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Worlds Within and Worlds Without: Field Guide to an Intellectual Journey

Online ISBN:
9781501768507
Print ISBN:
9781501768491
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

Worlds Within and Worlds Without: Field Guide to an Intellectual Journey

Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson
Harvard Divinity School
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Published online:
21 September 2023
Published in print:
15 April 2023
Online ISBN:
9781501768507
Print ISBN:
9781501768491
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

The author of this book predicates his intellectual autobiography on the view that works and lives are intimately entangled. Through an interweaving of personal and ethnographic descriptions, the author focuses on the imaginative and practical ways human beings negotiate the space between worlds they call their own and worlds they regard as lying beyond their immediate purview. Whether the worlds that elude our empirical grasp are identified with divinities or the dead, ether or earth, history or myth, the Internet, or the nation state, we experience them ambivalently, as potential sources of wellbeing and as possible threats to our very existence. Closing ourselves off from the world is not an option, for our humanity depends on the ties that bind us to significant others, and others to us. As the book shows, the relationship between the familiar and the foreign is not only an existential issue that all human beings address in one way or another, it is a methodological issue for anthropologists concerned with the complementarity of individual and collective perspectives, ethnos and anthropos, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective.

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