March 19, 1999

The Anthropologist's Public-Image Problem

By MICAELA di LEONARDO

I hit the wall this year when the guy from 20/20 called.

I am a cultural anthropologist who specializes in gender, race, political economy, cultural theory, and the American past and present. (Yes, Virginia, anthropologists do study the United States, they always have, but that's another story.) I can explain the 1970s' rise and the 1980s' decline of the ideology of white ethnicity -- the sudden popular

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