Michael Jackson (3)

“But life itself is a bumpy ride, a turbulent river, a hard road, and in trying to understand how people survive traumatic events – typically described as breakups or breakdowns – I have been struck again and again, in my fieldwork after the civil war in Sierra Leone and in reflections on my own biography, by the limited extent to which abstract ideas inform our actions, help us correct course, or enable us to endure. Despite our commitment to theories of knowledge and theologies, or show more to concepts of love, heroism, God, and goodness, these abstractions foreshadow but do not necessarily guide our actions. Mostly they emerge as retrospective abridgements and rationalizations that unfolded “thoughtlessly” and unpredictably in the no-man’s land between ourselves and others. Indeed, we never know exactly what we are doing, or why, and much as we like to impute causative power to our beliefs, they are more like tools that help us cope, after the fact, with events that outstripped our capacity to comprehend and control them.”
– Michael D. Jackson, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real show less

Michael Jackson is a distinguished NZ-born anthropologist, now teaching at Harvard. This book is the narrative of a recent return trip he made to New Zealand. There are some fascinating reflections on national culture, 'firstness' and the dilemmas of the expatriate here.

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