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 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. Traveling from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone to the Maori in New Zealand to the Warlpiri in Australia, Jackson argues that anthropological subjects continually negotiate - imaginatively, practically, and politically - their relations with the forces surrounding them and the resources they find in themselves or in solidarity with significant others. At the same time that they mirror facets of the larger world, they also help shape it. Stitching the themes, people, and locales of these essays into a sustained argument for a philosophical anthropology that focuses on the places between, Jackson offers a pragmatic understanding of how people act to make their lives more viable, to grasp the elusive, to counteract external powers, and to turn abstract possibilities into embodied truths.

About the Author
Michael Jackson is the Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School.

Reviews
"Lifeworlds is an extraordinary book, remarkable for its depth, scholarship, and lightness of touch. It puts the whole question of anthropology's relation to philosophy in a new light. Michael Jackson is not only a great ethnologist, he is also a major theoretician of anthropological knowledge. Not many people could have taken up such profound issues while wearing their scholarship so lightly." (Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University)"



Book Information
ISBN 9780226923659
Author Michael Jackson
Format Paperback
Page Count 360
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 539g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 16mm * 2mm