Michael Jackson (anthropologist)

Transcription

Gerhard: Thinking about how to group these things together, I remember reading your book and it sort of touched upon all of these issues in an interesting way to bring them together. It would be good if we could have little bit of segue into what "Life Within Limits" means to you and how you’ve thought about it? Michael: Yes. Well, I guess I would say all those modes of relationship that you've talked about as informed by ethical considerations or ethical struggle, by which I mean there's no pre-formulated way in which people can simply follow a script and relate to things or other people, particularly in situations of precariousness and scarcity as if that's all you have to do. "Life Within Limits" as an ethical affair means that people are struggling to find a way around obstacles, a way of getting under or over something which is blocking their path. It involves a great deal of inventiveness, which must, in a sense, pay respect to what is already codified as correct conduct but must, of necessity, depart from it in some way. The way I understand this ethical struggle, as it were, to work out a modus vivendi for yourself and for others that are part of your beloved community is very, very cognate with what Marcel Mauss called reciprocity because you're always saying, “What am I obliged to give? What can I rightfully expect to receive from the world? Insofar as I have received something, what do I have to give back?” I think this is something which connects with people in affluent and impoverished circumstances equally. These kind of considerations, it seemed to me, are universal and transcend circumstance. I think those are some of the issues that emerge out of the empirical fieldwork in Sierra Leone, but also have come to me through work and thinking and a variety of other settings. Gerhard: Do you think there's a difference—when you talk about within limits, there's a difference between limits that are imposed from the outside and limits that we perhaps impose upon ourselves? Of course, both of those work together but... Michael: Yes, exactly. Insofar as we have internalized certain standards and notions of the good and the true and the right, there is a limit that our own conscience imposes. But it's interesting that people in extremis, will, often, in a sense, transgress even those limits, even though they felt guilt-stricken, profoundly remorseful and will often describe themselves as having descended into animality in order to survive. So it seems to me that the evidence is that there's no limit that is not insurmountable or cannot be transgressed by human beings, even eating the bodies of other kind of members of your own species who have died in order to survive. But there are some people who can't overcome those limits, who will not do it, and who will prefer to die rather than transgress that. I don't know whether there's any historical incident in which people have had to commit incest for their society or their group to continue. Again, that's a kind of—it's a thought experiment to ask: under what circumstances would a person transgress these kind of incredibly profoundly internalized taboos in order to survive? Gerhard: In the book—I can't remember which page now—but you talk about ethnography. Actually, Paul Stoller picks that up. You talked about ethnography vis-à-vis philosophy in terms of anthropologists have, in a way, an obligation because we have the tools to actually bring forth and write and document these things. Can you talk a little bit about how you see anthropology's role in not just describing those scenarios we just talked about, but unveiling them in a way? Michael: Can you rephrase? Gerhard: Why do you think anthropology is better suited than, let's say, sociology to write about these things—or philosophy? Michael: I think that anthropology—certainly, the anthropology that I do and undoubtedly the anthropology you do—in society is where we kind of, in a sense, very easily lose our footing, where we're very radically thrown and destabilized by different ways of doing things, a completely foreign language, and in your case by people who have been doubly unsettled by virtue of being refugees. It's very, very difficult to negotiate one's way in such communities. We are more sharply aware, I think, than most sociologists who are working in much more comfortable or stable circumstances of exactly how difficult life can be, especially the strategies that people are trying to come up with to find a viable life, where they're blocked and hindered in every direction, not only by internal constraints, by compelling memories that tend to block out the ability to see their way ahead and also by the machinations of the state that impose themselves upon them at every turn. Insofar as we become a part of that situation, I think that our humanity is tested to the limits. We become more aware of what it is, as it were, to be so out of one's comfort zone, so unable to fall back on any kind of precedence or any kind of models for correct conduct, that we just really are fumbling in the dark. Gerhard: In terms of—we talked about this earlier actually on the work in terms of ethnography as a way of making and then talking about relationships, I guess. Does that give us an edge in terms of empathy, in terms of an effective relationship that we can establish to delve deeper into some of these issues? Michael: I'm not a fan of the idea of empathy, I've got to say. I mean, it's part of a kind of tradition, a European tradition of, I think, wishful thinking. It's a nice idea to think that we can empathize with people and get into their experience, but what we find ourselves in, as it were, is a kind of intersubjective zone in which there can be no complete crossing over into the mind of the other or the experience of the other, in which there is not a shareability of experience, in which we are doing the best with extremely limited understanding to negotiate a relationship, in which something of what they might have to tell us can be told and received, and something of what we then understand through what we received can be given back so there's some kind of mutual satisfaction in the encounter. It's a great—it's a long way away from a notion of empathic understanding. It's a long way away from the idea that we can know other people. I think these are the limits, too, the limits of the ability of an outsider to really grasp what is meaningful and real to another person in extremis. Gerhard: I think that's really important, actually, to think about our—be reflexive of our own limits, of our own work. Michael: Yes, precisely. Gerhard: I know you've—in the interview we talked about earlier, you talked about the role of the anthropologist. If you could just tell us a little bit about what you see as the role of the anthropologist today. For instance, is it to write within the academy and publish in anthropology journals, and/or is it to be an activist for the people you work with? Michael: Well, first of all, and I've said this often, for me anthropology is an experiment one conducts on yourself. It's a way of testing the extent to which you can cross these formidable cultural and—how to put it—these social lines, all these experiential divides, and get some glimmer of understanding of people living under completely different circumstances. That means, as it were, testing your own capacity to the limits, which is why there's a great deal of pain and disorientation and suffering involved, I think, in this—doing ethnography in this vein. I think that unless one does anthropology in this way, you really don't have very much to show the world at large except something you've kind of fabricated, often out of the kind of liberal imagination, which likes to—which has a heavy investment in the idea of mutual understanding across cultural frontiers. I think we need to be reminded of the extreme difficulty of this. The only way you can be honestly reminded of that is to show through your own experience of what that involved and how far you got with it. But one thing that I have discovered, and it's been something of a kind of nothing short of a miracle given the way everything is stacked against mutuality in a world of difference, is that friendships can be born of our encounters with people in other cultures, which in a sense are not explicable in terms of the idea that we are culturally preprogrammed or that is—we're already, in a sense, so different from one another that there can be no meeting point, no common ground. The formation of friendships, I think, with people that I've got to know in Sierra Leone and, to a lesser extent, Aboriginal Australia, testifies to me to exactly what can be accomplished under circumstances, as they say, which on the face of it preclude any such possibility. Gerhard: One of those friendships is with Sewa—I forget his surname… Michael: Yes, Sewa Koroma. Gerhard: In a way, it's a beautiful story that goes through several of your books and articles of tracing that friendship and relationship with him from Sierra Leone to London and back again in the "Life Within Limits." Is that a sort of—in a way, it's old-school anthropology, if you like, was about seeking out otherness and the exoticism by going somewhere, a bounded little village somewhere, and coming back and telling others, within the academy usually, about the place far away. There was—one thing that was always lacking was the exchange between us, the anthropologists, and the theories we come up with with the place we go to. If we actually talk about the people we work with as friends and deep relationships, they accompany us and we accompany them. Is that, if you like, a better form of anthropology, of doing anthropology, also because it means it's a long-term anthropology that you become part of the family, as it were, and have an ongoing relationship? Michael: Well, you can't prescribe anything. I don't think you can organize yourself or mobilize yourself in such a way as to make certain things happen in fieldwork. There's something—certain things just do happen. Some anthropologists wind up in societies where they feel totally kind of—about which they feel totally negative and have the most awful experiences. Others find themselves in societies that are very congenial to them. Others find themselves in societies which are a kind of mix of both, but they form extraordinary relationships, even friendships, in those societies in which there exists things like elective affinities. I think that this is something that is one of the nice things that can happen to you, but it's certainly not something you can make happen. It's like trying to find a life partner by going to a dating agency. Gerhard: Well, actually, when we talked to Rob Borofsky, he equated anthropology with love in terms of the relationship. It's much like a relationship that you're in. We have good days and bad days, but it's about making it work, rather than—I don't know. Romantic love is all about the imagination, the vision, but a real relationship, you just have to make it work, ongoing. It's like fieldwork. Michael: Right. Yes, I compared it, at one point, to an arranged marriage, my relationship to Kuranko. It was awkwardly negotiated at the outset, but it had worked out in the long run. I'm not sure about love. I also relate it to the joking relationship, which just brings it closer to friendship because, in a sense, the joking relationship is a form of friendship where there is simultaneously difference but you get familiarity in that sense, so it's a contradictory relationship. It can't be really taken seriously, so you fool around a lot. My relationship with Sewa is very, very much in that vein. I mean, I've always had a kind of silly streak in me. I'm very irreverent, anti-establishment just by instinct. And Sewa was very, very much the same. We spend a lot of time just being silly and joking around. Even though it doesn't resemble the formal Kuranko joking relationship, both because of the content not being comparable and also our relationship doesn't fit any of the kind of categories of the joking relationship in Kuranko. Nonetheless it's a kind of—it's something which, again, emerges spontaneously in many relationships and can have this kind of overturn of affection coexisting with a sense of a distance that can't be closed. Gerhard: A more general question, I guess: how did you come to anthropology? I know you did a lot of things beforehand, which I think are important, though, maybe not explaining but leading to the trajectory that you're on. Michael: Well, I've described this in my memoir. I grew up in a small rural New Zealand country town and didn't feel at all at home there. From early childhood, I was imagining a places where I might feel more at home. I read a lot like kids do and dreamed a lot about other places. Among the many places I read about and dreamed about were what would have been called primitive societies, except they were described in such 19th century stereotypical terms that they weren't, as it were, other worlds that I could see with much real clarity. I identified very, very much with Maori New Zealanders during my childhood because they were marginalized, and I felt very much on the margins, so there was a logical reason why I should associate and identify with them. Then, like a lot of young people, I wanted to do great things in the world, change the world for the better, and I began a career after I finished my first degree as a social worker. I worked in various places where anthropologists typically work: Aboriginal Australia, among the homeless in London and in Central Africa, and became increasingly dissatisfied with being in the position of somebody basically assuming to know what was best for other people and steering them onto the right path. I wanted to relate to people on a level playing field. In my time in Congo, I just had this enchanted sense that African villages were where I wanted to be. I couldn't get there except for a day or two, given the work I was doing in community development. I decided I would go and do anthropology and become an anthropologist essentially and go back to Africa that way. Gerhard: You started at it—you did your PhD at Cambridge. That was what took you to Sierra Leone the first time. Michael: Yes, because, at that time, most of the leading anthropologists in Cambridge, like Meyer Fortes and Jack Goody, were Africanists or West Africanists, so it's the obvious place for me to go. Gerhard: Did you choose Sierra Leone, or did it choose you, or did something else choose for you? Michael: No, I chose it for a strange reason. When I was living in Melbourne—this must have been about five years previous—a close friend of mine was a Jamaican guy. He and his wife I kept in touch with over the years. He wanted to go to Africa doing the "roots" thing. He wrote to me—because I was in the Congo. He said, "Where in Africa would you suggest I go?" I said, "I've heard Sierra Leone's a rather pleasant place." Honestly, I didn't know where it was. I had a vague idea it was in North Africa. Gerhard: You sent him off to Sierra Leone? Michael: He never went there, but it weighed on my mind. When Jack Goody said, "Where in Africa are we going to send you?" I said, "I suppose I better go to Sierra Leone because I once advised somebody to go there." I mean, it really was as arbitrary as that. Gerhard: Wow. One short thing that is also, I think, quite difficult actually is: if you had to summarize or give a definition of anthropology in one or two sentences, what would it be? Michael: I think it would be along the lines of what we've just been talking about. It's an exploration of the paradox of human plurality. The fact is that all human beings are in some sense the same. We're all members of the same species. We have millions of years of evolution that has made us what we are today. The period of our cultural revolution is relatively small by contrast. The period in which we have become different culturally, ethnically, and appearance is only a small part of our evolutionary history, but we are both, as it were, the same as all other human beings and every individual is absolutely different, genetically and in character. I think anthropology is possibly the most alluring and edifying way of exploring plurality and that paradox. Gerhard: That's very concise and very beautiful. Thank you.