Michael Jackson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3611976 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Jackson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Jackson |
| SIGNATURE | JACKSON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-5104-7646 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 121 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1013 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 117 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1959 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Da ansiedade ao método no trabalho de campo antropológico: Uma apreciação das ideias duradouras de George Devereux
Este capítulo é baseado em três suposições. Em primeiro lugar, considero que não existem emoções que sejam exclusivas do trabalho de campo antropológico, o que significa que a nossa tarefa é identificar situações dentro e fora do campo que possam ser comparadas de forma útil e que possam lançar luz um sobre o outro. Em segundo lugar, contesto que as emoções são apenas um aspecto de qualquer experiência humana e que violentamos a complexidade da e…
Under the Sign of Hermes: Transgression, the Trickster, and Natural Justice
The hybrid term “limitrophe” derives from the Latin limes (“boundary”) and the Greek trophos (“feeder”) and trephein (“to nourish”). In its original meaning, limitrophus designated lands that provided food for troops defending an outpost of empire. More generally, the word connotes a porous borderland between contiguous nation states or states of consciousness where openness to the ineffable and indeterminate may prove edifying and regenerative. …
Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky
This chapter explores issues that the author wanted to broach with Saran Salia Sanoh but had not pursued because they touched on some of the most secretive and sensitive aspects of Kuranko life. It details the death of Saran Salia's parents not long after his initiation, which marked a tragic turning point in his life, leaving him fearful and uncertain. Saran Salia explains how the initiation teaches how to master fears and master one's emotions,…
Living by the staff: A perspective on episcopacy and authority
The paper sets out a range of challenges facing ministry in today’s increasingly regulated church contexts. Noting the three foci of prophet, priest and king in the Christian’s self-understanding as a disciple of Jesus Christ, the paper goes on to make the case for looking afresh at the prophetic role of the bishop as a member of the community of faith. The bishop, it is argued, speaks from within the community of the church, as the church seeks …
Worlds Within and Worlds Without: Field Guide to an Intellectual Journey
Worlds Within and Worlds Without: Field Guide to an Intellectual Journey
Anthropologist Michael Jackson predicates his intellectual autobiography, Worlds Within and Worlds Without , on the view that works and lives are intimately entangled. Through a skillful interweaving of personal and ethnographic descriptions, he focuses on the imaginative and practical ways human beings negotiate the space between worlds they call their own and worlds they regard as lying beyond their immediate purview. Whether the worlds that el…
Chapter 6. Existential Aporias and the Precariousness of Being
Introduction. Anthropology and the Existential Turn
What Is Existential Anthropology?
Chapter 10. In Defense of Existential Anthropology
The Genealogical Imagination: Two Studies of Life over Time
Migrant imaginaries, multiple selves, and the varieties of temporal experience 1
There is an uncanny connection between a migrant struggling to negotiate the legal labyrinths and bureaucratic protocols of a European nation state and an anthropologist struggling to negotiate the academic jargons, conceptual frameworks, and intellectual fashions that dominate his or her profession. The migrant exemplifies, therefore, a vital aspect of every person’s passage through life – an ability to change with changing situations, conjuring…
Introduction. Experiments between Anthropology and Philosophy: Affinities and Antagonisms
The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real
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 th…
Critique of Identity Thinking
Recent world-wide 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 prof…
The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well-Being
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…
Critique of Identity Thinking
Recent world-wide 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 prof…
A conversation with Michael D. Jackson, writer and reader: On being an outsider, and the aporias of lived experience
Parallel lines and forking paths: Reflections on the work of Tim Ingold
To speak of existential anthropology is to make a commitment to engage directly with life as it is lived, in all its empirical diversity and complexity, and to reflect that life in one's writing. Tim Ingold's work exemplifies this view and implies a critique of an idealist anthropology centred on disembodied and decontextualized concepts of culture, while offering us a pragmatist method for avoiding the impasse of abstract theory on the one hand …
Forms of life and life itself: Reflections on human relations with ideas, artworks, and other species
This essay explores experiences that lie ambiguously between the inchoate, the intuitive, and the impressionistic, on the one hand, and the verbal, conceptual, aesthetic, and ideological, on the other. I am particularly interested in experiences that go beyond the nominally human and are felt to be shared by other species and to belong to "life itself." Empirical examples are adduced from ethnographies on human-animal relations and from the world…
Surviving loss and remaking the world: Reflections on the singular universal in a West African setting
As an ethnographer, I am obliged to reflect on the philosophical implications of my work to the same extent that I assume that any productive engagement with the human condition necessarily involves both participation in and observation of lived situations and actual events, and not simply the experience-distant interrogation of collective representations or the interpretation of texts. Accordingly, the following account of bereavement among the …
How Lifeworlds Work: Emotionality, Sociality, and the Ambiguity of Being
Sacrifice and Social Structure Among the Kuranko
The Kuranko term for sacrifice is sarake. The type of sacrifice offered and the spirit category invoked depend on the instructions of a diviner, and practically all consultations with a diviner entail subsequent votive offerings. In Kuranko thought a sacrificial gift is given in the name of a spirit category, while ordinary gifts are given in the name of persons or groups of persons. Sacrifice, like gift-giving, involves giving things which are h…
Stillbirth and Suffering in Ireland: A Theological Reflection from Healthcare Chaplaincy
Stillbirth is a devastating experience for parents who in a short period of time move from the excitement and expectancy of new life in pregnancy to the depth of heart-rending grief in the experience of bereavement. Semi-structured in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with parents bereaved through stillbirth who were cared for at an Irish tertiary maternity hospital. The data were analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis …
Unified clinical science, or paradigm diversity? Comment on Melchert (2016)
Drawing on Kuhn's (1970) analysis, Melchert (2016) argued that current professional psychology exists in a preparadigmatic state and that a transition to a unified clinical science based on the paradigm of the behavioral and neurosciences is now possible. But Melchert's analysis makes questionable assumptions about reducibility and neglects several crucial aspects of Kuhn's analysis. A close examination of psychological work on problems such as v…
Paths toward a clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry
Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology
Well-known scholars examine the relevance of phenomenology for anthropology.
Knowledge of the Body
This article examines the social implications of the human body as a physical and symbolic entity. Jackson argues that the body is not simply a biological organism but a socially constructed entity whose meanings and functions are shaped by cultural values and practices. He explores how bodily experiences, such as pain, illness, and death, are interpreted and managed within different social contexts. The article also considers the ways in which t…
Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want
Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology
Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects
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,…
The Shock of the New: On Migrant Imaginaries and Critical Transitions
This essay is based on recent fieldwork (2005-2006) among Sierra Leonean migrants, both legal and illegal, living in southeast London. Its focus is the lifeworld of a young Sierra Leonean man struggling to find his feet in a city that is both perplexing and perilous. It attempts to show how his struggle for legitimacy, security, income, and an ongoing sense ofconnectedness with his homeland is played out not only in his everyday survival strategi…
Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives
Preface 1. Introduction 2. Form and Play in Kuranko Fiction 3. During a Time of Great Hunger 4. Hare and Hyena 5. Prevented Transitions 6. Reciprocities 7. Men and Women 8. Co-Wives, Orphans, and Miraculous Interventions 9. DIrections Appendix Notes Glossary of Kuranko Words References List of Narratives Index
What Is Existential Anthropology
Introduction: Anthropology and the Existential Turn Michael Jackson and Albert Piette Chapter 1. Continuities of Change: Conversion and Convertibility in Northern Mozambique Devaka Premawardhana Chapter 2. Both/And Michael Lambek Chapter 3. Reading Bruno Latour in Bahia Mattijs Van de Port Chapter 4. The Station Hustle: Ghanaian Migration Brokerage in a Disjointed World Hans Lucht Chapter 5. Mobility and Immobility in the Life of an Amputee Sonia…
Storytelling Events, Violence, and the Appearance of the Past
Alluding to Sierra Leone's recent violent history, this paper argues that storytelling events offer insights into the ways that people evaluate, discuss, and negotiate social and ethical strategies for making communal life viable in war as well as in peace. At the same time, it explores some of the theoretical implications of Michael Oakeshott's assertion that "there are not two worlds-the world of past happenings and the world of our present kno…
Where thought belongs: An anthropological critique of the project of philosophy
Adorno, Arendt, Badiou, Derrida, Heidegger and Rorty have variously called for radically new conceptions of philosophy, but none has made a case for turning from the historical and genealogical past to the anthropological present. Taking the view that thought cannot escape the impress of a thinker's immediate situation, this article invokes the phenomenological notions of lifeworld and lebensphilosophie to explore the social spaces where thought …
Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives
An Approach to Kuranko Divination
An account and analysis of divinatory practices among the Kuranko of northeast Sierra Leone is presented, using the usual methods of ethno-graphical research, and also extrapolating from and discussing the author's own experiences of consulting diviners. Apart from examining the status of beliefs associated with Kuranko divinatory practices, this paper investigates some aspects of the method of participant observation in the human sciences. A pra…
The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy
The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline-including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life-are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, b…
Inside Moves and Outside Views: An Australian Case Study of Elite and Public Perceptions of Political Corruption
The search for a definition of political corruption that adequately captures the nuances of governmental activity has been a long one. This article defends social or attitudinal definitions of corruption against some recent criticisms. It examines the value of Arnold Heidenheimer's widely cited distinctions among “black,”“gray,” and “white” corruption using empirical evidence from an interview study of over 100 Australian politicians and 500 vote…
Familiar And Foreign Bodies: A Phenomenological Exploration Of The Human-Technology Interface
This article examines some of the ways in which our experiences of, and interactions with, new technologies are grounded in the strategies and metaphors of reciprocity that govern everyday social life. Though I follow others in arguing that technology and society cannot be separated, I explore this interrelationship intersubjectively, looking first at some of the ways in which people relate to computers, then analysing the experiences of transpla…
Structure and Event: Witchcraft Confession Among the Kuranko
This article examines the structure of witchcraft confessions among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone. Jackson argues that these confessions, rather than being simply coerced or delusional, are structured by cultural narratives and social dynamics. He analyzes how confessions reveal not only individual anxieties but also broader societal tensions and power relations. The article demonstrates how the seemingly irrational act of confessing to witchcraft …
The Structure and Significance of Kuranko Clanship
Opening ParagraphRecently renewed interest in the history and social structures of the Mande-speaking peoples of the West Sudan has brought to attention a problem of both ethnographical and theoretical importance. It is the problem of understanding the structure and functions of clanship in Mande societies, while at the same time interpreting the meanings of clan names, rituals, myths, totemic usages, and inter-clan relationships. In approaching …
Sacrifice and Social Structure among the Kuranko
In anthropological studies of African societies a recurring problem of analysis centres on the relationship between descent groupings and territorial units. A categorical distinction, such as Maine advanced (1861), between kinds of societies or groups based on either descent or locality is empirically spurious (Gluckman 1971: 85). Fortes has emphasised that the problem is one 'of assigning an order of relative weight to the various factors involv…
As Wide as the World Is Wise: Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology
Philosophy and anthropology have long debated questions of difference: rationality versus irrationality, abstraction versus concreteness, modern versus premodern. What if these disciplines instead focused on the commonalities of human experience? Would this effort bring philosophers and anthropologists closer together? Would it lead to greater insights across historical and cultural divides? In As Wide as the World Is Wise, Michael Jackson encour…
Ambivalence and the Last-Born: Birth-Order Position in Convention and Myth
This article examines the complex relationship between birth order and cultural perceptions of ambivalence, focusing on the last-born child. Jackson challenges the conventional view of the last-born as spoiled or rebellious, arguing that anthropological literature reveals a more nuanced picture. He explores cross-cultural examples and myths to demonstrate how the last-born is often associated with both positive and negative attributes, embodying …
Commentary: The Complementarity of Intrapsychic and Intersubjective Dimensions of Social Reality
This comment revisits the pioneering work of George Devereux in arguing for a reintegration of ethnographic and psychological perspectives in anthropology. The focus is not on an epistemological fusion of these different perspectives but on methodological strategies whose measure of value may be practical, aesthetic, or interpretive, depending on the researcher's interests and the research subject's own concerns. [George Devereux, psychoanalytic …
Biotechnology and the Critique of Globalisation
This paper argues that human ambivalence toward global forces and biopower is grounded in age-old anxieties about the strange, the new, and the other, and that these anxieties reflect the extent to which people feel that they are in control of the forces impinging on their local moral worlds. Tolerance of risk is thus a function of ontological security, and will be experienced very differently in the North and the South
A Fair Share
`I just want a fair share!' We all say it, but what is fair? The most complete answer is John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Experimental tests of Rawls's theory were conducted to generate some empirical data to compare with similar studies done in the United States and Poland by Norm Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer. The subjects were university students who made decisions behind a veil of ignorance to govern subsequent distributions of money. Subject…
Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa
Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Charles Piot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 220 pp
An Account of Religious Sociology in France
La durée vocalique en français canadien du sud de la Saskatchewan
A l’audition, le français canadien donne l’impression d’avoir un patron rythmique différent de celui du français standard: le rythme régulier de ce dernier, fait de syllabes sensiblement égales, suivies d’une syllabe finale accentuée, semble manquer au français canadien. Plusieurs chercheurs ont déjà étudié la question des longueurs vocaliques dans les deux parlers. Jean-Paul Vinay (1955) constate que « les syllabes toniques fermées du français d…
Aspects of symbolism and composition in Maori Art
Debate: A neglected teaching tool
(1973). Debate: A neglected teaching tool. Peabody Journal of Education: Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 150-154
Aperçu de tendances phonétiques du parler français en Saskatchewan
Cette étude veut être un complément d’information à nos travaux déjà effectués sur le parler des Franco-Canadiens de la Saskatchewan. En août 1970, poursuivant notre série d’enquêtes phonétiques, nous avons visité les villages de Willow-Bunch et de Bellegarde dans le sud-est de cette province, dans le but d’examiner quelques aspects phonétiques du français parlé dans ces deux centres actifs de la minorité francophone de la région
Lord Byron: A gallant Spirit and Kind One
The Structure and Significance of Kuranko Clanship
Opening ParagraphRecently renewed interest in the history and social structures of the Mande-speaking peoples of the West Sudan has brought to attention a problem of both ethnographical and theoretical importance. It is the problem of understanding the structure and functions of clanship in Mande societies, while at the same time interpreting the meanings of clan names, rituals, myths, totemic usages, and inter-clan relationships. In approaching …
A Futures Institute
Structure and Event: Witchcraft Confession Among the Kuranko
This article examines the structure of witchcraft confessions among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone. Jackson argues that these confessions, rather than being simply coerced or delusional, are structured by cultural narratives and social dynamics. He analyzes how confessions reveal not only individual anxieties but also broader societal tensions and power relations. The article demonstrates how the seemingly irrational act of confessing to witchcraft …
The Identity of the Dead. Aspects of Mortuary Ritual in a West African Society
M. Jackson - L'identité des morts: aspects des rites mortuaires dans une société d'Afrique occidentale. Les rites mortuaires sont assez généralement reconnus comme constituant un aspect social du travail de deuil. Deux traits spécialement frappants à cet égard sont, d'une part, la façon dont le deuil est assumé ou simulé par des personnes non immédiatement affectées, d'autre part, la façon dont son expression est temporellement déplacée et social…
Sacrifice and Social Structure among the Kuranko
In anthropological studies of African societies a recurring problem of analysis centres on the relationship between descent groupings and territorial units. A categorical distinction, such as Maine advanced (1861), between kinds of societies or groups based on either descent or locality is empirically spurious (Gluckman 1971: 85). Fortes has emphasised that the problem is one 'of assigning an order of relative weight to the various factors involv…
An Approach to Kuranko Divination
An account and analysis of divinatory practices among the Kuranko of northeast Sierra Leone is presented, using the usual methods of ethno-graphical research, and also extrapolating from and discussing the author's own experiences of consulting diviners. Apart from examining the status of beliefs associated with Kuranko divinatory practices, this paper investigates some aspects of the method of participant observation in the human sciences. A pra…
Ideology And Belief Systems In Change
The Kuranko: Dimensions of Social Reality in a West African Tribe
Ambivalence and the Last-Born: Birth-Order Position in Convention and Myth
This article examines the complex relationship between birth order and cultural perceptions of ambivalence, focusing on the last-born child. Jackson challenges the conventional view of the last-born as spoiled or rebellious, arguing that anthropological literature reveals a more nuanced picture. He explores cross-cultural examples and myths to demonstrate how the last-born is often associated with both positive and negative attributes, embodying …
The Kuranko. Dimensions of Social Reality in a West African Society
Prisoners of Isolation: Solitary Confinement in Canada
What is it really like in 'the hole'? On what basis do prison officials employ the most drastic of carceral punishments – solitary confinement – and to what effect? Michael Jackson, lawyer, professor, activist, made a point of finding out. Approached in 1974 by a group of prisoners in the British Columbia Penitentiary, Jackson listened to their stories, investigated, and became convinced that these prisoners were being held in solitary confinemen…
Database Developments In The Experimental Cartography Unit
The Experimental Cartography Unit of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) undertakes research and provides a service to NERC-funded institutes and university research groups in the fields of digital cartography and image analysis. The Unit's long history of recording topographic and environmental data in digital form has led to the acquisition of large data sets potentially of great use to environmental scientists. These data will also…
Knowledge of the Body
This article examines the social implications of the human body as a physical and symbolic entity. Jackson argues that the body is not simply a biological organism but a socially constructed entity whose meanings and functions are shaped by cultural values and practices. He explores how bodily experiences, such as pain, illness, and death, are interpreted and managed within different social contexts. The article also considers the ways in which t…
Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives
Preface 1. Introduction 2. Form and Play in Kuranko Fiction 3. During a Time of Great Hunger 4. Hare and Hyena 5. Prevented Transitions 6. Reciprocities 7. Men and Women 8. Co-Wives, Orphans, and Miraculous Interventions 9. DIrections Appendix Notes Glossary of Kuranko Words References List of Narratives Index
Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives
Prisoners of Isolation: Solitary Confinement in Canada
Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives
Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought . T. O. Beidelman
Digital Cartography, Image Analysis, and Remote Sensing Towards an Integrated Approach
Sociology (77 works) · Philosophy (55 works) · Political science (44 works) · Epistemology (39 works) · Law (37 works) · History (32 works) · Philosophy (29 works) · Computer Science (28 works) · Psychology (28 works) · Anthropology (27 works)