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Savages, Deplorables, And The Promise Of Anthropological Ethnography, Andrew M. Gardner

All Faculty Scholarship

This short essay describes a longitudinal ethnographic project on which I am embarking with successive coteries of students here at the University of Puget Sound. The essay starts with a discussion of the latent power of ethnography to cross thresholds of difference on a mission of empathy and understanding. I tie this mission to the legacy and definition of anthropological ethnography. In the second section of the essay, I discuss the fractious nature of the American polity, and the caricatures of rural Americans that I've encountered in the urban and academic environs of the west coast. In the final …