The interviews published in this issue of American Anthropologist seek to contribute to the global conversations that the World Anthropologies section has been fostering in recent years. We may not all agree about whether globalization is a recent phenomenon, but I am convinced that we all agree that social issues of a global sort require global dialogues that also take the local into account. To that end, the interviews I conducted with Chandana Mathur and Soumendra Patnaik, and that AA includes here, focus on how social issues, intellectual trajectories, and scientific institutions are intertwined, and shape and reshape global connections. These interviews not only ask about the role of anthropology in responding to contemporary challenges but also ask how our discipline itself is being challenged and how it responds to those challenges. The accounts Chandana Mathur and Soumendra Patnaik provide capture a good deal of such social and disciplinary transformations. My aim in interviewing them was to explore aspects of both their personal trajectories and their academic work that epitomize anthropology's efforts to engage in these global issues. What is more, as the attentive reader may notice, in interviewing them I sought to explore the possibility that anthropology might make some progress in such global conversations by adopting a more symmetrical attitude when it comes to institutional and epistemological practices.