Tuesday 9/9 @ 6:00 PM

Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

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Anand Pandian, anthropologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University, discusses his new book Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down with Elizabeth Anne Davis.

In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump's harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States and the appeal of Trump’s politics of anger and fear. In the years that followed, he traveled the country seeking out fellow Americans with markedly different social and political commitments, trying to understand the forces that have hardened our suspicions of others. The result is a groundbreaking and ultimately hopeful exploration of the ruptures in our social fabric, as well as an accounting of courageous efforts to rebuild a collective life beyond those ruptures.

The stakes of disconnection have never felt higher. From the plight of migrants and refugees to the climate crisis and the pandemic, much relies on our care and concern for lives and circumstances beyond our own. As Pandian discovers, such empathy is often thwarted by the infrastructure of everyday American life: fortified homes and neighborhoods, bulked-up cars and trucks, visions of the body as a fortress, and media that shut out contrary views. These walls divide insiders and outsiders, making it difficult to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously and to acknowledge and relate to the needs and struggles of others.

Through vivid encounters with Americans of many backgrounds and opinions, Pandian shares tools to think beyond the limits of our current divides. While he recognizes our impasses draw from deep American histories of isolation and segregation, Pandian reveals how strategies of mutual aid and communal caretaking can help to reveal more radical visions for a life in common with others.

Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times and Ayya's Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India. He has served as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective.

Elizabeth Anne Davis is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her ethnographic and archival projects in Greece and Cyprus address knowledge, subjectivity, and social relations in the context of social division. She is author of three books: Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece; Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing; and The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context; as well as articles on economic crisis and suicide, body doubles and body politics, and visual culture.

This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Department of Anthropology, Princeton's Humanities Council, and Labyrinth Books.