The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real

by Michael D. Jackson

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 thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, to new ways of connecting with others. Through sixty-one beautifully crafted essays based on sojourns in Europe, West Africa, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, and taking his cue from Wallace Stevens’s late poem, “Of Mere Being,” Jackson explores a range of experiences where “the palm at the end of the mind” stands “beyond thought,” on “the edge of space,” “a foreign song.” Moments of crisis as well as everyday experiences in cafés, airports, and offices disclose the subtle ways in which a single life shades into others, the boundaries between cultures become blurred, fate unfolds through genealogical time, elective affinities make their appearance, and different values contend.

Genres: Ethnography, Anthropology

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

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

[Sue Bridgwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting - not quite what I expected, a refreshingly accessible approach to anthropology. The author's reflections on what he calls 'critical experience' is illuminated by many fascinating stories - not quite definable as case studies, stories from his own life, from the lives of friends and family and from the many people he met and became friends with during his fieldwork. As one reviewer says, 'Jackson reflects on those things-love, loss pain, courage, resilience-that define the human condition.'

The source of the title is the following poem, which seems to have given several other authors their titles, too;

Of Mere Being
BY WALLACE STEVENS
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

“But life itself is a bumpy ride, a turbulent river, a hard road, and in trying to understand how people survive traumatic events – typically described as breakups or breakdowns – I have been struck again and again, in my fieldwork after the civil war in Sierra Leone and in reflections on my own biography, by the limited extent to which abstract ideas inform our actions, help us correct course, or enable us to endure. Despite our commitment to theories of knowledge and theologies, or to concepts of love, heroism, God, and goodness, these abstractions foreshadow but do not necessarily guide our actions. Mostly they emerge as retrospective abridgements and rationalizations that unfolded “thoughtlessly” and unpredictably in the no-man’s land between ourselves and others. Indeed, we never know exactly what we are doing, or why, and much as we like to impute causative power to our beliefs, they are more like tools that help us cope, after the fact, with events that outstripped our capacity to comprehend and control them.”

[Raoul W · Rating 3 out of 5]

a lot of interesting ideas to ponder about life, relationships, and the religious experience