High Anthropology

The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.

Frustrated by her students' performance, her relationships with them, and her own daughter's problems in school, Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology, set out to understand why her students found their educational experiences at a top-tier institution so profoundly difficult and unsatisfying. Through her research and in conversations with her students, she discovered a troubling mismatch between the goals of the university and the needs of students.

Anthropologists have invariably engaged in their discipline as a form of redemption, whether to escape from social restriction, nourish their souls, reform their home polities, or vindicate "the natives". Redeeming Anthropology explores how in pursuit of a secular science sired by the Enlightenment, adherents to a "faith in mankind" have vacillated between rejecting and embracing theology, albeit in concealed and contradictory ways.