Life Within Limits , livre ebook

Duke University Press - Jackson Michael Jackson

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The sense that well-being remains elusive, transitory, and unevenly distributed is felt by the rich as well as the poor, and in all societies. To explore this condition of existential dissatisfaction, the anthropologist Michael Jackson traveled to Sierra Leone, described in a recent UN report as the “least livable” country in the world. There he revisited the village where he did his first ethnographic fieldwork in 1969–70 and lived in 1979. Jackson writes that Africans have always faced forces from without that imperil their lives and livelihoods. Though these forces have assumed different forms at different times—slave raiding, warfare, epidemic illness, colonial domination, state interference, economic exploitation, and corrupt government—they are subject to the same mix of magical and practical reactions that affluent Westerners deploy against terrorist threats, illegal immigration, market collapse, and economic recession. Both the problem of well-being and the question of what makes life worthwhile are grounded in the mystery of existential discontent—the question as to why human beings, regardless of their external circumstances, are haunted by a sense of insufficiency and loss. While philosophers have often asked the most searching questions regarding the human condition, Jackson suggests that ethnographic method offers one of the most edifying ways of actually exploring those questions.

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Sierra Leona

Sierra Leone

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Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	16 février 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780822393696
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	5 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1348€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Life Within Limits

Michael Jackson

LIfEWITHINLIMITS

Well-being in a World of Want

duke university press durham and london 2011

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

ypeset in Whitman by

seng ïnformation Systems, ïnc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the waiter turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by ime. hat is the life of men. —ZORà NEàE ûRŝTON, Their Eyes Were Watching God

he gospel of detachment is as well suited to a culture of ex-

cess as it is to a society of radical poverty. ït thrives in circum-stances in which one’s wants are dangerous because they are surely going to be deprived—or because they are pulled in so many directions that they pose a threat to the integrity, the unity of one’s self. Ôf course, wanting too much, wanting the wrong thing, wanting what you can’t have is one deInition of the human condition; we all have to learn how to make some liveable compromise between the always insatiable self and the always insuîcient reality principle. —EVà OMàN, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

Contents

ïmagining Firawa ix

Fathers and Sons 1 Forty Days 13 Scenes from a arriage 30 Smoke and irrors 46 hings Hidden Since the Foundation of the World 63 he eopening of the Gate of Éort 77 Something’s issing 88 he Politics of Storytelling 100 he oad to Kabala 112 heir Éyes Were Watching God 122 Albitaiya 134 he Year of Supernatural Abundance 145 Strings Attached 158 he Shape of the ïnconstruable Question 172 ot to Find Ône’s Way in a City 187 Coda 199

Acknowledgments 201 otes 203 ïndex 225

ïmagining Firawa

Tŝ BOO ŝ àN Eŝŝà in understanding human well-being, not as a settled state but as a Ield of strule. As with goodness and reasonableness, our diîculty of achieving wellness does not dimin-ish its hold over our imaginations, for it signiIes a hope without which existence would be untenable—that life, for ourselves and those we care about, holds more in store for us than less. hough it is rare to meet people who are completely and permanently sat-isIed with their lot, it is rarer to meet people who expect nothing of life, abjectly accepting the status quo, never imagining that their situations could or should be socially, spiritually, or materially im-proved. his sense that well-being remains elusive, transitory, and unevenly distributed is felt by the rich as well as the poor, and in all societies. o explore this condition of existential dissatisfaction, ï traveled to a West African country described in a recent ûN report as the “least liveable” in the world. ïn going to Sierra Leone, ï wanted to see if current Western preoccupations with socioeconomic devel-opment and human rights prevent us from adequately understand-ing the priorities and values of ordinary Africans and whether, on balance, Sierra Leoneans have a harder time of it than Éuropeans and Americans in dealing with scarcity and insuîciency. African people have always faced forces from without that imperil lives and livelihoods. hough these minatory forces assume dierent forms at dierent times—slave raiding, warfare, epidemic illness, colonial domination, state interference, religious zealotry, economic exploi-tation, and corrupt government—they are subject to the same mix of magical and practical reactions that we in the auent West de-ploy against terrorist threats, illegal immigration, market collapse, and economic recession. ut well-being is always contingent on more than one’s particular historical or cultural situation. ït reects a sense of discontinuity between who we are and what we might become—questions ofexistential well-beingand personal fate that

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