Something Between Us
An anthropologist's quest to understand the deep social and political divides in American society, and the infrastructures that must change to overcome them.
In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump's harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States, the appeal of that politics of anger and fear. In the years that followed, he crisscrossed the country—from Fargo, North Dakota to Denton, Texas, from southern California to upstate New York—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 Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, a groundbreaking and ultimately hopeful exploration of the ruptures in our social fabric, and courageous efforts to rebuild a collective life beyond them.
The stakes of disconnection have never been higher. From the plight of migrants and refugees to the climate crisis and the recent pandemic, so much turns on the care and concern we can muster for lives and circumstances beyond our own. But 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 an armored fortress, and media that shut out contrary views. Home and road, body and mind: these interlocking walls sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it difficult to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.
Through vivid encounters with Americans of many kinds—including salesmen, truck drivers, police officers, urban planners, and activists for women's rights and environmental justice—Pandian shares tools to think beyond the twists and turns of our bracing present. While our impasses draw from deep American histories of isolation and segregation, he reveals how strategies of mutual aid and communal caretaking can help to surface more radical visions for a life in common with others, ways of meeting strangers in this land as potential kin.
—Jason De León, author of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, winner of the National Book Award
"A brave book tackling some of our most contentious political issues through, at times, harrowing fieldwork. It accomplishes the rare feat of balancing the intellectual acuity of ethnographic study with the wit and urgency of journalism. I was left both unnerved and inspired to action."
—Bradley Garrett, author of Bunker: What It Takes to Survive the Apocalypse
"A brilliant and vivid application of cultural theory, ethnography, and material culture that helps us see our world in a new way. It shows how and why we choose to segregate ourselves from those who challenge or discomfort us by using barriers that are cultural, legal, and physical. It explains the current United States better than almost any book I have read in the past decade."
—Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy
"Anand Pandian offers a profound interrogation of the walls—literal and figurative—that divide American life. Through sharp and considerate ethnography, he reveals the insidious ways fear and exclusion shape the divisions of our daily interactions. This essential work invites readers to dismantle these barriers, envisioning new structures for humanity built on mutuality, openness, and repair."
—Jovan Scott Lewis, author of Violent Utopia Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa
"This is not a book, to start with, but an experience. I would rank it as some of the best writing by just about anyone lately about the ways our environments, our infrastructures, and our politics keep us divided, topics that are not easy to write about well or at all. I am glad Anand Pandian did that work; he created something truly wonderful as a result."
—Joshua Reno, co-author of Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest
"In Something Between Us, Anand Pandian turns his ethnographic method on the American body politic. Applying his 'anthropology of the open mind'to the concrete ways we separate ourselves from each other, Pandian explores how our collective material culture generates and sustains social, political, and ontological division. This is a remarkable book, notable for its tough questions, even-handed rigor, and indefatigable compassion. It offers a piercing, necessary, and humane look deep into contemporary American culture."
– Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization
"Something Between Us provides a beautifully rendered account of the walls, made of either mortar or mistrust, that shape our lives. In a moment of deep divisiveness in America, it offers an urgently needed account of how we might reimagine our communities in ways that anchor us to each other and our own humanity."
—HahrieHan, author of Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church and co-author of Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America
"Something Between Us is a profound and fascinating exploration of the fortresses we've built around ourselves in America—in our communities and in our minds—and a rousing call to a more hopeful vision of collective life."
—Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You
