Diagnosing America

For years, anthropology has brought the lives and beliefs of other peoples, often "exotic" tribes, to academic and popular audiences in the West. In Diagnosing America: Anthropology and Public Engagement, standard anthropological methods are brought to bear on social, economic, and political problems in the contemporary United States. The book is a clarion call to anthropologists to help address these critical problems that tear at the fabric of our society.

Individual essays in the volume investigate topics ranging from contested values, community politics, middle-class economics, and workplace culture to the psychophysiological effects of stress on African Americans and the coping mechanisms of Mexican Americans along the border. Debunking the notion of anthropology as a "value-free" science, the authors argue forcefully for an anthropology expressly committed to the values of cultural pluralism and democratic participation.

The book thus distinguishes an "engaged anthropology" in which the analyst is both researcher and citizen and suggests a powerful public policy role for the anthropologist as well as the public intellectual.