This chapter uproots the border from the perimeter of the country, from the traditional dyad in which it is embedded and releases it in the urban landscape. The premise is that just as the category of space has been mobilized in the work of geographers such as Doreen Massey, it is possible to transfer this process of destabilization to the concept of the border and the shifting categories of crossers and gatekeepers. Borders are always in the process of being reconfigured, always in the midst of being drawn but also blurred. Through a selection of works by Latinx and Asian American writers the chapter looks at borders not only in their “ordering” dimension but also as sites that allow for reordering strategies of self-definition. These writers occupy a border in process and write from within the border. As a result, the places of resettlement where ethnoracialized and subaltern subjects have been traditionally relocated become repossessed to constitute a privileged standpoint and a self-fashioning from within. This double perspective of urban borders allows both to acknowledge the productivity of boundaries as well as their violation and subversion.

As Anthropology and the world have moved toward and into the new millennium, both have changed, not so radically, perhaps, as some would announce but nonetheless importantly. This revised edition responds to those changes while retaining concerns and concepts which remain salient throughout Anthropology's first century and into the present. Three of these abiding foci are culture, fieldwork, and relevance. Each remains a focus of one of the three chapters: culture in the first chapter, “Substance,” fieldwork in the second chapter, “Method,” and relevance in the third chapter, “Significance.”

Within each chapter, however, new questions, issues, and perspectives are interwoven. In Chapter 1, the concept of culture now leads into dynamic perspectives and issues, such as globalism, feminism, and power. In Chapter 2, fieldwork now leads into questions about reflexivity – the interplay between fieldworker and fieldwork and the larger question of how knower affects the known. In Chapter 3, questions about application now lead into such concerns as Human Rights and the potential for anthropology to shape public issues.

While revisions are called for since the Lens was drafted two decades ago, the first edition anticipated many of the recent developments. For example, the postmodernist emphasis on “construction” continues the caution against “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” and is also cautioned by “the fallacy of misplaced abstractness,” both mentioned in the first edition; that is, culture is a construction, to be sure, but saying so should not deny the primordial power of those phenomena to which we apply labels such as “culture.”

Fall semester began, and I gave the first lecture in an introductory course in anthropology. This course, at a state university, was being taught in the gymnasium and was heavily attended by people whose clothing and demeanor suggested more interest in sports than in study. The class ended, and I asked if there were questions. I was startled when a young man inquired, “What's your hermeneutic?”

“Hermeneutic” in the narrow sense pertains to the study of texts in order to interpret their meaning. This student used the term in a broad sense. He wanted to know the meaning of this course. Perhaps he wanted to know the meaning of anthropology.

The student's question was profound. This book attempts to answer it, at an elementary level. The study of a field like anthropology can be all sound and fury, signifying nothing: exciting facts without sufficient understanding of their meanings. Introductory courses teach such facts. Such courses tell about “bones and stones,” as some students term human fossils and artifacts; the varieties of economies, governments, and family organizations throughout the world; how grammars of language vary as we move out of our Indo-European heritage to exotic cultures. What is meant by all this information?

E. E. Evans-Pritchard gives this account of his fieldwork among the Nuer of Africa:

What is life? What is the essence of human existence? Of what does experience consist?

Anthropology offers a variety of answers to these questions. This variety can be reduced to several major themes. Most prominent, perhaps, is this: Human life should be viewed as a whole – a configuration interwoven of many forces and aspects, all organized by culture. Yet the whole is dynamic, and the study of it fraught with debate.

IT'S REAL! CULTURE BEHELD

Surabaya – hot, crowded, impoverished – is a port city of Java, which is the most populous island of the world's fourth largest nation, Indonesia. In 1962, when I was doing fieldwork in Surabaya, an estimated 75,000 of its million inhabitants were beggars. Most people were undernourished, living on a third the food Westerners eat. Inflation had run away; prices were tripling monthly, and monthly wages were enough for only a few days of each month. The family with whom my wife and I were living, in a shantytown near the railroad tracks, were surviving but barely. Medicine was difficult to obtain; communications were uncertain; transportation, an adventure. The city was dominated by the Communist Party, which at the time was the second largest in Asia and was poised for revolution. Instability, hardships, and anxiety characterized this period titled by Indonesia's President Sukarno, “The Year of Living Dangerously.”