I have been a student of American society and culture for many years now, at least implicitly and sometimes quite explicitly. I have conducted ethnographic research in different contexts domestically, and I have lived and worked in many different places in the US--in Alaska, in Wyoming, New York, Missouri, Texas, and California. I have been involved and attended many different universities in these states. I have been a student and scholar of American history, and whenever I have done fieldwork and ethnographic research abroad, I have always looked back to the US and to my own ethnocultural background as an American as a standard of comparison that I wanted to better understand from an objective anthropological point of view. But over the years the interest in American culture and its history, our history, has been motivated by more than merely the desire for setting up standards of anthropological comparison. I have grown increasingly aware of both the strengths and critical weaknesses of our own way of life, and I have become increasingly involved in the outcomes and issues that affect and serve to define our collective future. In part this has been fueled by a desire professionally to be something more or other in the American system than just a perpetual stranger. In part, it is the desire that my own daughter can grow up to live in a better world than the one that I have known. I see many mistakes and wrong-doings continuing to be repeated. I see truth being hidden away and untruths promulgated as a collective fiction designed only to keep the majority of people in line with the status quo. I see perennial contradictions that go unacknowledged, and therefore, because we are failing to learn from our own history, we are bound to repeat the same kinds of mistakes in the future. In other words, as a society, we rest somewhat at this stage beyond the capacity for self-induced reform, as most societies on earth have remained.

I ask myself repeatedly why positive changes that would improve the world, that are logically obvious to everyone, and yet are being pursued by almost no one in any serious manner, are so difficult if not impossible to implement in a practical manner in the world. Such positive idealism is dismissed off-hand as unrealistic, but without really giving such reform a try. I think the answer, based upon my own field experiences, is complicated by several factors--in general, people do not have a clear or systematic kind of knowledge that would make such reform, done in a dramatic manner, effective and constructive. Behind this is a form of ignorance and a kind of prejudice that ignorance breeds, that make the tried and the true the securest path seemingly possible. But I have also come to a conclusion that the majority of people in the world, in spite of their condition, do not really want changes in their world. The majority of people prefer the status quo, and pursue self-interest over collective interest. Critical in the political processes guiding development, and in a way chartering the path of our current and future history, have been a kind of high-powered conspiracy of elite interests who are attempting to control the entire game board of development in a manner that will promote their own interests, at almost any cost. These powerful interests manipulate affairs of state and election results, and sway political decision making in favor of their court. These interests have consistently interfered with coordinated attempts to induce or introduce positive alternative reforms to the American system especially that would favor the collective ove their own profit.

One cannot help living and working in the US any longer without taking notice on some level of basic contradictions that exist within the society, of mixed messages received through the media, of inequalities, prejudices and biases that cross-cut American society, of the massive and growing presence of foreign-born and often foreign-based populations who have not and do not participate in the traditional American class system and who seem to have their own markets and networks. If one has lived here for very many decades, it the direction of all these changes becomes more apparent, when we compare what the US used to be like in the 1940's, 50's and 60's, to today. Over-development in some regions is undeniably, with the destruction of the natural landscape and the ecosystems inevitable, and underdevelopment in other regions. These growing contradictions in American society have lead many, especially older Americans, to question and rethink what has been going on in their brave new world. Largely, the youth of America who are born into this new world do not know or understand these discrepancies that their parents and grandparents must live with. Perhaps they see these new changes as natural and an inevitable part of the world, and perhaps this is preferable and a good thing. But it is evident that our youth of today are not without their own dilemmas and crises of growing up and getting ahead that their parents and grandparents never had to struggle with. They must contend with forms of violence that are now a common facet of our world that simply did not commonly exist in the world of old. They must face a future that is in many ways far more uncertain and insecure than the worlds that their parents and grandparents inherited, and they must learn to deal in a modernized and globalized world that is vastly more complicated in many ways than the simpler worlds of their parents and grandparents.

I myself am of the peak of the Baby Boom generation, and at 45 years of age, it has been my age-specific cohort who has born the brunt of many of these contradictions far more than other groups of Americans. I can call and correspond with my cousins from both sides of the continent, and we all share similar kinds of stories, experiences and life-situations that have unfolded in our lives. We of our age group and ethnocultural background have found ourselves systematically excluded at every turn of a new program or change in policy in our greater society, and we have found a foreign based and increasingly foreign-born America that is far less friendly and understanding than the one we were raised with. We were the children of the sixties and our older brothers were the one's who bore the brunt of Vietnam. We came of age in an America that was disillusioned with the Vietnam war and that was suffering domestically from a kind of economic ennui that was called "stagflation." We got out of colleges and Universities to face the harsher side of Reaganomics and the sudden record levels of unemployment by American's holding degrees. We came out of a military to face affirmative action discrimination in almost every direction we turned. I've been chasing, primarily through academia, the ever receding horizon of the American dream pie since then, and no matter how successful I've been as a scholar and an intellectual, I always find at the next turn an obstacle and a closed set of doors. I have found consistently that illegal aliens in places like Southern California get ahead far quicker than myself, and that these people buy new cars and homes far sooner than the average, educated American counterpart--this is not a matter of personal prejudice, but only of first-hand personal observation. I have found that skilled trades have earned far more wealth than educated professions, and that, to succeed in the New America, one does not even need any degrees or titles behind one's name.

And I know, without a doubt, not as a matter of blind faith but as a matter of disillusioned realism, that I have not been alone in my suffering and plight as an American, though I've been made to believe and feel alone through the social isolation we've endured, increasingly. The shoes I've walked in, the path I've walked down, has been a path of many defeated Americans who, though consistently disenfranchised by consistent polcies that have hurt them at someone elses advantage, continue to have hope and to struggle in whatever manner possible for a better life and for a better sense of America.

My concern in my middle age is no longer over my own misfortune and fate. I cannot bemoan my complete loss of status in America or the prejudice and discrimination that I've had to endure, unfairly, at every turn. My concern now is the kind of America that I will now leave to my daughter and her generation, and to the children that they will eventually bring into the world. And this concern, not a selfish or by any means a narrow sense of self-interest, is the kind of concern over which wars are fought and harsh words give form to harsher actions and realities. American's like myself, not to speak for all Americans, but only for myself, have increasingly a desire to take back, politically and economically, what was ours in the first place and what was stolen from us while we were being mislead by irresponsible politicians and their even less responsible chronies. We are tired of being told what is wrong with the way we were raised or of our own cultural values and institutions. We are tired of the promotion of ethno-political interests, and tolerance of intolerance by alien resident groups, and we are also fed up with systematic policies that are seen increasingly as motivated by pure self-interest and that hurt, politically and structurally, the collective interests of the American people.

I have taken off the white man's burden. If all these foreigners are permitted to come to America to enjoy the American dream pie, then it is they and their children who can now continue to carry this burden. They can serve in the military. They can pay their taxes and dues. They can struggle and fight for America. If I am supposed to carry this mantle, this cangue, any longer, then I recommend to all my social superiors, which seem to be most people, that they can take their turn for a while. I've never bought into the mythology of the white man's burden, as it is itself a racist agenda. Being a white male American, I've never known privilege, advantage or wealth. I've never hated blacks or hispanics, and I am a member of a culture that has taken pride in its democratic values, its sense of tolerance and its forebearance in society.

In spite of these personal feelings that are the reflection of my life experiences and our existential situation in American society, I have attempted in these pages to be as objective and neutral an analysis of American society and cultural patterning as I can achieve at this time as a cross-cultural anthropology. This does not mean that I pull any punches in the name of appearing correct, or that I do not take strongly opinionated and controversial stands on many issues. One cannot address critical and important issues facing American society, like overpopulation, stratification, exploitation, increasing stress and resulting socio-pathy, without taking sides and engendering controversy. One cannot feign neutrality when it comes to serious issues that involve intimately one's own life-interests. If, as an American born in rural America, a veteran, a scholar, and father and a husband, if I have my opinions, my prejudices, my ethnocentrisms, then I am not alone. All people have their prejudices and their contradictions that they must learn to deal with in the world.

Americans, like many people in the world, vote with their feet. They do not, unlike the Chinese I've known, voice their ethnic solidarity in small stone-throwing groups that roam at night. They quietly hang their flags and talk amongst themselves. They wait until election time to make their opinions felt, if they even have any real choice during an election. They put their money where other's mouths are. They do not, in general, fight the hispanicization of America in the same manner that their hispanic counterparts aggressively promote Mexican interests in the US. They retire and put their kids into private schools or adopt home schooling. They go to their churches to find some measure of social solidarity the greater society does not otherwise provide them. They eventually relocate to neighborhoods and areas, increasingly less and isolated, where they can raise their children in schools that still have buses and teach in English and where they can have at least the illusion of the kind of world that they themselves grew up in. If white flight is construed by "non-white" Americans as a sign of prejudice, it is understood by those who choose relocation over continued cultural dislocation as a defensive strategy that has had a long precedence in American history.

If I have an axe to grind, it is a not uncommon feeling that is shared by many average Americans (what is the average anymore anyway?) that something has been fundamentally wrong in the state of the Union, that we have been somehow short changed, and many, many others here have now gained what can be considered unfair and undue advantage at our expense. Many now question whether 9/11 was a necessary reality, whether it might not have been more easily prevented in a society that was more sensibly governed and that actually enforced its own borders in a realistic manner. That opportunity structures have been consistently and deliberately manipulated and systematically interferred with for most Americans is basically undeniable in terms of the life-experiences that many of us have now faced. We are left as a voiceless majority, and largely unrepresented tax-payers, who are expected to do our jobs and always be correct, or else to face joblessness, no matter how tough and unfair things become.

My standards of comparison in my own life experiences have been based upon fieldwork in Malaysia and in China. The US shares affinities and important differences with both societies, and one might be surprised to learn the ways that the US might be alike these other societies, and ways they may even "surpass" us along certain dimensions. Important to me has been to objectify, as an anthropologist, my own cultural standards, values and heritage, in order to understand both this and the realities and implications of other cultures as well. This interest has extended over two decades now, and has come to take into a greater account "An Anthropology of the Self" versus a preoccupation of an "Anthropology of the Other" that has developed in American Academia, largely as a response to the issues referenced in this preface and centrally dealt within this collection of essays. The point is that if we are to genuinely know the other, we must first and also know ourselves, and self-knowledge in a sense comes through knowing others, and vice-versa. An anthropology of the self is not "reflective" or narcissistic Anthropology--it is not even reflexive anthropology as this has been promulgated in its various "post-structural" ways. It is an attempt rather, I would say, at self-realization and self-objectification, of making explicit and clear what otherwise remains implicit and therefore vague. And in this way we cannot clearly separate the cultural from the psychological sense of ourselves or our identities as social beings. It is making the strange familiar, by making the familiar seem strange.

The theoretical framework I have adopted in these essays are what I have called the anthropological construction of reality. Unfortunately, the constructivist paradigm has received a bad rep and has been misrepresented, as usually, because few people really bother to read their sources. I have been engaged in the Anthropology of Knowledge, not from a critical standpoint derived from comparative literature, but from a standpoint of scientific objectivity. I therefore see this framework as directly leading to and relating to the problems of human psychology and behavior, human cognition and the cognitive sciences, human language and linguistics, social patterning and structure, as well as the problems of history, social ethics, and human cultural patterning. In other words, constructionism is in my books not the critique and end of science, but the beginning of a more objective science that should lead to better scientific constructions. Therefore, if I refer to the concept of race as this is articulated in American society as being a social construction and an ethnocultural reification, by saying this in this manner makes the patterning of racial stratification and articulation no less real in American than if I called race a genuine or "valid" scientific category, which it has not been for almost forty years now except in the minds and paperwork of government officials and administrative bureaucrats.