-year position as a regional scholar-in-residence for the Tennessee Community Heritage Project (TCHP), a state-wide project of the Tennessee Humanities Council (TCH, now Humanities Tennessee, Inc.), working with communities in diverse areas in 19 counties in eastern Tennessee. That pilot year turned into three, and then into a long string of THC grant-funded consultations and community heritage projects, as I began my Ph.D. studies. The first TCH grant project director I worked with was Linda Caldwell, my co-author. Linda is a founder and executive director for a non-profit heritage tourism consortium, which now plans and implements cultural, arts, and heritage grants and public programming.