Bond Co-edits "The Rise of Trumpism"
On the eve of the presidential inauguration, a top journal in American anthropology has published a collection of essays, co-edited by Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action David Bond, which raises new questions about the rise of Trump and the current state of American politics. The collection features work from leading anthropologists who offer provocative reflections on the culture of Trump and popular misconceptions of class and race today. These wide-ranging essays offer bold new interpretations of solidarity, hate and the future of American democracy.
“As experts on human diversity, cultural anthropologists are alarmed by the weaponization of difference in American politics today," said co-editor Dr. Lucas Bessire, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. "This series aims to advance the conversation on inequality and push against the ways our differences are exaggerated and used for partisan and economic profit.”
Challenging widespread narratives of white working class resentment as the primary explanation for the rise of Trump, this collection is inspired by the staggering diversity of working people today and the lived contradictions in former steel towns, coal mining regions, and the agricultural heartland of America. Drawing from long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the contributors offer fresh insight into the simplification of race and class in election post-mortems and draw new attention to reproductive politics, populism, faith and the challenges of rural life today.
“The elected direction of American democracy demands a new generation of public intellectuals,” said Bond. “In this moment of self-indulgent presidential grandstanding without regard for empirical evidence or human consequence, the insight of serious social research is desperately needed as a vital public good. This collection begins to chart out those scholars and issues that should be part of the larger conversation on President-Elect Trump.”
The Rise of Trumpism also includes two essays by Bennington alumnae, Faye Ginsburg '78 and Judith Butler '75.