Customer Reviews

At Home in the World

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Michael Jackson is an Ethnographer/Anthropologist who is of the school which searches for similarities rather than differences among cultures, to look at the full range of our humanity in dealing with various situations.

This book describes the second year of a three year study of a group of Walbiri people of Australia. This particular group has had all of their usual nomadic places encroached on by civilization. In addition, the earlier unwittingly harmful effect of the Australian government's attempt to "civilize" the indigenous people is discussed.

Michael Jackson uses this study to focus on what is meant by "home" and "homelessness" on many levels, from the present world-wide migrations to his past personal choice of careers in escaping New Zealand (a place many of us would to go to).

In addition to being a very well-traveled and professionally accomplished scholar, Michael Jackson has also published fiction and poetry. Consequently this book is also a Thoreau-like attempt to fuse Art and Science.

The concepts of home and homelessness are mapped out for us to understand and apply to our own situations. But the only solutions to any problems arising there, lie in the compassion and human-heartedness that show throughout this author's writing.

Each chapter stars with an apt quotation. My favorite is a toss-up between a Roman proverb from Chapter 2: "ubi bene, ibi patria"-translated as-"Your home is where they treat you well", and a Walbiri saying from Chapter 4:"A house is a good thing. You can lock it up and go live anywhere you like"--Walter Pukatiwara.

A very intriguing and beautifully written book, if at times lacking in context and clarity. Then again, a little bit of muddle does seem fitting on a subject so dense, and a narrative as multi-faceted as the dreaming.

This book came highly recommended by some of the best phenomenological anthropologists in the field, so I looked forward to reading it with great anticipation. Though Jackson is a fine writer, the work was ultimately a disappointment, especially because he had clearly done so much top-quality fieldwork with the Warlpiri people and the question of what it means to be at home in the world.

It seemed to me that his radical adherence to bare-bones narrative flow - the book reads more like a travel novel than an ethnographic work - while admirable in its attempt to present the lived experience of this Aboriginal community, actually undermines his purpose by concealing more than it reveals. He uses Warlpiri terms, italicized, with no gloss or glossary; he introduces the fascinating kinship structure and then lets it drop without explaining to the non-Aboriginal reader what this might mean to their experience of social relations; he speaks extensively of the role of the Dreaming in their conceptions of home, without an introduction for the reader who does not know what the Dreaming is, or worse, already has some essentialized, stereotyped notion in mind.

In sum, he has made the first half of the hermeneutic journey to the experience of the other, perhaps more successfully than many other ethnographers; but he then fails to complete the return journey home by translating his find into a recognizable idiom.