Ethnographic Writing about American Culture

Abstract

Anthropologists have done more research in the United States in the last dozen years than in the entire previous history of the discipline-far more, perhaps twice as much. Some reasons for this boom may be paradigmatic: heightened interdisciplinarity and genre-blurring all through the social sciences and humanities, postcolonial critiques of First-World/Third-World distinctions foundational to an older anthropology, new forms of older concerns about relevance and application. At least as important, however, are more down-to-earth disciplinary pragmatics: growing numbers of anthropologists in a period of declining transnational access and funding. Anthropologists worked at home in the past, of course, and by 1980, a considerable body of work had slowly accumulated.2 The pace has tremen