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 34
... 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 ...
... walk stretches of this road that I will not live to see. Now I take in the landscape around me: a seemingly boundless ... walking on them, strangers whose preoccupations are very different from my own, and I do not know when and how my ...
... walking the streets, taking in the sights, and catching up on what we had been doing since we last saw each other in Sydney seven years before. As I listened to him talk about his sound recordings of bells in various parts of Europe, I ...
... walking to Portbou in Spain through the railway tunnel or over the steep ridge along which the border ran. Only a week or ten days before Benjamin tried to reach Spain, several other Jewish refugees—among them Lion and Marta Feucht ...
... walking for almost three hours , they reached a clearing at which Benjamin announced he intended to sleep for the night and wait for the others to rejoin him in the morning . Fearing for his safety , Fittko tried to persuade him against ...
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 |