"Theorizing the Hybrid" is a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore that critically engages the metaphor of hybridity as it is currently employed in the analysis of narratives and discourses, genres and identities, material forms and performances. Authors in the fields of folklore, cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, literary history, ethnomusicology, and comparative literature reflect on the nature, value, limitations, and dangers of hybridity as both an analytic model and a social practice. Articles consider topics ranging from the premodern to the cybernetic, the biological to the political, the highly localized to the transnational.