At home in the world / Michael Jackson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jackson, Michael, 1940-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Warlpiri (Australian people)--Social conditions.

Warlpiri (Australian people).

Philosophy, Warlpiri.

Home--Philosophy.

Home.

Homelessness--Philosophy.

Homelessness.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (202 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 1995.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Ours is a century of uprootedness, with fewer and fewer people living out their lives where they are born. At such a time, in such a world, what does it mean to be "at home?" Perhaps among a nomadic people, for whom dwelling is not synonymous with being housed and settled, the search for an answer to this question might lead to a new way of thinking about home and homelessness, exile and belonging. At Home in the World is the story of just such a search. Intermittently over a period of three years Michael Jackson lived, worked, and traveled extensively in Central Australia. This book chronicles his experience among the Warlpiri of the Tanami Desert.Something of a nomad himself, having lived in New Zealand, Sierra Leone, England, France, Australia, and the United States, Jackson is deft at capturing the ambiguities of home as a lived experience among the Warlpiri. Blending narrative ethnography, empirical research, philosophy, and poetry, he focuses on the existential meaning of being at home in the world. Here home becomes a metaphor for the intimate relationship between the part of the world a person calls "self" and the part of the world called "other." To speak of "at-homeness," Jackson suggests, implies that people everywhere try to strike a balance between closure and openness, between acting and being acted upon, between acquiescing in the given and choosing their own fate. His book is an exhilarating journey into this existential struggle, responsive at every turn to the political questions of equity and justice that such a struggle entails.A moving depiction of an aboriginal culture at once at home and in exile, and a personal meditation on the practice of ethnography and the meaning of home in our increasingly rootless age, At Home in the World is a timely reflection on how, in defining home, we continue to define ourselves.

Contents:

Frontmatter

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ONE. Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness

TWO. Ubi bene, ibi patria (Your home is where they treat you well) -Latin proverb

THREE. I think of two landscapes-one outside the self, the other within. -Barry Lopez

FOUR. A house is a good thing. You can lock it up and go and live anywhere you like. -Walter Pukatiwara

FIVE. He departed with thoughts of home, He departed with thoughts of home, He departed towards another place. -Honey-Ant Men's Song

SIX. I don't really know what happened. If one wished to be solemn, it could be said that I had found my landscape, my real home. -Ingmar Bergman

SEVEN. It is suicide to be abroad. But w hat is it to be at home, ... what is it to be at home? -Samuel Beckett

EIGHT. Man's real life is not a house, but the Road, and . .. life itself is a journey to be walked on foot. -Bruce Chatwin

NINE. There's too much poverty below us. Every leaf defines its limits. All roots have their histories. -Derek Walcott

TEN. My country is the place where I can cut a spear or make a spear-thrower without asking anyone. -A Western Desert man

ELEVEN. And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. -T. S. Eliot

TWELVE. Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. There is no place like home. -Yi-Fu Tuan

THIRTEEN. Man does not relate to the world as subject to object, as eye to painting; nor even as actor to stage set. Man and the world are bound together like the snail to its shell. -Milan Kundera

FOURTEEN. Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. -T. S. Eliot

EPILOGUE. Authenticity comes from a single faithfulness: that to the ambiguity of experience. Its energy is to be found in how one event leads to another. Its mystery is not in the words but on the page. -John Berger

POSTSCRIPT

NOTES

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-188).

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822325383

0822325381

9780822396123

0822396122

OCLC:

1153020975