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"Jackson, Michael, 1940-"
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The wherewithal of life
The Wherewithal of Life engages with current developments in the anthropology of ethics and migration studies to explore in empirical depth and detail the life experiences of three young men – a Ugandan migrant in Copenhagen, a Burkina Faso migrant in Amsterdam, and a Mexican migrant in Boston – in ways that significantly broaden our understanding of the existential situations and ethical dilemmas of those migrating from the global south. Michael Jackson offers the first biographically based phenomenological account of migration and mobility, providing new insights into the various motives, tactics, dilemmas, dreams, and disappointments that characterize contemporary migration. It is argued that the quandaries of African or Mexican migrants are not unique to people moving between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ worlds. While more intensely felt by the young, seeking to find a way out of a world of limited opportunity and circumscribed values, the experiences of transition are familiar to us all, whatever our age, gender, ethnicity or social status – namely, the impossibility of calculating what one may lose in leaving a settled life or home place; what one may gain by risking oneself in an alien environment; the difficulty of striking a balance between personal fulfillment and the moral claims of kinship; and the struggle to know the difference between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ utopias (the first reasonable and worth pursuing; the second hopelessly unattainable).
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Between one and one another
Michael Jackson extends his path-breaking work in existential anthropology by focusing on the interplay between two modes of human existence: that of participating in other peoples' lives and that of turning inward to one's self. Grounding his discussion in the subtle shifts between being acted upon and taking action, Jackson shows how the historical complexities and particularities found in human interactions reveal the dilemmas, conflicts, cares, and concerns that shape all of our lives. Through portraits of individuals encountered in the course of his travels, including friends and family, and anthropological fieldwork pursued over many years in such places as Sierra Leone and Australia, Jackson explores variations on this theme. As he describes the ways we address and negotiate the vexed relationships between \"I\" and \"we\"—the one and the many—he is also led to consider the place of thought in human life.
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Dilemmas
The ingenious ways dilemmas are addressed in non-Western
traditions Dilemmas explores some of the most
pressing existential problems of our times, from climate change,
political conflict, and social injustice, to balancing one's own
needs against those of others. Pushing back against the tendency to
think of dilemmas as clear-cut binary choices, renowned
anthropologist Michael Jackson shows us some of the ingenious ways
that dilemmas are addressed in non-Western thought and oral
traditions, as well as in Western philosophy. Drawing on examples
from myth, literature, and his extensive ethnographic fieldwork in
West Africa and Aboriginal Australia, each of thirteen chapters
examines a particular dilemma and how it is experienced,
circumvented, or reimagined. From the struggles of the Aboriginal
people of Central Australia for land rights to Walter Benjamin's
harrowing journey across the Pyrenees as he fled German-occupied
France in 1940; from the story of a suburban family in Aotearoa New
Zealand adjusting to life in a commune to the dilemmas of migrants
from the Global South trying to reconcile their search for a better
life with their longing for home-Jackson interweaves philosophical
reflections, insights from his anthropological fieldwork, and
individual life stories. In striking a balance between our
contradictory impulses to be both apart from and together with
others, Jackson makes a case against identitarian essentialism,
showing us how the oppositional thinking through which we often
frame our contemporary dilemmas may be overcome.
eBook
The other shore
In this book, ethnographer and poet Michael Jackson addresses the interplay between modes of writing, modes of understanding, and modes of being in the world. Drawing on literary, anthropological and autobiographical sources, he explores writing as a technics akin to ritual, oral storytelling, magic and meditation, that enables us to reach beyond the limits of everyday life and forge virtual relationships and imagined communities. Although Maurice Blanchot wrote of the impossibility of writing, the passion and paradox of literature lies in its attempt to achieve the impossible--a leap of faith that calls to mind the mystic's dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, and the ethnographer's attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. Every writer, whether of ethnography, poetry, or fiction, imagines that his or her own experiences echo the experiences of others, and that despite the need for isolation and silence his or her work consummates a relationship with them.
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Critique of identity thinking
Recent world-wide political developments have persuaded many people that we are again living in what Hannah Arendt called \"dark times.\" Jackson's response to this age of uncertainty is to remind us how much experience falls outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible. Drawing on such critical thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Karl Jaspers, whose work was profoundly influenced by the catastrophes that overwhelmed the world in the middle of the last century, Jackson explores the transformative and redemptive power of marginalized voices in the contemporary conversation of humankind.
Book
Harmattan
We all experience qualms and anxieties when we move from the known to the unknown. Though our fulfillment in life may depend on testing limits, our faintheartedness is a reminder of our need for security and our awareness of the risks of venturing into alien worlds.
Evoking the hot, dust-filled Harmattan winds that blow from the Sahara to the Gulf of Guinea, this book creatively explores what it means to be buffeted by the unforeseen and the unknown. Celebrating the life-giving potential of people, places, and powers that lie beyond our established worlds,Harmattanconnects existential vitality to the act of resisting prescribed customs and questioning received notions of truth. At the book's heart is the fictional story of Tom Lannon, a graduate student from Cambridge University, who remains ambivalent about pursuing a conventional life. After traveling to Sierra Leone in the aftermath of its devastating civil war, Tom meets a writer who helps him explore the possibilities of renewal. Illustrating the fact that certain aspects of human existence are common to all people regardless of culture and history,Harmattanremakes the distinction between home and world and the relationship between knowledge and life.
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