An Anthropology of North America for the World Society for the Anthropology of North America David Flood and Megan Raschig March 26, 2018 As North Americanists, we share the imperative and capacity to give sense and depth to today’s epistemological and empathic divides, to connect disparate sites of struggle to overarching structural inequalities, and to glimpse how it could be otherwise. As two junior faculty members with precarious positions as visiting associate professor (David) and postdoc (Megan), and respective research among white and Latinx working-class populations on the East and West coasts, we have been asking ourselves what particular interventions an anthropology of North America can and should make in the discipline and beyond. Why might this particular regional grouping be good to think with at this point in history? An obvious but partial answer to the question points to the contributions that in-depth ethnography can make to broader public knowledge by challenging the hegemony of big data, surveys, and interviews. The disciplinary answer is less easy because it requires our ongoing reckoning with the uncertain position of domestic ethnography within anthropology writ large—and the commonality of fieldwork in “our own backyards” as a convenient post- tenure project rather than a first foray. Indeed, the disciplinary contribution of North Americanists is often caught between two poles: First, its unique ability to contextualize the cultural and political home terrain of American anthropology per se (and thus of the inevitably cultural lenses we often import invisibly into our work elsewhere). Second, the historically vexed status of domestic anthropology. A future for an anthropology of North America involves staking a central place in the discipline for these inquiries as full-bodied, wide-ranging endeavors supported by long-term immersive fieldwork (and by institutional !