Quandaries of Belonging

Notes on Home, from Abroad

By (author) Michael Jackson

Publication date:

15 December 2020

Publisher

First Hill Books

Dimensions:

216x140mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781785276415

Those who leave their homelands, either under duress or by design, will see them in a different light than those who have stayed put. Michael Jackson argues that the perspective of the expatriate may be compared with what ethnographers call ‘stranger value’. In moving between detachment and deep immersion, this bifocal perspective implicates a bicultural one, which is why Jackson has recourse to Māori traditional knowledge, not in order to impose a Eurocentric interpretation on them, but to show how cross-cultural conversations and interactions can promote new forms of sociality and coexistence.

Preface; 1. Taranaki; 2. Neither Here nor There; 3. Being Out of Place; 4. The Pare Revisited; 5. Talking with Te Pakaka; 6. The Road to Karuna Falls; 7. The Social Life of Stories; 8. A Landscape with Too Few Lovers; 9. Distance Looks Our Way; 10. At Home in the World; 11. Fires of No Return; 12. Critique of Colonial Reason; Coda; Acknowledgments, Epigraphs, and Sources; Index.

It is said that inside each person is the universe. Jackson’s book is a stunning illustration of this. Narrating the self and the places integral to his own making, he reaches out and grasps a shared humanity that strives to comprehend a poetics of fit in the world'. — Amanda Kearney, Professor of Anthropology and Indigenous Studies at Flinders University and author of Violence in Place, Environmental and Cultural Wounding