At Home in the World

by Michael D. Jackson

Ours is a century of uprootedness, with fewer and fewer people living out their lives where they are born. At such a time, in such a world, what does it mean to be "at home?" Perhaps among a nomadic people, for whom dwelling is not synonymous with being housed and settled, the search for an answer to this question might lead to a new way of thinking about home and homelessness, exile and belonging. At Home in the World is the story of just such a search. Intermittently over a period of three years Michael Jackson lived, worked, and traveled extensively in Central Australia. This book chronicles his experience among the Warlpiri of the Tanami Desert.
Something of a nomad himself, having lived in New Zealand, Sierra Leone, England, France, Australia, and the United States, Jackson is deft at capturing the ambiguities of home as a lived experience among the Warlpiri. Blending narrative ethnography, empirical research, philosophy, and poetry, he focuses on the existential meaning of being at home in the world. Here home becomes a metaphor for the intimate relationship between the part of the world a person calls "self" and the part of the world called "other." To speak of "at-homeness," Jackson suggests, implies that people everywhere try to strike a balance between closure and openness, between acting and being acted upon, between acquiescing in the given and choosing their own fate. His book is an exhilarating journey into this existential struggle, responsive at every turn to the political questions of equity and justice that such a struggle entails.
A moving depiction of an aboriginal culture at once at home and in exile, and a personal meditation on the practice of ethnography and the meaning of home in our increasingly rootless age, At Home in the World is a timely reflection on how, in defining home, we continue to define ourselves.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Research

202 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

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

[Lindsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jackson is my new hero and I have been voraciously reading everything I can by him. So far I have not been disappointed. He consciously undermines theoretical jargon in this book to highlight the most important aspect of anthropology...people. That said, his approach is far from lacking in theory. Instead, he is in dialogue with existential philosophy an frequently highlights elements of William James, Sartre, and other existential and phenomenological thinkers while reserving the focal point of the discussion for the experience of everyday life for the wonderful warlpiri people he works with in Australia.

[preeya · Rating 5 out of 5]

an incredibly easy and captivating read, devoid of any jargon typically found in anthropological texts. brings to light so many interesting and important beliefs and concepts surrounding home, kinship and the Warlpiri. i cant recommend this enough

[Dayna-Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfect book to finish the year with. I found Michael to be honest, poetic and critical which I wasn’t necessarily expecting from middle aged white anthropologist back in 1995. So many good reflections on what home could mean, how we confine ourselves to the “meanings” of words and how our identity is linked to whatever we understand to be home.

[F]

Read for one of my favorite anthropology classes -- as recommended as a highly specific academic text can be... which isn't a lot.

[Resa Adiljan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A captivating read

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

At Home in the World is a thoughtful, very readable look at the Central Australian Warlpiri through the experiences of anthropologist Michael Jackson. Jackson and his wife, also an anthropologist, spent a year living with the Warlpiri, learning their language and becoming acquainted with their epistemology; particularly with their ideas of "the Dreaming" and "song lines"*, their relationship with place, time, their past, future and each other. The real strength of Jackson's work is his insertion of himself into his depiction of the Warlpiri. He continuously draws attention to how his subjectivity did or could have contributed to his evaluation of the time he spent with the Warlpiri. He comes across as an exceedingly self-reflective and empathetic person whose points are worth considering simply on that merit, even if he were not an academically trained anthropologist. Jackson comes from New Zealand originally but, at the time of the writing of his book lived, worked and raised his family in the United States. This fact probably contributed to one of the main aspects of Warlpiri life and thought that Jackson returns to again and again; namely, the concept of home and belonging. In treating this subject, Jackson also pays sensitive uncondescending attention to the Warlpiri as colonized, marginalized and brutalized people and to his own whiteness and European heritage.

I read this book while contemplating my own impending move across country and out of the only city I have felt truly at home in. A lovely lesson I have taken from At Home in the World is that, even when I live elsewhere, I am now a part of the place I call home and even if I leave them, I am part of the people I love. I take it all with me and leave myself behind. My home is as fluid a thing as my sense of self, continually adapting to circumstance, altering with time and events. This seems comforting to me rather than alarming. Especially as I attempt to feel at home when I am far away from home. A very timely read full of comfort for those of us, increasingly many, who have lived semi-itinerant lives and who love people scattered around the world.



*If you have not heard these terms before, look them up. They are multivalent concepts that I am barely beginning to grasp. I would not explain them with any depth or in ways that would do their complexity of meaning justice.

[Conal · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anthropologist who despairs that anthropology as often practiced and studied today in academic departments is without soul--without humanness, without emotions and feelings, where macro-processes write out the human from the picture and where human lives become simply incidental in the face of larger macro-processes--turn to this book to see how we can revive anthropology that has been overtaken by literary/textual and macro/historical approaches.

I first encountered Jackson when I designed and taught a course on anthropology in West Africa and assigned his book « In Sierra Leone ». The book was written in such a humanistic and poetic way that captures the struggles of individuals in the aftermath of Sierra Leon's long civil war and how those individuals come to re-embed themselves back into life by re-creating living in a war torn place. I was fascinated that an anthropologist spoke to me so deeply, after being inculcated in the kind of cultural anthropology approaches I've encountered in my training. So I went on to look at other books by Jackson and came to his book « At Home in the World ».

« Home » looks at how aborigines of Australia have worked with reclaiming colonised land as their home. It brings into perspective larger existential questions about home and belonging in a world where you can be uprooted and not belonging even though that place is supposed to be your "home".

For me, this book gave me the sense that I could reclaim anthropology for myself (that is, legitimise it for myself) because so many of my own interests in the discipline fall out of the perspectives of the dominant strains of anthropology and yet those interests are legitimately studied and discussed by anthropologists in the small field of phenomenological/existential anthropology.