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Michael D. Jackson came to Harvard in 2005, with ethnographic experience in Sierra Leone and Aboriginal
Australia. His work has been strongly influenced by critical theory, American pragmatism, and existential-phenomenological thought.
Through a direct engagement with the everyday situations and struggles that characterize human life in any society, irrespective of
its specific historical and cultural conditions, the ethnographic method of participant-observation promises not only an extended
and deeper understanding of ourselves in relation to others and otherness; it may provide new insights into the limits and possibilities
of both comparative analysis and viable coexistence in a multiplex world. He is the author of numerous books of anthropology, including
the prize-winning Paths Toward a Clearing and At Home in the World, and has also published three novels, a memoir, and six
books of poetry. His latest book, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity and the Real, appeared in February 2009,
and in a work in press (Life Within Limits: Wellbeing in a World of Want) he uses his ongoing fieldwork in Sierra Leone to
explore experiences of social injustice and existential dissatisfaction. He is presently writing on firstness as a fundamental trope in the
social imaginaries and political discourse of indigenous peoples in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand.
curriculum vitae (Adobe
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