The enormous significance of this book lies in great part with the central question it poses: What does it mean to write about culture in our time? "These days," Rosaldo writes in the preface," questions of culture seem to touch a nerve because they quite quickly become anguished questions of identity." Situating his work within the context of the ongoing debate about the nature of "cultural literacy" and renewed interest in redefining American national identity, Rosaldo argues for the need to pluralize precisely these cultural categories of "literacy" and "identity." The task of social analysis is not one of reinstituting the privilege of certain modes of knowing and being at The expense of others; rather, it entails the discovery of those other identities and literacies that have been historically repressed.