Keen On

From suburban swimming pools and SUVs to White Lives Matter rallies, the Johns Hopkins anthropologist Anand Pandian has been exploring the everyday walls of American life. In his new book, Something Between Us, Pandian travels across the United States in his search to both climb and overcome these walls. What he finds is a nation tragically at war with itself. Through intimate portraits of communities divided by race, class, and ideology, Pandian reveals how ordinary public spaces have become literal battlegrounds for identity and belonging. From gated suburban neighborhoods in Florida to online echo chambers, his ethnographic journey exposes the invisible barriers that shape American social life. But he concludes with a degree of optimism. We can overcome those walls, he says, with the kind of collective political action that brings people of different ideological persuasions together.1. Anthropological Method Reveals America's Hidden Divisions"Ethnographic research is based on the idea that the best way of