Background
Michael Jackson was born in 1940 in Nelson, New Zealand.
1961
Kelburn, Wellington 6012, New Zealand
Michael Jackson studied at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1961.
1967
Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand
Michael Jackson earned a Master of Arts degree with honors from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 1967.
1972
The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom
Michael obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1972 from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
2016
752 36 Uppsala, Sweden
Michael D. Jackson's talk at the symposium "Changing Epistemologies and Life" at Uppsala University, 7 October 2016.
(Poet and anthropologist Michael Jackson brings to this st...)
Poet and anthropologist Michael Jackson brings to this study of the folktales of the Kuranko people of Sierra Leone a sensitivity to the philosophical nuances of literature.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0253304717/?tag=2022091-20
1982
(Ours is a century of uprootedness, with fewer and fewer p...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822325381/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(This collection of poems is lucid and simple. They are sh...)
This collection of poems is lucid and simple. They are short poems with a variety of settings, including Australia, Sudan, Turkey and New Zealand. The author writes of brief incidents or sudden memories which pose paradoxes or flash illuminations. This collection of poems is lucid and simple. They are short poems with a variety of settings, including Australia, Sudan, Turkey and New Zealand. The author writes of brief incidents or sudden memories which pose paradoxes or flash illuminations. This collection of poems is lucid and simple. They are short poems with a variety of settings, including Australia, Sudan, Turkey and New Zealand. The author writes of brief incidents or sudden memories which pose paradoxes or flash illuminations.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1869401581/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(In the annals of New Zealand crime, the name Pawelka is p...)
In the annals of New Zealand crime, the name Pawelka is practically synonymous with anarchy. The Pawelka manhunt was the most sensational news story of 1910, and the mystery of his escape from prison and subsequent disappearance has never been solved. Who was Joe Pawelka, and how might one explain the hold this self-styled "man against the world" has had on our country's consciousness? In recounting the story of this disaffected son of Moravian immigrants, Michael Jackson intercuts recollections of his own life in small town New Zealand, deftly creating an allegory about the ways in which the past shapes the present, and the known blurs with the imagined to determine the nature of truth.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0864693079/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(The postmodern opposition between theory and lived realit...)
The postmodern opposition between theory and lived reality has led in part to an anthropological turn to "dialogic" or "reflexive" approaches. Emphasizing the intersubjective encounter over objective descriptions of the whole historical and contemporary situation of a given people, he illustrates the power and originality of existential anthropology through a series of vignettes from his fieldwork in Sierra Leone and Australia. An award-winning poet, novelist, and anthropologist, Jackson offers a timely critique of conventions that dull our sense of the links between academic study and lived experience.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226389464/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(Hannah Arendt famously argued that politics are best unde...)
Hannah Arendt famously argued that politics are best understood as a power relationship between private and public realms. And storytelling, she argued, creates a vital bridge between these realms, a place where individual passions and shared perspectives can be contested and interwoven. In The Politics of Storytelling revised in this 2nd edition with a new preface and design anthropologist Michael Jackson explores and expands on Arendt’s notions, bringing stories from all around the world into impressive cross-cultural analysis.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/8763540363/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(Hannah Arendt argued that the "political" is best underst...)
Hannah Arendt argued that the "political" is best understood as a power relation between private and public realms, and that storytelling is a vital bridge between these realms - a site where individualized passions and shared views are contested and recombined. In his new book, Michael Jackson explores and expands Arendt's ideas through a cross-cultural analysis of storytelling that includes Kuranko stories from Sierra Leone, Aboriginal stories of the stolen generation, stories recounted before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and stories of refugees, renegades, and war veterans.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/8772897376/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(In 2002, as Sierra Leone prepared to announce the end of ...)
In 2002, as Sierra Leone prepared to announce the end of its brutal civil war, the distinguished anthropologist, poet, and novelist Michael Jackson returned to the country where he had intermittently lived and worked as an ethnographer since 1969. While his initial concern was to help his old friend Sewa Bockarie (S. B.) Marah a prominent figure in Sierra Leonean politics write his autobiography, Jackson’s experiences during his stay led him to create a more complex work: In Sierra Leone, a beautifully rendered mosaic integrating S. B.’s moving stories with personal reflections, ethnographic digressions, and meditations on history and violence.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822333139/?tag=2022091-20
2004
(Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic m...)
Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of ritualization, the magical use of language, the sociality of violence, the prose of suffering, and the discourse of human rights. Throughout this compelling work, Jackson demonstrates that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of individual being, enables us to explore issues of social existence and coexistence in new ways, and to theorise events as the sites of a dynamic interplay between the finite possibilities of the situations in which human beings find themselves and the capacities they yet possess for creating viable forms of social life.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1845451228/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(Throughout Excursions, Jackson emphasizes the need for pr...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822340755/?tag=2022091-20
2007
(In many societies and for many people, religiosity is onl...)
In many societies and for many people, religiosity is only incidentally connected with texts or theologies, church or mosque, temple or monastery. Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic work among people for whom religion is not principally a matter of faith, doctrine, or definition, Michael Jackson turns his attention to those situations in life where we come up against the limits of language, our strength, and our knowledge, yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, to new ways of connecting with others.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822343819/?tag=2022091-20
2009
(The sense that well-being remains elusive, transitory, an...)
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. There he revisited the village where he did his first ethnographic fieldwork in 1969 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, 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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822349159/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(Michael Jackson extends his path-breaking work in existen...)
Michael Jackson extends his path-breaking work in existential anthropology by focusing on the interplay between two modes of human existence: that of participating in other peoples’ lives and that of turning inward to one’s self. Grounding his discussion in the subtle shifts between being acted upon and taking action, Jackson shows how the historical complexities and particularities found in human interactions reveal the dilemmas, conflicts, cares, and concerns that shape all of our lives.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520272358/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(In this book, ethnographer and poet Michael Jackson addre...)
In this book, ethnographer and poet Michael Jackson addresses the interplay between modes of writing, modes of understanding, and modes of being in the world. Drawing on literary, anthropological and autobiographical sources, he explores writing as a technics akin to ritual, oral storytelling, magic, and meditation, that enables us to reach beyond the limits of everyday life and forge virtual relationships and imagined communities.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520275268/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(Michael Jackson’s Lifeworlds is a masterful collection of...)
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 the 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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226923657/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(The Wherewithal of Life engages with current developments...)
The Wherewithal of Life engages with current developments in the anthropology of ethics and migration studies to explore in empirical depth and detail the life experiences of three young men a Ugandan migrant in Copenhagen, a Burkina Faso migrant in Amsterdam, and a Mexican migrant in Boston in ways that significantly broaden our understanding of the existential situations and ethical dilemmas of those migrating from the global south. Michael Jackson offers the first biographically based phenomenological account of migration and mobility, providing new insights into the various motives, tactics, dilemmas, dreams, and disappointments that characterize contemporary migration.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520276728/?tag=2022091-20
2013
(Recent worldwide political developments have persuaded ma...)
Recent worldwide political developments have persuaded many people that we are again living in what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.” Jackson’s response to this age of uncertainty is to remind us how much experience falls outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible. Drawing on such critical thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Karl Jaspers, whose work was profoundly influenced by the catastrophes that overwhelmed the world in the middle of the last century, Jackson explores the transformative and redemptive power of marginalized voices in the contemporary conversation of humankind.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MN2146H/?tag=2022091-20
2019
anthropologist educator author
Michael Jackson was born in 1940 in Nelson, New Zealand.
Michael Jackson studied at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1961. Six years later he earned a Master of Arts degree with honors from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Michael also obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1972 from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
Michael Jackson began his academic career in 1973 as a Senior Lecturer at Massey University, New Zealand. In 1977 was appointed as a Reader of Anthropology and Maori Studies there. In 1984 he joined the Australian National University where he served as a Part-time Lecturer of Prehistory and Anthropology until 1985.
In 1989 Jackson moved to the United States where he was a College Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University until 1996. For one year he was a Part-time Lecturer of Anthropology at The University of Sydney. Michael Jackson also served as a Guest Professor of Anthropology in 1999-2000, Guest Lecturer of Anthropology in 2000-2003 and Professor of Anthropology in 2003-2005 at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Nowadays he holds the position of a Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.
Michael is the author of numerous books, including “Latitudes of Exile: Poems, 1965-1975” which was published in 1976, “Wall” in 1980, “Going On” in 1985, “Duty Free: Selected Poems, 1965-1988” in 1989, “Antipodes” in 1996, “The Kuranko: Dimensions of Social Reality in a West African Society” in 1977, “Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives” in 1982, “Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky: An Ethnographic Novel” in 1986, “Rainshadow: A Novel” in 1988, “Pieces of Music” in 1994, “At Home in the World” in 1995, “The Blind Impress” in 1997, “The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity” in 2002, “In Sierra Leone” in 2004.
Jackson’s most recent books are “Being of Two Minds” that came out in 2012, “Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes” in 2012, “Between One and One Another” in 2012, “Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology” in 2013, “The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing” in 2013, “The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration and the Question of Well-Being” in 2013 and “Harmattan: A Philosophical Fiction” in 2015.
Michael Jackson is also a contributor to journals, including the Journal of the Polynesian Society, New Zealand Studies, and Man.
(The Wherewithal of Life engages with current developments...)
2013(Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic m...)
2005(Hannah Arendt argued that the "political" is best underst...)
2002(In 2002, as Sierra Leone prepared to announce the end of ...)
2004(Michael Jackson extends his path-breaking work in existen...)
2011(Throughout Excursions, Jackson emphasizes the need for pr...)
2007(Poet and anthropologist Michael Jackson brings to this st...)
1982(Michael Jackson’s Lifeworlds is a masterful collection of...)
2012(In this book, ethnographer and poet Michael Jackson addre...)
2012(In many societies and for many people, religiosity is onl...)
2009(The postmodern opposition between theory and lived realit...)
1998(The sense that well-being remains elusive, transitory, an...)
2011(Recent worldwide political developments have persuaded ma...)
2019(Hannah Arendt famously argued that politics are best unde...)
2002(Ours is a century of uprootedness, with fewer and fewer p...)
1995(In the annals of New Zealand crime, the name Pawelka is p...)
1997(This collection of poems is lucid and simple. They are sh...)
1996Jackson 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.
Michael Jackson was married to Pauline Harris, but she died in 1983. He has a daughter.