The Accidental Anthropologist

Michael Jackson

Dec 2013 · Sold by Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited

About this ebook

Journeys through the Congo, Sierra Leone and Outback Australia in an inventive memoir by a Commonwealth Poetry Prize-winning ethnographer. The Accidental Anthropologist is a fascinating, impeccably written memoir, or more accurately, a series of fragments. Compelling and absorbing as well as intense and insightful, Jackson writes a far from classically autobiographical text. There is nothing predictable about the mode or incidents he has chosen to write about: this is literary memoir at its best and most inventive. Jackson has a fascination with the concept of personal metamorphosis, the idea that a life can be dismantled and reassembled in a different country and set of relationships. And throughout the story the author makes a pretty good fist of living the theory. Jackson’s experiences begin with his earnest portrayal of young adulthood in Wellington where he associates on the fringes with many of the literary figures of the early 1960s: Bob Lowry, Fleur Adcock, James K. Baxter, R.A.K. Mason and the artist McCahon. Jackson finds himself homeless in London where he’s drawn to help the poor and eventually finds his way to Cambridge, where he stumbles upon anthropology. His subsequent ethnographic fieldwork takes him to the Congo, Sierra Leone, and outback Australia. Jackson makes it clear that our lives are barely our own, they belong as much to the people, the landscapes, the influences of thought and ideology that absorb us. He excells at the intensely personal and captivates with this masterful work. The Accidental Anthropologist is a challenging and magnificent memoir; much of it is spellbinding, astute and disquieting.

About the author

Michael Jackson is an internationally acclaimed anthropologist and award-winning poet and novelist, and founder of existential anthropology, a non-traditional sub-field of anthropology which is strongly influenced by critical theory, American pragmatism, and existential-phenomenological thought. Born in Nelson, New Zealand, he received a BA from Victoria University of Wellington, an MA from the University of Auckland, and a PhD from Cambridge University (UK). He has travelled widely, worked in a variety of jobs and has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone and Aboriginal Australia, much of which features in his memoir The Accidental Anthropologist. He is Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, in the United States. Formerly he taught at Massey University, the Australian National University, Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Copenhagen. He won the 1976 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Latitudes of Exile, the 1981 New Zealand Book Award for Wall, and the 1995 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Pieces of Music. In 1982 he was recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship. He has written 30 books, including the award-winning Paths Toward a Clearing and At Home in the World and Road Markings: an Anthropologist in the Antipodes. In 2006, Jackson was awarded an honorary doctorate by Victoria University.