Michael Jackson | |
---|---|
Born | 1940 (age 83–84) |
Other names | Smooth criminal |
Education | BA, Victoria University of Wellington MA, University of Auckland PhD, Cambridge University |
Occupation(s) | Anthropologist, poet, philosopher, teacher |
Employer | Harvard Divinity School |
Michael D. Jackson (born 1940) is a New Zealand poet and anthropologist who has taught in anthropology departments at Massey University, the Australian National University, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of Copenhagen. He is currently distinguished professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School.
Jackson is the founder of existential anthropology, a non-traditional sub-field of anthropology using ethnographic methods and drawing on traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, and critical theory, as well as American pragmatism, in exploring the human condition from the perspectives of both lifeworlds and worldviews, histories and biographies, collective representations and individual realities.
The struggle for being involves a struggle to reconcile shared and singular experiences, acting and being acted upon, being for others and being for oneself. But rather than polarise subject and object, Jackson emphasises the intersubjective negotiations at the heart of all relationships – whether between persons, persons and things, persons and language – and shows that being-in-the-world consists of endless dilemmas and constant oscillations in consciousness that admit of only temporary, imagined, narrative or ritualised resolutions. Insofar as anthropological understanding is attained through conversations and events in which the ethnographer's prejudices, ontological assumptions, and emotional dispositions are at play, the ethnographer cannot pretend to be an impartial observer, producing objective knowledge. Jackson's published work fully discloses the contexts in which understandings are negotiated, arrived at, or, in some instances, unattainable. [1]
Jackson's recent books have explored diverse topics such as well-being in one of the world's poorest societies (Life Within Limits), the relation between religious experience and limit situations (The Palm at the End of the Mind), the interplay between egocentric and sociocentric modes of being (Between One and One Another), and writing as a technology for creating connections that transcend the limits of ordinary communication (The Other Shore).
He has conducted fieldwork among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone from 1969, among the Warlpiri of Australia's Northern Territory between 1989 and 1991, and among the Kuku Yalangi of Cape York Peninsula in 1993 and 1994. [2]
His poetry has appeared in Poetry NZ. [3] and in the Poetry Archive (UK). One critic wrote: In Dead Reckoning, Jackson deploys "a navigator’s term for estimating one’s location based upon extrapolations of distance and direction from one’s last-known position. The eponymous poem cements the metaphor’s connection to personal identity..." [4] In Being of Two Minds (2012), Jackson explores the existential quandaries of being torn between seemingly irreconcilable affections, identifications, and places of personal anchorage. The critic Vincent O'Sullivan writes, "What one hears in his readings is the modest, confidant, international voice that drives his poems, the conversing of a man who, as ever, is on one road to find another." [5]
Jackson holds a Bachelor of Arts from Victoria University of Wellington, a Master of Arts (postgraduate) from the University of Auckland, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Cambridge University.
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
Phenomenology is the philosophical study of objectivity and reality as subjectively lived and experienced.
Alfred Schutz was an Austrian philosopher and social phenomenologist whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions. Schutz is gradually being recognized as one of the 20th century's leading philosophers of social science. He related Edmund Husserl's work to the social sciences, using it to develop the philosophical foundations of Max Weber's sociology, in his major work Phenomenology of the Social World. However, much of his influence arose from the publication of his Collected Papers in the 1960s.
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Salvage ethnography is the recording of the practices and folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a result of modernization. It is generally associated with the American anthropologist Franz Boas; he and his students aimed to record vanishing Native American cultures. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have used the term as part of a critique of 19th-century ethnography and early modern anthropology.
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Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Phenomenology within sociology, or phenomenological sociology, examines the concept of social reality as a product of intersubjectivity. Phenomenology analyzes social reality to explain the formation and nature of social institutions. The application of phenomenological ideas in sociology is distinct from other social science applications of social science applications.
Louis Albert Johnson was a New Zealand poet.
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George Amos Dorsey was an American ethnographer of indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a special focus on the Caddoan and Siouan tribes of the Great Plains. He is credited with helping develop the anthropology of the Plains Indian tribes while serving as curator at the Field Museum in Chicago from 1898 until 1915. During this period, he also was Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago from 1907 to 1915.
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.
Paul Stoller is an American cultural anthropologist. He is a professor of anthropology at West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Marla Faye Frederick is an American ethnographer and scholar, with a focus on the African American religious experience. Her work addresses a range of topics including race, gender, religion and media studies. She became the eighteenth Dean of Harvard Divinity School on January 1, 2024.