Suchergebnisse

Worlds Within and Worlds Without -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- I -- As Through a Glass Darkly -- Notes from Underground -- It's Other People Who Are My Old Age -- Empedocles in Auckland -- Myself Must I Remake -- Blue Notes -- To and Fro Within the World and Up and Down Upon It -- Heart of Darkness -- Transitions -- II -- In Sierra Leone -- Dankawali -- Firawa and the Ethnography of Events -- Return to Cambridge -- III -- From Anxiety to Method -- A Storyteller's Story -- Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky -- I Am Another -- The Philosopher Who Would Not Be King -- Wilderness -- Uppsala -- IV -- Indiana -- Cape York -- An Etiology of Storms -- After Indiana -- V -- Return to Sierra Leone -- Migrant Imaginaries -- Existential Mobility and Multiple Selves -- The Limitrophe -- On the Work and Writing of Ethnography -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.

"This book draws on philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the meanings and affordances of friendship-a relationship just as significant as, yet somehow different from, kinship and love. Renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson explores the political and personal resonances of friendship, and the tensions between them-in the thought of philosophers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Arendt, in the biography of the Indian historian Brijen Gupta, and in the oral narratives of a Kuranko storyteller, Keti Ferenke Koroma. He offers reflections on childhood friends and imaginary friends, lifelong friendships and friendships with animals; and ruminates on the complications of friendship between ethnographers and their interlocutors in the field. Blending memoir, theory, ethnography, and fiction, Jackson shows us how the elective affinities of friendship transcend culture, gender, and age, and offer us perennial means of taking stock of our lives and getting a measure of our own self-worth"--

In this book, renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson draws on philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the meanings and affordances of friendship—a relationship just as significant as, yet somehow different from, kinship and love. Beginning with Aristotle's accounts of friendship as a political virtue and Montaigne's famous essay on friendship as a form of love, Jackson examines the tension between the political and personal resonances of friendship in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the biography of the Indian historian Brijen Gupta, and the oral narratives of a Kuranko storyteller, Keti Ferenke Koroma. He offers reflections on childhood friends, imaginary friends, lifelong friendships, and friendships with animals. He ruminates particularly on the complications of friendship in the context of anthropological fieldwork, exploring the contradiction between the egalitarian spirit of friendship on the one hand and, on the other, the power imbalance between ethnographers and their interlocutors.Through these stories, Jackson explores the unpredictable interplay of mutability and mutuality in intimate human relationships, and the critical importance of choice in forming friendship—what it means to be loyal to friends through good times and bad, and even in the face of danger. Through a blend of memoir, theory, ethnography, and fiction, Jackson shows us how the elective affinities of friendship transcend culture, gender, and age, and offer us perennial means of taking stock of our lives and getting a measure of our own self-worth

Anthropologist Michael Jackson predicates his intellectual autobiography, Worlds Within and Worlds Without, on the view that works and lives are intimately entangled. Through a skillful interweaving of personal and ethnographic descriptions, he focuses on the imaginative and practical ways human beings negotiate the space between worlds they call their own and worlds they regard as lying beyond their immediate purview. Whether the worlds that elude our empirical grasp are identified with divinities or the dead, ether or earth, history or myth, the Internet, or the nation state, we experience them ambivalently, as potential sources of wellbeing and as possible threats to our very existence. Closing ourselves off from the world is not an option, for our humanity depends on the ties that bind us to significant others, and others to us. As Jackson shows, the relationship between the familiar and the foreign is not only an existential issue that all human beings address in one way or another. It is a methodological issue for anthropologists concerned with the complementarity of individual and collective perspectivesethnos and anthropos, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective

Philosophy and anthropology have long debated questions of difference: rationality versus irrationality, abstraction versus concreteness, modern versus premodern. What if these disciplines instead focused on the commonalities of human experience? Would this effort bring philosophers and anthropologists closer together? Would it lead to greater insights across historical and cultural divides? In As Wide as the World Is Wise, Michael Jackson encourages philosophers and anthropologists to mine the space between localized and globalized perspectives, to resolve empirically the distinctions between

How are we to think of works of art' Rather than treat art as an expression of individual genius, market forces, or aesthetic principles, Michael Jackson focuses on how art effects transformations in our lives. Art opens up transitional, ritual, or utopian spaces that enable us to reconcile inward imperatives and outward constraints, thereby making our lives more manageable and meaningful. Art allows us to strike a balance between being actors and being acted upon. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia and West Africa, as well as insights from psychoanalysis, religious studies, literature, and the philosophy of art, Jackson uses an extraordinary range of references'from Bruegel to Beuys, Paleolithic art to performance art, Michelangelo to Munch'in exploring the symbolic labor whereby human beings make themselves, both individually and socially, out of the environmental, biographical, and physical materials that affect them: a process that connects art with gestation, storytelling, and dreaming and illuminates the elementary forms of religious life

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, Harmattan connects existential vita

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

Imagining Firawa -- Fathers and sons -- Forty days -- Scenes from a marriage -- Smoke and mirrors -- Things hidden since the foundation of the world -- The reopening of the gate of effort -- Something's missing -- The politics of storytelling -- The road to Kabala -- Their eyes were watching God -- Albitaiya -- The year of supernatural abundance -- Strings attached -- The shape of the inconstruable question -- Not to find one's way in a city -- Coda