Excursions
Jackson, Michael. 2007 Excursions. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.Notes: xxvii, 295 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN: 9780822340546
Reviewed 05 Dec 2008 by:Sushumna Kannan <sushumnaa@gmail.com>Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, India & University of Jean Moulin, Lyon, France.
Medium:
Written Literature
Subject Keywords: Philosophy, Modern - 20th century Intellectual life - 20th century
ABSTRACT: Excursions discusses issues of identity, agency, labor, society-state, subjectivity, violent histories, and colonialism. The discussions are interwoven with the author's experiences, conversations with friends, students, and colleagues; in locations as diverse as London, Sierra Leone, aboriginal Australia and New Zealand. It carries a focus on the 'human condition' and the challenges presented in intercultural encounters.
Recent times have seen enormous skepticism about what ethnography can achieve. Ethnography could easily pass for a venture where ‘anything goes’, with categorical, conceptual and ethical accountability taking a beating. Empirical research in general and ethnography in particular run the danger of becoming pre-designed encounters where the data proves the hypothesis, predetermined categories produce facts and questions shape answers: ‘what is found is thus, what one went looking for’. In this kind of research, the results confirm the initial assumptions, which might well be valid if a book is illustrative of earlier researches, but not so if it aims at original enquiries. We are more alert today to the very impulse behind 19th century disciplinary developments in the social sciences, but there are few methodologies available to help track our own biases. That said, ethnography is still a significant way in which problems of reference and language can be confronted. Michael Jackson’s Excursions is refreshing in that it understands this predicament in our disciplines and voices its dilemmas very clearly, so that readers could assess the cognitive and theoretical moves made.
Excursions is interested in the human condition in general, and the challenges presented in the encounters of different cultures. It recuperates the idea of 'human nature' from the otherwise excessively historicized contexts, and attempts a balanced view of human dispositions and historical determination. The twelve chapters are each dedicated to take up specific issues like identity, agency, labor, society versus state, subjectivity, violent histories, and colonialism. Discussions of these issues are interwoven with the experiences of the traveling author in various geographical locations and cultural spaces. As the author tells us –the book originates from three kinds of conversations –a dialogue with authors who have captured his imagination and conversations from ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Aboriginal Australia and New Zealand and conversations with friends, students and colleagues. Excursions travels not just through various cultural spaces, but also across different disciplinary conventions. Its inter-disciplinarity is not simplistic in ways that might reduce the complexity of the concerns raised in any of the disciplines, but is achieved by writing that is clear and jargon-free; presenting us with a perceptible chain of thought.
Throughout the book, Jackson effectively juxtaposes the "voice of modernity that is predicated on the assumption that we can make history the way we want it to be and through knowledge, democracy and foreign aid bring humanity from the dark ages of sectarian hatred and civil strife..." and "the contrary view that we can never legislate away intolerance, or through scientific innovation bring an end to suffering, or through punishment prevent crime, or through remembering history alter its course" (pp. 36-37). Instead of weaving conspiracy theories about how the 'State fails people everywhere' (p 48), Jackson brings the domain of the cultural to the fore and draws our attention "to bear witness to how people endure their lot, affirming life in the face of death". While emphasis on cultural misunderstanding and cultures enabling life-affirming action is a good move, Jackson does see the nation-state as constitutively problematic rather than as functionally so. Thus the new themes introduced by Jackson still use older theorizations and concepts as necessary foundations. This is disappointing since the conclusions that Jackson draws from his new facts and ethnographic accounts are finally very different from what these theorizations were meant to account for.
Jackson’s methodology; what he calls ‘poetical thinking’ in his Preface, affords him a flexibility to draw analogies between Kuranko pragmatism and Taoist images of "the river’s force placing a limit on the oarsman’s ability to navigate" (p. 36). One could take these analogies further and hypothesize about similarities in all Asian and aboriginal cultures and their differences from the European west. Jackson’s reassurance in following Benjamin’s path to the Pyrenees—"One must abandon any conception of what one is doing in order to do it"—only corroborates such a hypothesis, since the emphasis on concept-less action is primarily eastern. But he does not venture there and instead aims to recuperate the reasoning of the east as one that can be placed on par with any other worldview. My discomfort here is that Jackson mediates the east for us and argues for "a stoic or defiant acceptance of fate, after the fact", (p. 38) while any coherent understanding of the east should render it as already being about reflections that begin after the fact. "That what enables us to bring life also enables us to destroy it", is 'tragic irony' for Jackson, but this would be the very starting point of the reflections of non-European cultures, a fact from which to begin to go about life.
A problem arises because Jackson does not consider this possibility; the East is now ascribed with another worldview. Its modes of concept-less action, one hopes, will be effectively captured by Jackson's call elsewhere in the book, to emphasize 'lifeworld rather than worldview'. A similar neglect leads Jackson to ask, (borrowing from Sen 2005) -"why should Arjuna's dilemma be dismissed as illusory?" while it is actually not dismissed as being illusory. What is actually suggested in the Mahabharata is the inevitability of action, which ironically is only what Jackson would agree with as we see in other parts of the book.
The exploration of conversations with mining laborers and Warlpiri notions of work in chapter 4 is one of the best in the book. The following observations are the highlights of this chapter: "labor is experienced not simply as action of an individual subject on inert matter but as an intersubjective relationship that simultaneously transforms both object worked on and the worker himself", "It is important to remind ourselves that in traditional societies, 'work' includes a range of actions that we in the West would designate as ritual, magical, or even social action, as though these were secondary or surplus to the supposedly primary activities of gardening, herding, farming, hunting, or gathering" (p. 72).
The ways in which reason is construed in this book seem somewhat confusing and limited. By saying that there are "limits to which existence can be subject to reason", or: "...I repudiate the notion that enlightened thought operates solely from the standpoint of reason" (p. 151), it seems that Jackson is mistaking reasons for causes and concepts. For, reason can function at various levels: even in situations of considerable ignorance, there is still the possibility of proceeding, with the situations themselves providing reasons. So when Jackson says that to understand Aua, (Knud Rasmussen’s Igulik Eskimo informant) "we require wit and wisdom rather than reason..." (p. xxiv), he is suggesting that Aua’s world is not one of reason. Could it not be that reason is exactly that which compels Aua to see the world as he does? If reason is construed as a process involved in acting (although there might be instances where rationalization predominates), then it is concepts (or dogmas) that need to be abandoned and not reason.
In chapter seven, Jackson examines New Zealand’s aboriginal tribes and their ways of relating to nature, and also the ways in which the Kuranko come to terms with technological advancements of the west, or the landing on the moon. While Jackson provides us here with various hues of functional and other interpretations of Kuranko actions, there is yet another way in which these very data could be interpreted. It is possible to argue that Kuranko cultures indeed proceed scientifically, but do so mainly with the powers of observation alone, given the absence of technological tools. This does not mean that we need to conclude that they are mythical. Thus stories around the thunderstorm could be a secondary level of knowledge systematization and dissemination rather than those that can be debated for truth-value. This rearrangement does not disallow that through observation one has sensed the ‘energies’ (nature) of either the ‘bush’ or the ‘thunder’. As Jackson himself points out, the problem’s solution is in activating the analogies or stories. But it still surprises him that the practical action of burning grass tree logs to shoo away the storm is indeed undertaken. For a historical (and not philosophical) study, understanding reason as part of action would be far more helpful here than otherwise. Jackson calls the Kuranko’s ways ‘magical reasoning’ in chapter eight—he need not –Would he not be mysticizing the Kuranko by doing so?
The description of the African diaspora in London in chapter six is very sensitive and layered. Both "the untruth of identity" and underlying cultural issues are beautifully captured here. The important aspects of 'immigrant imaginary' that consist of various emotions, thoughts, feelings, and dreams including intense self-consciousness, fear, guilt and 'taking everything personally' are duly recorded.
In chapter eight, we find an interesting discussion of divination. Here we are told that "it is the immediate subjective effects of the spells that really matter" (p. 152) and that "...that these psychological and existential changes are immediate and positive, and that the ultimate outcome of any prognostication or sacrifice does not necessarily inspire retrospective interest in the truth or falsity of the diviner’s original propositions" (p. 169). Jackson also reconfigures the notion of agency alongside to produce a new understanding; "But the notion of agency also covers actions whose effects are felt inwardly rather than manifest outwardly...", "the effects of this logic and the consequences of this action are to be measured in relation to a person's changed experience of his or her relation to the world—the extent to which it encourages the belief that a person makes the world to the same extent that it makes him or her" (p. 214). Jackson thus carefully renders either a Kuranko or a Maori world sociologically understandable and in such a way that their statements about the world begin to sound valid and insightful to a modern-western audience that would have otherwise rejected them as mystical or superstitious. But despite his efforts, Kuranko or Maori cultures come across as possessing insights at best and not truth. That is, that either divination or medicine 'works' is not seen as representative of the possibility that they possess truths about the world (even if partial), but as a way of coping with the world. Here is where perhaps future research questions must begin. They must aim not just sociologically describing, and at recovering indigenous scientific reasoning, but also seek truth by re-examining them via western scientific methods and indigenous/eastern spiritual methods if necessary. It is at least not clear at this point of time that we can be sure that these insights do not also constitute truths.
Jackson's record of the various reasons why the Maori were drawn to Christianity is extremely valuable, given the fact that the academia has often been plagued by believers in nothing less than Liberation theology. Unlike the oft-posed thesis of complete victimhood, we see here that there were choices made in response to what the outsider offered: "When the missionaries came we consented to them because we thought they were a law of life to the body" (p. 241).
Jackson's observation of "the paradox of human evolution that has adapted us to life in small groups" (p. xxvii) is capable of opening up questions of race, caste and class in truly meaningful ways. Most importantly, this book provides empirical grounds to both familiar and new arguments and alerts us to the dangers of reducing life to language. Its reading of Anthropology as symptomatic of the human impulse to wander off the beaten track, although interesting for present times, cannot evade the fact that anthropology was a particular kind of enterprise embedded in the European worldview, that eventually violated the cultures it studied, via the categories imposed and the judgments passed: "What is anthropology but a systematic implementation of this impulse to open up dialogue with others, to call into question the parochial view that one’s own world is the world, and all others a diminished version or demonic corruption of it?" (p. 222). Thus the changing history of this discipline provides an enormous fund of lessons to learn from, as do Jackson's ways of reusing its frameworks for different purposes.
Excursions also engages with debates taken up by disciplines like Philosophy and Cultural Studies, so this book will be useful for students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities and even for lay readers.
Reviewed 05 Dec 2008 by:Sushumna Kannan <sushumnaa@gmail.com>Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, India & University of Jean Moulin, Lyon, France.
Medium:
Written Literature
Subject Keywords: Philosophy, Modern - 20th century Intellectual life - 20th century
ABSTRACT: Excursions discusses issues of identity, agency, labor, society-state, subjectivity, violent histories, and colonialism. The discussions are interwoven with the author's experiences, conversations with friends, students, and colleagues; in locations as diverse as London, Sierra Leone, aboriginal Australia and New Zealand. It carries a focus on the 'human condition' and the challenges presented in intercultural encounters.
Recent times have seen enormous skepticism about what ethnography can achieve. Ethnography could easily pass for a venture where ‘anything goes’, with categorical, conceptual and ethical accountability taking a beating. Empirical research in general and ethnography in particular run the danger of becoming pre-designed encounters where the data proves the hypothesis, predetermined categories produce facts and questions shape answers: ‘what is found is thus, what one went looking for’. In this kind of research, the results confirm the initial assumptions, which might well be valid if a book is illustrative of earlier researches, but not so if it aims at original enquiries. We are more alert today to the very impulse behind 19th century disciplinary developments in the social sciences, but there are few methodologies available to help track our own biases. That said, ethnography is still a significant way in which problems of reference and language can be confronted. Michael Jackson’s Excursions is refreshing in that it understands this predicament in our disciplines and voices its dilemmas very clearly, so that readers could assess the cognitive and theoretical moves made.
Excursions is interested in the human condition in general, and the challenges presented in the encounters of different cultures. It recuperates the idea of 'human nature' from the otherwise excessively historicized contexts, and attempts a balanced view of human dispositions and historical determination. The twelve chapters are each dedicated to take up specific issues like identity, agency, labor, society versus state, subjectivity, violent histories, and colonialism. Discussions of these issues are interwoven with the experiences of the traveling author in various geographical locations and cultural spaces. As the author tells us –the book originates from three kinds of conversations –a dialogue with authors who have captured his imagination and conversations from ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Aboriginal Australia and New Zealand and conversations with friends, students and colleagues. Excursions travels not just through various cultural spaces, but also across different disciplinary conventions. Its inter-disciplinarity is not simplistic in ways that might reduce the complexity of the concerns raised in any of the disciplines, but is achieved by writing that is clear and jargon-free; presenting us with a perceptible chain of thought.
Throughout the book, Jackson effectively juxtaposes the "voice of modernity that is predicated on the assumption that we can make history the way we want it to be and through knowledge, democracy and foreign aid bring humanity from the dark ages of sectarian hatred and civil strife..." and "the contrary view that we can never legislate away intolerance, or through scientific innovation bring an end to suffering, or through punishment prevent crime, or through remembering history alter its course" (pp. 36-37). Instead of weaving conspiracy theories about how the 'State fails people everywhere' (p 48), Jackson brings the domain of the cultural to the fore and draws our attention "to bear witness to how people endure their lot, affirming life in the face of death". While emphasis on cultural misunderstanding and cultures enabling life-affirming action is a good move, Jackson does see the nation-state as constitutively problematic rather than as functionally so. Thus the new themes introduced by Jackson still use older theorizations and concepts as necessary foundations. This is disappointing since the conclusions that Jackson draws from his new facts and ethnographic accounts are finally very different from what these theorizations were meant to account for.
Jackson’s methodology; what he calls ‘poetical thinking’ in his Preface, affords him a flexibility to draw analogies between Kuranko pragmatism and Taoist images of "the river’s force placing a limit on the oarsman’s ability to navigate" (p. 36). One could take these analogies further and hypothesize about similarities in all Asian and aboriginal cultures and their differences from the European west. Jackson’s reassurance in following Benjamin’s path to the Pyrenees—"One must abandon any conception of what one is doing in order to do it"—only corroborates such a hypothesis, since the emphasis on concept-less action is primarily eastern. But he does not venture there and instead aims to recuperate the reasoning of the east as one that can be placed on par with any other worldview. My discomfort here is that Jackson mediates the east for us and argues for "a stoic or defiant acceptance of fate, after the fact", (p. 38) while any coherent understanding of the east should render it as already being about reflections that begin after the fact. "That what enables us to bring life also enables us to destroy it", is 'tragic irony' for Jackson, but this would be the very starting point of the reflections of non-European cultures, a fact from which to begin to go about life.
A problem arises because Jackson does not consider this possibility; the East is now ascribed with another worldview. Its modes of concept-less action, one hopes, will be effectively captured by Jackson's call elsewhere in the book, to emphasize 'lifeworld rather than worldview'. A similar neglect leads Jackson to ask, (borrowing from Sen 2005) -"why should Arjuna's dilemma be dismissed as illusory?" while it is actually not dismissed as being illusory. What is actually suggested in the Mahabharata is the inevitability of action, which ironically is only what Jackson would agree with as we see in other parts of the book.
The exploration of conversations with mining laborers and Warlpiri notions of work in chapter 4 is one of the best in the book. The following observations are the highlights of this chapter: "labor is experienced not simply as action of an individual subject on inert matter but as an intersubjective relationship that simultaneously transforms both object worked on and the worker himself", "It is important to remind ourselves that in traditional societies, 'work' includes a range of actions that we in the West would designate as ritual, magical, or even social action, as though these were secondary or surplus to the supposedly primary activities of gardening, herding, farming, hunting, or gathering" (p. 72).
The ways in which reason is construed in this book seem somewhat confusing and limited. By saying that there are "limits to which existence can be subject to reason", or: "...I repudiate the notion that enlightened thought operates solely from the standpoint of reason" (p. 151), it seems that Jackson is mistaking reasons for causes and concepts. For, reason can function at various levels: even in situations of considerable ignorance, there is still the possibility of proceeding, with the situations themselves providing reasons. So when Jackson says that to understand Aua, (Knud Rasmussen’s Igulik Eskimo informant) "we require wit and wisdom rather than reason..." (p. xxiv), he is suggesting that Aua’s world is not one of reason. Could it not be that reason is exactly that which compels Aua to see the world as he does? If reason is construed as a process involved in acting (although there might be instances where rationalization predominates), then it is concepts (or dogmas) that need to be abandoned and not reason.
In chapter seven, Jackson examines New Zealand’s aboriginal tribes and their ways of relating to nature, and also the ways in which the Kuranko come to terms with technological advancements of the west, or the landing on the moon. While Jackson provides us here with various hues of functional and other interpretations of Kuranko actions, there is yet another way in which these very data could be interpreted. It is possible to argue that Kuranko cultures indeed proceed scientifically, but do so mainly with the powers of observation alone, given the absence of technological tools. This does not mean that we need to conclude that they are mythical. Thus stories around the thunderstorm could be a secondary level of knowledge systematization and dissemination rather than those that can be debated for truth-value. This rearrangement does not disallow that through observation one has sensed the ‘energies’ (nature) of either the ‘bush’ or the ‘thunder’. As Jackson himself points out, the problem’s solution is in activating the analogies or stories. But it still surprises him that the practical action of burning grass tree logs to shoo away the storm is indeed undertaken. For a historical (and not philosophical) study, understanding reason as part of action would be far more helpful here than otherwise. Jackson calls the Kuranko’s ways ‘magical reasoning’ in chapter eight—he need not –Would he not be mysticizing the Kuranko by doing so?
The description of the African diaspora in London in chapter six is very sensitive and layered. Both "the untruth of identity" and underlying cultural issues are beautifully captured here. The important aspects of 'immigrant imaginary' that consist of various emotions, thoughts, feelings, and dreams including intense self-consciousness, fear, guilt and 'taking everything personally' are duly recorded.
In chapter eight, we find an interesting discussion of divination. Here we are told that "it is the immediate subjective effects of the spells that really matter" (p. 152) and that "...that these psychological and existential changes are immediate and positive, and that the ultimate outcome of any prognostication or sacrifice does not necessarily inspire retrospective interest in the truth or falsity of the diviner’s original propositions" (p. 169). Jackson also reconfigures the notion of agency alongside to produce a new understanding; "But the notion of agency also covers actions whose effects are felt inwardly rather than manifest outwardly...", "the effects of this logic and the consequences of this action are to be measured in relation to a person's changed experience of his or her relation to the world—the extent to which it encourages the belief that a person makes the world to the same extent that it makes him or her" (p. 214). Jackson thus carefully renders either a Kuranko or a Maori world sociologically understandable and in such a way that their statements about the world begin to sound valid and insightful to a modern-western audience that would have otherwise rejected them as mystical or superstitious. But despite his efforts, Kuranko or Maori cultures come across as possessing insights at best and not truth. That is, that either divination or medicine 'works' is not seen as representative of the possibility that they possess truths about the world (even if partial), but as a way of coping with the world. Here is where perhaps future research questions must begin. They must aim not just sociologically describing, and at recovering indigenous scientific reasoning, but also seek truth by re-examining them via western scientific methods and indigenous/eastern spiritual methods if necessary. It is at least not clear at this point of time that we can be sure that these insights do not also constitute truths.
Jackson's record of the various reasons why the Maori were drawn to Christianity is extremely valuable, given the fact that the academia has often been plagued by believers in nothing less than Liberation theology. Unlike the oft-posed thesis of complete victimhood, we see here that there were choices made in response to what the outsider offered: "When the missionaries came we consented to them because we thought they were a law of life to the body" (p. 241).
Jackson's observation of "the paradox of human evolution that has adapted us to life in small groups" (p. xxvii) is capable of opening up questions of race, caste and class in truly meaningful ways. Most importantly, this book provides empirical grounds to both familiar and new arguments and alerts us to the dangers of reducing life to language. Its reading of Anthropology as symptomatic of the human impulse to wander off the beaten track, although interesting for present times, cannot evade the fact that anthropology was a particular kind of enterprise embedded in the European worldview, that eventually violated the cultures it studied, via the categories imposed and the judgments passed: "What is anthropology but a systematic implementation of this impulse to open up dialogue with others, to call into question the parochial view that one’s own world is the world, and all others a diminished version or demonic corruption of it?" (p. 222). Thus the changing history of this discipline provides an enormous fund of lessons to learn from, as do Jackson's ways of reusing its frameworks for different purposes.
Excursions also engages with debates taken up by disciplines like Philosophy and Cultural Studies, so this book will be useful for students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities and even for lay readers.
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