Distinctions

Anthropologists and sociologists rarely study people whose identities are constructed in distinction from, in opposition to, to their own: country-westerners dance to a song that proclaims, “I ain't no doctor, don't got no Ph.D., but when you talk about lüüüüv, come to me!”; I, in turn, was jealous that they could so easily and straightforwardly lay claim to being “typical red-blooded Americans,” while no one would ever call me a real down home, plain-folks American. I worried that I was the wrong person to study regular Americans. Even if the Buffalo Club was not “really” cowboy culture, it was all foreign to me, an urban, bi-coastal, bespectacled, Jewish, Ph.D. candidate from a long line of communists, atheists, liberals, book-readers, ideologues, and arguers. I could not trade on my unwholesome background if I were running for political office. Some of my earliest fond memories are of my communist grandpa telling me about the joy of unalienated labor as we carefully made beds and cleaned dishes, or railing about the Vietnam War, or sitting at his little desk writing letter after letter to his local newspaper.

Theoretically, I know there is no such thing as a “mainstream American” – mainstream by ethnicity, class, race, region, religion, and everything else – and if there were, the mainstream would either have to be broad enough to include someone like me, or else it would represent only a small minority of Americans. Nevertheless, whatever the statistical reality, the people portrayed here laid a more firm claim on normalness than I.