When it comes to what’s happening in other places, Americans will talk about “tribes,” “regimes,” “radicalization,” “religious extremists,” “ethnic conflicts,” “local superstitions,” or “rituals.” Anthropology is for other people, not Americans. America is supposedly this “shining city upon a hill,” a term Ronald Reagan famously popularized, adapting it from the biblical story of the Sermon on the Mount. But when I would see evangelists prophesying the end times and woe unto the nonbelievers, when I watched a Westboro Baptist Church demonstration, when I saw a gun show with bikini-clad ladies
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