The Stakes of an Anthropology of the United States

Within anthropology itself there has not existed a large community of dense, vital critical discussion of work in the United States to give it sustained, systematic meaning. . . . So in the absence of anthropologists themselves defining a distinctive place for this body of research, the work itself becomes fragmented and is dispersed as case studies to be given their significance by other constituencies that more powerfully or more normally define the debates and discussions that articulate what the United States is as a social and cultural phenomenon. . . . Anthropologists join these discussions from the margins of their discipline and through terms usually not of their own making. They have a single point to make, a case to offer, however provocative or important, but rarely have they thought through the stakes of an anthropology of the United States (or of France or Britain) for the project of anthropology itself.