The Accidental Anthropologist: A Memoir

by Michael D. Jackson

'... my lifelong preoccupation with renewal ... lies in the childhood fantasy without which I could not have endured that another life awaited me elsewhere, or with another, and once reborn in that other world, I would find fulfillment and happiness.' One of the key figures in Michael Jackson's unorthodox and extraordinary memoir observes, "We do not own our own lives we are not in sole possession of the truth about ourselves"; Faithful to this view, Jackson delivers his remarkable life in subtle shadings, halftones, and haunting, melodious lines. From his New Zealand beginnings, when he associated with James K. Baxter, Fleur Adcock, Bob Lowry and others, Jackson's quest has taken him across Paris in the footsteps of his literary hero, Blaise Cendrars, to the doss-houses of London, among the remote Kuranko people of Sierra Leone, and into the Australian desert. This award-winning poet, ethnographer and novelist likens his life course to that of a shape shifter, making it apparent that our lives are as various as the bonds we form and the social landscapes through which we move.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Autobiography

252 pages, Paperback

First published June 6, 2006

About the author

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 professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School. 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 sub-field of anthropology using ethnographical 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).

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 Levi-Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, William James, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, Bronislaw Malinowski, Richard Rorty, Paul Ricoeur, Marcel Mauss.

He is in no way related to the famous singer, also named Michael Jackson.

Reviews

[N. N. Santiago · Rating 2 out of 5]

After heartily enjoying 'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes' by Daniel Everett, I was very much looking forward to jumping into another anthropologist's memoirs. However, other than being broadly chronological, 'The Accidental Anthropologist' lacks narrative or conceptual cohesion, and it is difficult to be captivated by Jackson's tale.

Obviously it is difficult to fit one's entire life into a couple hundred pages, but the book suffers from a disjointedness due to the snippet treatment that many of his stories receive, and the lack of smooth flow between them. The resulting feeling of fragmentation is compounded by Jackson's diversions into poetic and philosophical reverie, and an over-quoting of famous writers of the past, which are neither particularly well enmeshed into the fabric of his story, nor developed very far or rigorously.

Finally, he comes across as quite an earnest fellow, as one is tempted to think of many poets (his other profession) as being , and the resulting lack of very much humour or irony is something that grates on a cynical, pseudo-emotionless pain-in-the-ass like myself.

[Peter Walton-Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel bad that till now the only Michael Jackson I really knew of was the one we all know of. This Michael Jackson is a New Zealander, an anthropologist, writer and a poet. He has experienced an anthropologist's life - "by compelling you to inhabit the world of others, anthropology changes the way you think about yourself" - not only in ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone and Australia, but also in trying to understand his own life. Why Jackson's name never came up when I was studying Anthropology at Victoria University seems strange to me now as I read this. His perspective on Anth is enthralling and one in hindsight I believe I was looking for. His view on his life and the worlds he has walked in is engaging story-telling; challenging, inspiring, provocative...

[Lewismatt]

Great literary memoir about the people we imagine we might one day become; and the voices we encounter along the way.