The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack

Unsettled by this estrangement from the familiar, he sets out to visit them to learn about their people and their culture to make them more comprehensible. A chance encounter with ceremonial quarters honoring Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands jolts Mack into realizing that millions of people-many, although not all, American citizens-live in what can only be described as a U.S. It’s the “and territories” that, as Doug Mack describes in his new book T he Not-Quite States of America, people often forget. Instead, I view the country as a patchwork actor, one marked by multiple traditions of identities, governed by two major parties who alternate according to a coin flip, and divided into fifty states and territories. For me, the “United States” is never a unitary actor, even if its outward appearance sometimes puts such a mask over its structurally divided government. There is one small region in which I am slightly less guilty than my fellows, however: I think - I hope - that I take the peculiar composite nature of the United States government a little more seriously than the average scholar of international relations. I am at least as guilty of these tendencies as the next social scientist. Even if we manage to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of conventional wisdom in some particular niche, the necessity of producing a steady stream of work that engages our fellows and our blind spots about our own ignorance (compounded by the epistemic arrogance that a professional standing as an “expert” breeds). More fundamentally, however, researchers often proceed from “stylized facts” about parts of the social world that are merely better drawn caricatures of social life than the non-specialist presents. Intellectual fashions provide the most obvious evidence that much of what seems to be deep engagement really arises from fads. Of course, social life being infinite, most of the time we fail at this task. When we flatter ourselves, social scientists preen themselves on exactly those dimensions: interrogating this and wrestling with that.

Viewing social life as a dynamic process should prompt a constant unsettling with the superficially -a disenchantment with received wisdom and estrangement from the familiar.

One of the great thrills of social science should be the constant rediscovery of the world as begging for explanation.

The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack