Michael Jackson
Writer
Michael Jackson is the author of over 40 works of fiction, poetry, memoir, and anthropology, and has drawn on his extensive experience in Aotearoa, Sierra Leone, and Aboriginal Australia to develop a unique genre-blurring style that has garnered many awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, and the Victor Turner Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanist Anthropology. Michael Jackson is currently Senior Research Fellow in World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.
2026 – Menton Journal, Lasavia Publishing
BOOKS (Anthropology)
2025 Playing the Hand We are Dealt: The Counterpoint of Fate and Freewill in Literature and Life, New York: Berghahn.
2024 Dilemmas: Beyond Binaries and Double Binds, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2023 Worlds Within & Worlds Without: Field Guide to an Intellectual Journey.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
2023 Friendship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2021 Coincidences: Synchronicity, Verisimilitude, and Storytelling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2021 The Genealogical Imagination: Two Studies of Life Over Time, Durham: Duke University Press.
2020. Quandaries of Belonging: Home Thoughts, from Abroad. London: Anthem Press.
2019 (reprinted 2022) Critique of Identity Thinking. New York: Berghahn.
2018 The Varieties of Temporal Experience: Travels in Philosophical, Historical, and Ethnographic Time, New York: Columbia University Press.
2017 How Lifeworlds Work: Emotionality, Sociality and the Ambiguities of Being. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
2016 The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Columbia.
2016 As Wide as the World is Wise: Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press.
2015 Harmattan: A Philosophical Fiction. New York: Columbi University Press.
2013 The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt. 2nd revised edition. Chicago: Chicago University Press and Museum Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen.
2013 The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration and the Question of Well- Being. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2013 The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2013 Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2012 Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes. Dunedin: Rose Mira Books.
2012 Between One and One Another. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2011 Life Within Limits: Wellbeing in a World of Want. Durham: Duke University Press.
2009 The Palm At The End Of The Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real. Durham: Duke University Press.
2007 Excursions. Durham: Duke University Press.
2005 Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Events. Berghahn: New York & Oxford
2004 (reprinted 2005). In Sierra Leone. Duke University Press: Durham.
2002 (reprinted 2006). The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity. Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen: Copenhagen.
1998 Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
1997 The Blind Impress. The Dunmore Press: Palmerston North.
1995 (reprinted 2000). At Home in the World. Duke University Press: Durham.
1989 Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Indiana University Press: Bloomington.
1986 Barawa, and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky. Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington.
1982 Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives. Indiana University Press: Bloomington.
1977 The Kuranko: Dimensions of Social Reality in a West African Society. Hurst: London.
EDITED BOOKS (Anthropology)
2015 (with Albert Piette), What is Existential Anthropology? Berghahn Books: New York.
2014 The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engagements with Philosophy, eds. Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, and Bhrigupati Singh, Durham: Duke University Press.
1996 Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Indiana University Press: Bloomington.
1990 (with Ivan Karp). Personhood and Agency: The Experience of Self and Other in African Cultures. Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, 14.
BOOKS (Poetry, Fiction, Memoir)
2026. Menton Journal. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing.
2025. Outliers: Eight Antipodean Tales. Ugly Hill Press.
2024. Beginnings: In Aotearoa and Abroad. Ugly Hill Press.
2021. Dowsing. Seattle:
2019. The Paper Nautilus – a Trilogy, Dunedin: University of Otago Press.
2016. Walking to Pencarrow: Selected Poems. Cold Hub Press: Christchurch.
2015. Constant in the Darkness. WutheringInk: Sydney.
2013. Midwinter at Walden Pond. AuthorHouse: New York.
2012. Being of Two Minds. Steele Roberts: Wellington.
2006. Dead Reckoning. Auckland University Press: Auckland.
2006. The Accidental Anthropologist: a Memoir. Longacre: Dunedin.
1996. Antipodes. Auckland University Press: Auckland.
1994. Pieces of Music. Random House: Auckland.
1989. Duty Free: Selected Poems 1965-1988. McIndoe: Dunedin.
1988. Rainshadow. McIndoe: Dunedin.
1985. Going On. McIndoe: Dunedin.
1980. Wall: Poems 1976-1979. McIndoe: Dunedin.
1976. Latitudes of Exile: Poems 1965-1975. McIndoe: Dunedin.