Existential Anthropology

Michael Jackson is a graduate of the Universities of Auckland (New Zealand) and Cambridge (UK), and has, for many years, carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone and Aboriginal Australia. The author of numerous books of anthropology, including the prize-winning Paths Toward a Clearing and At Home in the World, he has also published five books of poetry and two novels. Michael Jackson has taught in his native New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Denmark, where he is presently Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.

• AcknowledgementsPreface: The Struggle for BeingChapter 1. The Course of an EventChapter 2. The Space of AppearancesChapter 3. Violence and Intersubjective ReasonChapter 4. Custom and Conflict in Sierra Leone: An Essay on AnarchyChapter 5. What’s in a Name? An Essay on the Power of WordsChapter 6. Mundane RitualChapter 7. Biotechnology and the Critique of GlobalisationChapter 8. Familiar and Foreign BodiesChapter 9. The Prose of SufferingChapter 10. Whose Human Rights?Chapter 11. Existential ImperativesBibliographyIndex

“This book is a thoroughly wise one, learned, patient, and humane: an inspiring companion with which to journey anthropologically to human lifeworlds at any stage of one’s life-project.” • American Ethnologist“…what is truly worthwhile in this loose grouping of essays is the ethnographic examples. Powerfully presented, beautifully written (the final three pages of the book offer poignantly evocative description of ethnography as a way of living) and loaded with telling detail…” • Arthur Kleinman in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological institute