Existential Anthropology

Existential Anthropology PDF Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845451226
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
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.

Existential Anthropology

Existential Anthropology PDF Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845451226
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
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.

Lifeworlds

Lifeworlds PDF Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226923649
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
4e de couv.: Michael Jackson's Lifeworlds is a masterful collection of essays, the culmination of a career of exploring the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. Drawing inspiration from James, Dewey, Arendt, Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, and from ethnographic fieldwork among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, the Warlpiri of Central Australia, and the Maori of Aotearoa (New Zealand), Jackson outlines an existential anthropology grounded in the dynamics and quandaries of everyday life. He offers a pragmatic understanding of how people act to make their lives more viable, to bridge the gap between self and other, to grasp the elusive, and to transform abstract possibilities into embodied truths.

Things As They Are

Things As They Are PDF Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 9780253210500
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"The real beauty of this book is that the thinking does not stop . . . deep in the thickets of philosophic references. Instead, true to the spirit of phenomoenology, we are provided with provocative accounts of how such thinking flows in contemporary anthropological practice." —XCP - Cross Cultural Poetics In this timely collection, thirteen contemporary ethnographers demonstrate the importance of phenomenological and existential ideas for anthropology. In emphasizing the link between the empirical and the experiential, these ethnographers also explore the relationship between phenomenology and other theories of the lifeworld, such as existentialism, radical empiricism, and critical theory.

Between One and One Another

Between One and One Another PDF Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520272358
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
"Between One and One Another is a lively and fascinating exploration of the interplay between being a part of the lives of others, and being apart from them. Michael Jackson, one of the leading and most innovative anthropologists today, draws on a wealth of anthropological, literary, philosophical, and autobiographical resources to make his case on the matter. It's clear that a lifetime of learning and reflection has gone into the thoughts invested in this text."—Robert Desjarlais, author of Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard

As Wide as the World Is Wise

As Wide as the World Is Wise PDF Author: Michael D. Jackson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541988
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
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 encourages philosophers and anthropologists to mine the space between localized and globalized perspectives, to resolve empirically the distinctions between the one and the many and between life and specific forms of life. His project balances abstract epistemological practice with immanent reflection, promoting a more situated, embodied, and sensuous approach to the world and its in-between spaces. Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and Aboriginal Australia, Jackson resets the language and logic of academic thought from the standpoint of other lifeworlds. He extends Kant's cosmopolitan ideal to include all human societies, achieving a radical break with elite ideas of the subjective and a more expansive conception of truth.

Minima Ethnographica

Minima Ethnographica PDF Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226389464
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The postmodern opposition between theory and lived reality has led in part to an anthropological turn to "dialogic" or "reflexive" approaches. Michael Jackson claims these approaches are hardly radical as they still drift into such abstractions as "society" or "culture." His Minima Ethnographica proposes an existential anthropology that recognizes even abstract relationships as modalities of interpersonal life. Written in the style of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, Jackson's work shows how general ideas are always anchored in particular social events and critical concerns. 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.

Anthropology and Philosophy

Anthropology and Philosophy PDF Author: Sune Liisberg
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782385576
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of the contributors demonstrate how such a collaboration can result in new and challenging ways of thinking about trust and hope. Reading the dialogues may, therefore, also inspire others to work in the productive intersection between anthropology and philosophy.

The Wherewithal of Life

The Wherewithal of Life PDF Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520956818
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
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. It is argued that the quandaries of African or Mexican migrants are not unique to people moving between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ worlds. While more intensely felt by the young, seeking to find a way out of a world of limited opportunity and circumscribed values, the experiences of transition are familiar to us all, whatever our age, gender, ethnicity or social status – namely, the impossibility of calculating what one may lose in leaving a settled life or home place; what one may gain by risking oneself in an alien environment; the difficulty of striking a balance between personal fulfillment and the moral claims of kinship; and the struggle to know the difference between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ utopias (the first reasonable and worth pursuing; the second hopelessly unattainable).

Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes

Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes PDF Author: Samuli Schielke
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455079
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.

Mabogo P. More

Mabogo P. More PDF Author: Tendayi Sithole
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538166127
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Mabogo P. More: Philosophical Anthropology is the first book to provide an extensive treatment of More’s Africana existential thought. This book locates him, as it is clear in his body of work, in the Azanian (Black and Indigenous) existential tradition. As a philosopher, he is engaged from the perspective of black radical thought. From this intervention, it is clear that his philosophical project originates and is expressed from the existential condition of being-black-in-an-antiblack-world. It is from the lived experience and the fact of being black that More is meditated upon and this book, which is the extension of his work, brings to the forth the ways of thinking, knowing, and doing that that illuminate his philosophical project.