ExcursionsA village in Sierra Leone. A refugee trail over the Pyrenees in French Catalonia. A historic copper mine in Sweden. The Shuf mountains in Lebanon. The Swiss Alps. The heart of the West African diaspora in southeast London. The anthropologist Michael Jackson makes his sojourns to each of these far-flung locations, and to his native New Zealand, occasions for exploring the contradictions and predicaments of social existence. He calls his explorations “excursions” not only because each involved breaking with settled routines and certainties, but because the image of an excursion suggests that thought is always on the way, the thinker a journeyman whose views are perpetually tested by encounters with others. Throughout Excursions, Jackson emphasizes the need for preconceptions and conventional mindsets to be replaced by the kind of open-minded critical engagement with the world that is the hallmark of cultural anthropology. Focusing on the struggles and quandaries of everyday life, Jackson touches on matters at the core of anthropology—the state, violence, exile and belonging, labor, indigenous rights, narrative, power, home, and history. He is particularly interested in the gaps that characterize human existence, such as those between insularity and openness, between the things over which we have some control and the things over which we have none, and between ourselves and others as we talk past each other, missing each others’ meanings. Urging a recognition of the limits to which human existence can be explained in terms of cause and effect, he suggests that knowing why things happen may ultimately be less important than trying to understand how people endure in the face of hardship. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 63
... never noticed before , nor the subtle interleaving of the sounds of cycles , the cold breeze now stirring , and the pedestrians passing on the sidewalk . Our habitual accounts of the world depend not only on what we see , but on solid ...
... never had since , like adopted kids , they had never inhabited the world whose passing they now la- mented , and had therefore never had the freedom to embrace or re- pudiate it as their fathers had . This was their loss : The inability ...
... never embraced any moral system , and I hope I never will . " Sometime later , when we were talking about the options open to those who lost limbs , loved ones , and livelihoods in the war , Noah again surprised me with his acceptance ...
... never be made up . Thought waits to be woken one day by the memory of what has been missed , and to be transformed into teaching . ( 1978 : 81 ) What we miss , gloss over , censor out , or artificially fill in when we impose narrative ...
... never forget from whom he got his start in life , and with whom his life began . The brothers were all equal , in age and ability . But the brother whose mother first saved the life of the chief had the prior claim . If a person trips ...
Contents
1 | |
2 Of Time and the River the interface of historyand human lives | 22 |
3 Imagining the Powers That Be society versusthe state | 40 |
4 On the Work of Human Hands | 61 |
5 Storytelling Events Violence and the Appearance of the Past | 80 |
6 Migrant Imaginaries with Sewa Koroma in southeast London | 102 |
7 A Walk on the Wild Side the idea of human nature revisited | 135 |
8 From Anxiety to Method a reappraisal | 154 |
9 Despite Babel an essay on human misunderstanding | 174 |
10 On Birth Death and Rebirth | 192 |
11 Quandaries of Belonging home thoughts from abroad | 216 |
12 A Critique of Colonial Reason | 233 |
Notes | 257 |
References | 271 |
Index | 289 |