Culture and Diversity in the United States
This book addresses the standard topics of race, ethnicity, class, and gender but goes much further by engaging seriously with issues of language, religion, age, health and disability, and region and geography. It also considers the intersections between and the diversities within these categories. Eller presents students with an unprecedented combination of history, conceptual analysis, discussion of academic literature, and up-to-date statistics. The book includes a range of illustrations, figures and tables, text boxes, a glossary of key terms, and a comprehensive bibliography. New to this edition are updated numerical and statistical data, as well as discussions of sociopolitical developments over the past decade, including
• The controversies over the 2020 census itself (e.g., the “citizenship question,” funding for the census)
• The #MeToo movement
• The Black Lives Matter movement, Critical Race Theory, and race-related police violence
• The rise in racial, ethnic, and religious hate crimes, for example, anti-Semitism and anti-Asian bias (the latter largely resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic)
• White nationalism and the “Great Replacement” conspiracy
• Anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes and legislation (“don’t say gay” laws, book banning, denial of “gender-affirming” treatment for minors)
• General immigration facts and policies (e.g., family separation), the proposed border wall, etc.
This book is ideal for introductory and advance level courses in anthropology, American Studies, and across the social sciences.
Jack David Eller is a cultural anthropologist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology with Woxsen University in Hyderabad, India. His research interests include religion, psychological anthropology, violence, and ethnicity and diversity. An experienced teacher and author, his other books for Routledge include Cultural Anthropology: Global Forces, Local Lives; Introducing Anthropology of Religion; and Psychological Anthropology for the 21st Century.