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Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology Kindle Edition

by Michael Jackson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 5 ratings
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Michael Jackson’s Lifeworlds is a masterful collection of essays, the culmination of a career aimed at understanding the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. Seeking the truths that are found in the interstices between examiner and examined, world and word, and body and mind, and taking inspiration from James, Dewey, Arendt, Husserl, Sartre, Camus, and, especially, Merleau-Ponty, Jackson creates in these chapters a distinctive anthropological pursuit of existential inquiry. More important, he buttresses this philosophical approach with committed empirical research. Traveling from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone to the Maori in New Zealand to the Warlpiri in Australia, Jackson argues that anthropological subjects continually negotiate—imaginatively, practically, and politically—their relations with the forces surrounding them and the resources they find in themselves or in solidarity with significant others. At the same time that they mirror facets of the larger world, they also help shape it. Stitching the themes, peoples, and locales of these essays into a sustained argument for a philosophical anthropology that focuses on the places between, Jackson offers a pragmatic understanding of how people act to make their lives more viable, to grasp the elusive, to counteract external powers, and to turn abstract possibilities into embodied truths.
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  1. Print length
    360 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    The University of Chicago Press
  5. Publication date
    November 22, 2012
  6. File size
    921 KB
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Editorial Reviews

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 “Lifeworlds is an extraordinary book, remarkable for its depth, scholarship, and lightness of touch. It puts the whole question of anthropology’s relation to philosophy in a new light. The framing of these essays by the first and last chapter as well as the experience of reading them as a series with the rippling effect of themes that are developed through different kinds of stories and through different voices makes one realize that Michael Jackson is not only a great ethnologist, he is also a major theoretician of anthropological knowledge. Not many people could have taken up such profound issues while wearing their scholarship so lightly.” 

-- Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University Published On: 2012-04-26

“Lifeworlds comprises a stellar set of essays that advances a convincing testament to the value and pressing need for an existential anthropology. I know of no other text that advances such a statement in such rich and informed terms. The writing is lively and engaging throughout, and the scholarship on which the text rests is strong and well informed. Michael Jackson, one of the leading and most innovative anthropologists today, draws on a wealth of anthropological, literary, and philosophical resources to make his case on the matter. Part anthropological inquiry, part philosophy, Lifeworlds stands out in the ranks of anthropological tomes published of late.” -- Robert Desjarlais, Sarah Lawrence College

“This book offers a salutary reminder that the worth of a text is measured by the extent to which it is true to its author and to that of which he or she writes. That one of our number can write so well, and with such evident sincerity, should warm the hearts of all of us.”
― Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“Michael Jackson is an extremely productive ethnographer, a serious reader of phenomenological and existential philosophy, and a remarkable writer at a level that one rarely sees in anthropology. Lifeworlds, unsurprisingly, is no exception. The several essays included here fit into an impressive whole that set out a compelling case for a type of ethnography of which Jackson is one of the masters. The writing is strong and the critical reflections impressive. This book defines an approach to anthropology that is resonant enough to challenge the leading models of our time.” -- Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University

About the Author

Michael Jackson is Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B009XE64YA
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ The University of Chicago Press (November 22, 2012)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 22, 2012
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 921 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 360 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 5 ratings

About the author

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Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson

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Michael Jackson is a New Zealand-born writer, presently Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He has published over thirty books of poetry, fiction, ethnography and memoir, and is internationally renowned for his innovations in ethnographic writing, his pioneering use of phenomenological and pragmatist methods in anthropology, and his contributions to existential anthropology and religious studies. In New Zealand, he is best known for his poetry and creative non-fiction (Latitudes of Exile was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1976, and Wall won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 1981). Since 1969 he has conducted extensive fieldwork among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, the Warlpiri and Kuku-Yalanji of Australia, and with African migrants in Europe. Perhaps the most central question in his work has been how human beings everywhere seek, separately and in concert with others, to strike a balance between a sense of closure and openness, between acting and being acted on, between acquiescing in the given and shaping their own destinies. Most of his books explore the ways in which inherited customs, habits and dispositions both constrain activity and consciousness and are reconstructed, resisted and replenished in quotidian practices, rites, narratives, and unspoken experience. In his view, one of the most urgent tasks of anthropology is to close the gap between theoretical and practical knowledge, and between the academy and the wider world, exploring the immediate, intersubjective underpinnings of abstract forms of understanding, disclosing the subject behind the act, and the vital activity that lies behind the fixed and seemingly final form of things. At the same time as one explores and discloses connections between worldviews and lifeworlds, one endeavors to test and critique one’s views—whether personal, theoretical, ethical or political—through an engagement with others. One’s goal is never absolute knowledge, but rather a deepened pragmatic understanding of the possibilities of human coexistence in a pluralistic world.

Customer reviews

5 out of 5 stars
5 out of 5
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Top reviews from the United States

S. Soloff
5.0 out of 5 stars I confess.
Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2014
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I am working my way through chapter one by going to Starbucks with my Kindle and notebook writing down words and concepts that are unfamiliar to me. I'm giving this book five stars because the amount of thinking I have had to do and the fact that I am unashamedly confessing to ignorance and wish to expand my understanding of the way that Mr. Jackson views anthropology is worth all the stars. My academic exposure to anthropology was as an undergrad at UCLA and my professor had us read Marvin Harris, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, etc. In addition I read anthropological journalson my own and am fascinated by the lives of people that I see as distinctly different than me. I understand that nowdays one doesn't need to live among indigenous groups and that any group of people who identify themselves as part of a non traditional society (whatever that means to you) and share similar views and lifestyles can be observed and written about.

Mr. Jackson draws on philosophical concepts, compares them one to the other, questions what it means for any of us who carry our own secret society of self and probes into how we manage to live in our own self world and still be part of a specifice culture, or as he calls it,"lifeworlds," a term borrowed from the philosopher Habermas. I am taking it as a personal challenge to read and understand Mr. Jackson's ideas. And I'm only on Chapter one! Will appreciate any comments, as I'm sure my own are half-baked.
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Will Boone
5.0 out of 5 stars More existential insight and well-crafted prose from Michael Jackson
Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2012
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This particular book covers a wide range of topics: embodiment, violence, technology, and many others. It gives a better sense of Jackson's commitments as a scholar than do his monographs from the last several years which tend more toward creative non-fiction. As always, however, Jackson is committed to the idea that ethnographic writing is better suited for awakening existential echoes than it is for advancing academic theories.
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Travis
5.0 out of 5 stars Difficult but worthwhile
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 1, 2013
Verified Purchase
A really good collection of papers on an interesting approach to anthropology. The more theoretical papers at the beginning are hard especially if the reader is unfamiliar with existentialism; they're quite hard if you are familiar. It is worth persevering. The fieldwork papers are very clearly written and it is easy to see what Jackson is trying to do in appying an existential interpretation to ethnography. The papers on Australian Aboriginals are very good in being good ethnology and good at illustrating how his approach works. It is often conceptually easy to see how people in a different culture see the world but not often easy to stand in their shoes; Jackson's existential approach enables that latter difficulty to be tackled.
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