Michael Jackson (anthropologist)

For other people named Michael Jackson, see Michael Jackson (disambiguation).

Michael D. Jackson (born 1940) is a post-modern New Zealand anthropologist who has taught in the anthropology departments at the University of Copenhagen and Indiana University and is currently a distinguished visiting professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School.^[1] He holds a BA from Victoria University of Wellington, an MA from the University of Auckland and a PhD from Cambridge University.

Jackson is the founder of existential/phenomenological anthropology, a non-traditional sub-field of anthropology using ethnographic 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). His latest book, The Palm at the End of the Mind, explores Martin Heidegger's philosophy of language and religion and attempts to understand the religious experience cross-culturally as that which lies within the realm of human experience, but beyond the realm of naming and language.

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.

His influences include: Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, William James, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, Bronisław Malinowski, Richard Rorty, Paul Ricoeur, Marcel Mauss.

See also

• Philosophical anthropology

Notes

1. ^ Personal page on Harvard Divinity School

References

• "Michael D. Jackson". Harvard Divinity School. http://www.hds.harvard.edu/faculty/jackson.html. 

Bibliography

• Latitudes of Exile: Poems 1965-1975 (1976)
• The Kuranko: Dimensions of Social Reality in a West African Society (1977)
• Wall: Poems 1976-1979 (1980)
• Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives (1982)
• Going On (1985)
• Barawa, and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky (1986)
• Rainshadow (1988)
• Paths Towards a Clearing (1989)
• Duty Free: Selected Poems 1965-1988 (1989)
• Personhood and Agency: The Experience of Self and Other in African Cultures (1990)
• Pieces of Music (1994)
• At Home in the World (1995)
• Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology (1996)
• The Blind Impress (1997)
• Antipodes (1997)
• Minima Ethnographica (1998) Review
• The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity (2002)
• In Sierra Leone (2004)
• Existential Anthropology (2005) Review
• Dead Reckoning (2006)
• The Accidental Anthropologist: a Memoir (2006)
• Excursions (2007)
• The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real (2009)
• Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want (2011)

External links

• Jackson, Michael (2005). Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. Methodology and History in Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. ISBN 1571814760. http://books.google.hu/books?id=IcphVj6IRtsC.  Many pages online accessible. See also a short annotation.

• "The Philosopher Who Would Not Be King." Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Summer/Autumn 2010 (Vol. 38, Nos. 3 & 4) [1]

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Name	Jackson, Michael
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Date of birth	1940
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