The Larger World

I live in the state of Indiana, in a small city about an hour northwest of Indianapolis. To many people on the coasts of the United States, I might as well live on Mars. Residents of New York and California tend to regard the Midwest as a featureless wasteland, and I have spent a good deal of time at anthropology conferences explaining to other Americans exactly where Indiana is. I was surprised, then, when my first informant among the Danish Jews told me he knew all about the place. He had a degree in pharmacy from Purdue University and was able to describe the building where I work in considerable detail. Another informant had relatives in nearby Lafayette, whom she asked me to look up when I got back to the United States. Others referred me to relatives elsewhere in the Midwest, and still others told me about traveling through my area on trips across the United States. It became obvious very early in my field-work that America was familiar territory to almost all of the people I was interviewing, a place they associated with family, education, work, and tourism. They knew my home far better than I knew theirs, and indeed they had sometimes seen more of it than I had myself. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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