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The Genealogical Imagination

Two Studies of Life over Time
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2021

About this book

In The Genealogical Imagination Michael Jackson juxtaposes ethnographic and imaginative writing to explore intergenerational trauma and temporality. Drawing on over fifty years of fieldwork, Jackson recounts the 150-year history of a Sierra Leone family through its periods of prosperity and powerlessness, war and peace, jihad and migration. Jackson also offers a fictionalized narrative loosely based on his family history and fieldwork in northeastern Australia that traces how the trauma of wartime in one generation can reverberate into the next. In both stories Jackson reflects on different modes of being-in-time, demonstrating how genealogical time flows in stops and starts—linear at times, discontinuous at others—as current generations reckon with their relationships to their ancestors. Genealogy, Jackson demonstrates, becomes a powerful model for understanding our experience of being-in-the-world, as nobody can escape kinship and the pull of the past. Unconventional and evocative, The Genealogical Imagination offers a nuanced account of how lives are lived, while it pushes the bounds of the forms that scholarship can take.

Author / Editor information

Michael Jackson is Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, and the author of numerous books, including Critique of Identity Thinking and The Varieties of Temporal Experience: Travels in Philosophical, Historical, and Ethnographic Time.

Reviews

“Michael Jackson has long been a source of inspiration for those of us interested in pushing the boundaries of anthropological writing, providing us with regular and often much-needed reminders of the high ethical stakes of such writerly experimentation. The Genealogical Imagination will be of immense interest to anthropologists, literary scholars, students and teachers of creative writing, and anyone interested in the expressive possibilities of writing as a means of exploring the ways in which humans exist in time.”

-- Stuart McLean, author of Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human

“I already have the sense that The Genealogical Imagination will not leave me alone in the years to come—that I will be haunted by it and worked upon by it in the way I am worked over by the stories of my own forebears. The Genealogical Imagination is an anthropological tour de force. It will inhabit the imagination of generations of anthropologists to come.”

-- Lisa Stevenson, author of Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
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  • Publicly Available

    Contents

    vii
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    Preamble

    1
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  • Chronicles of the Barawa Marah
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    Being-in- Time

    7
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    Being of Two Minds

    13
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    Koinadugu

    23
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    Jihad and Colonization

    33
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    Albitaiya

    36
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    Primus inter Pares

    41
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    Lifelines and Lineages

    45
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    Prospero and Caliban

    51
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    Tina Komé

    56
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    Abdul’s Reminiscences

    63
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    Limitrophes

    71
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    Noah’s Story

    78
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    Taking Stock

    89
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    Ferensola

    95
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    S. B.’s Story

    99
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    After the War

    107
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    Within These Four Walls

    111
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    Passages

    119
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    Relationship and Relativity

    122
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    Endings

    135
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    Only Connect

    152
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    Transition

    156
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  • Fathers and Sons
  • Part I
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    Black Mountain

    167
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    Clearing Out the Garage

    174
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    A Hidden History

    188
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    New Lives for Old

    191
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    Billy

    206
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    The Wet

    208
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  • Part II
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    Aground on the Great Barrier

    219
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    University

    223
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    Maya

    232
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    Families

    237
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    Breaking Point

    241
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  • Part III
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    The Unanimous Night

    253
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    Weary Bay

    259
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    Bulbul

    267
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    Toby

    270
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    The Reef

    281
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    The Return

    285
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    Postscript

    288
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    Notes

    293
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    Index

    305
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
April 30, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9781478021384
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478021384
eBook ISBN: 9781478021384
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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