Description
Book SynopsisThrough sixty-one beautifully crafted, concise essays, the anthropologist Michael Jackson reflects on life situations where we are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding ourselves and connecting with others.
Trade Review“Michael Jackson’s sixty-one short essays, based on his experiences in disparate geographical settings, are designed to speak to each reader individually like a sophisticated musical composition, rather than advancing a linear argument. . . . Jackson’s case that ‘history, religion, spirituality, culture are shop-worn terms,’ and should be replaced by ‘the image of life at the edge of language, a shoreline on which the sea washes ceaselessly,’ is given substance by his own literary skill. And it is possible to glimpse here the makings of a shared ‘religious’ sensibility that may be fitfully emerging to unite different peoples and traditions, in ways influenced by, but not entirely decreed by, the gods of the marketplace.” - Jonathan Benthall,
Times Literary Supplement“As always . . . Jackson writes with beauty and great clarity on demanding
and elusive topics.” - Hayder Al-Mohammad,
Social Anthropology“Jackson excels at an interpretive method in which the power resides in storytelling.
The Palm at the End of the Mind is a book to think with as it evokes the beauty and mystery of our experiences. Its stories haunt the imagination and so illustrate the power of phenomenology.” - REBECCA A. ALLAHYARI,
Anthropology and Humanism“
The Palm at the End of the Mind is a marvelous work of deep scholarly and artistic significance. Michael Jackson reflects on those things—love, loss, pain, courage, resilience—that define the human condition. Bringing a lifetime of work in anthropology to bear, he provides a rich description of the irreducible dynamics of living in social worlds that are in continuous flux.”—
Paul Stoller, author of
The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey“Elegant and harrowing, this book from renowned ethnographer Michael Jackson takes us to the borderlands of human experience, where normal habits of thought and rules of social location are lost or ruptured, ‘where we confront sides of ourselves that ordinarily do not see the light of day, yet from which new modes of consciousness may take shape.’ As Jackson moves fluidly between storytelling, poetry, memoir, metaphysics, social commentary, interior exploration, and existential reflection, we travel with him around the globe and through incongruous histories: ‘penumbral domains’ that he argues do not belong exclusively to the language of religion, or even to language itself.
The Palm at the End of the Mind insists on the integrity of transmutations, even terrible ones, for these are still eternally precious and deeply true. It bears witness to the cosmic connections forged in such mystery, refusing to let us look away. Long after its last page, it haunts, it sings, it prophesies. This is a brilliant ethnography of the heart.”—
Kimberley Patton, Harvard Divinity School
“As always . . . Jackson writes with beauty and great clarity on demanding and elusive topics.” -- Hayder Al-Mohammad * Social Anthropology *
“Jackson excels at an interpretive method in which the power resides in storytelling.
The Palm at the End of the Mind is a book to think with as it evokes the beauty and mystery of our experiences. Its stories haunt the imagination and so illustrate the power of phenomenology.” -- Rebecca A. Allahyari * Anthropology and Humanism *
“Michael Jackson’s sixty-one short essays, based on his experiences in disparate geographical settings, are designed to speak to each reader individually like a sophisticated musical composition, rather than advancing a linear argument. . . . Jackson’s case that ‘history, religion, spirituality, culture are shop-worn terms,’ and should be replaced by ‘the image of life at the edge of language, a shoreline on which the sea washes ceaselessly,’ is given substance by his own literary skill. And it is possible to glimpse here the makings of a shared ‘religious’ sensibility that may be fitfully emerging to unite different peoples and traditions, in ways influenced by, but not entirely decreed by, the gods of the marketplace.” -- Jonathan Benthall * TLS *
Table of ContentsPreface xi
1. Ancestral Roots
The Real 1
Only Connect 2
93 Irving Street 4
Reconnecting 8
Missed Connections 11
Tertium Quid 14
The Dead 19
Mind the Gap 23
The Genealogical Imagination 29
The Penumbral 34
After Midnight 38
Second Skins 40
On Not Severing the Vine When Harvesting the Grapes 42
Corrupted Con-texts 46
The Broken Heart 48
2. Primary Bonds
Incarnations 52
The Matrixial 57
A Letter from Athens 61
Emily's Journal 62
Beginnings 65
The Pain in Painting 69
Paths 73
Parallel Lives 75
My Lunch with arthur 81
The Wellness Narratives 84
Night 94
Outside the Window 98
"What Really Matters" 99
3. Elective Affinities
Knots 103
Marina del Rey 106
In Limbo 108
In Media Res 108
In Wellington 112
The Enigma of Anteriority 116
Survivor Guilt 119
Ventifact 123
Measured Talk 129
Heaven and Hell 131
Manifest Destiny 134
The Nature of Things 148
The Road of Excess 159
The Eternal Ones of the Dream 162
Strange Lights 15
Recognitions 168
The Other Portion 173
It Happens 176
Ships That Pass in the Night 178
4. Competing Values
Cafe Stelling 182
Value Judgments 184
The Bottle Imp 189
Marginal Notes 193
A Storyteller's Story 195
Big Thing and Small Thing 200
Sacrifice 203
Prince Vessantara 208
The Girl Who Went Beneath the Water 210
Ill-Gotten Gains 216
Is Nothing Sacred? 221
Return to the Cafe Stelling 229
Metanoia 232
The Place Where We Live 236
Acknowledgments 239
