Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want by Michael D. Jackson

by Michael D. Jackson

The sense that well-being remains elusive, transitory, and unevenly distributed is felt by the rich as well as the poor, and in all societies. To explore this condition of existential dissatisfaction, the anthropologist Michael Jackson traveled to Sierra Leone, described in a recent UN report as the “least livable” country in the world. There he revisited the village where he did his first ethnographic fieldwork in 1969–70 and lived in 1979. Jackson writes that Africans have always faced forces from without that imperil their lives and livelihoods. Though these forces have assumed different forms at different times—slave raiding, warfare, epidemic illness, colonial domination, state interference, economic exploitation, and corrupt government—they are subject to the same mix of magical and practical reactions that affluent Westerners deploy against terrorist threats, illegal immigration, market collapse, and economic recession. Both the problem of well-being and the question of what makes life worthwhile are grounded in the mystery of existential discontent—the question as to why human beings, regardless of their external circumstances, are haunted by a sense of insufficiency and loss. While philosophers have often asked the most searching questions regarding the human condition, Jackson suggests that ethnographic method offers one of the most edifying ways of actually exploring those questions.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Africa

Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Michael D. Jackson (born 1940) is a post-modern New Zealand anthropologist who has taught in the anthropology departments at the University of Copenhagen and Indiana University and is currently a professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School. He holds a BA from Victoria University of Wellington, an MA from the University of Auckland and a PhD from Cambridge University.

Jackson is the founder of existential/phenomenological anthropology, a sub-field of anthropology using ethnographical fieldwork as well as existential theories of being in order to explore modes of being and interpersonal relationships as they exist in various cultural settings throughout the world. In this way he creates an interdisciplinary approach that attempts to understand the human condition by examining the various ways in which this condition manifests itself cross-culturally. In so doing, he concentrates on concrete, individual, lived situations and attempts to recreate and explain these situations as they are perceived and experienced by the other. For example, rather than looking at what mythology or ritual may mean for a group of people, he looks at what mythology or ritual means for an individual existing in the group. In this way he is able to examine "being-in-the-world", a concept fundamental to the field of existentialism. This approach also allows him to address the problem of intersubjectivity, which has as a goal the understanding of the other in terms of the other's individual lifeworld. In this way the other's relationship with the world around them is explained in a manner not previously seen, and is fundamental to the project of understanding intersubjective existence (or the relation between two individual subjects).

A large part of Jackson's methodology is also his account of personal experiences he acquired during his fieldwork. This method of reflexivity is indicative of the current postmodern trend in the field of anthropology, which seeks to contextualize the ethnographer as a subjective participant in the field. This methodology allows him to explain very accurately his relation with the world around him, referencing frequently existential theories in the process.

His influences include: Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Claude Levi-Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, William James, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, Bronislaw Malinowski, Richard Rorty, Paul Ricoeur, Marcel Mauss.

He is in no way related to the famous singer, also named Michael Jackson.

Reviews

[عمرو خيري · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب قادر ع تغيير نظرتك الى العالم واولوياتك فيه.. عن منهج مختلف للنظر الى الوجود. الامل والاحباط والنصيب والبحث الدائم عن مختلف الاشياء لان التطلع من اسباب الحياة.. باختصار مخلّ