Michael Jackson’s Lifeworlds is a masterful collection of essays, the culmination of a career aimed at understanding the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. Seeking the truths that are found in the interstices between examiner and examined, world and word, and body and mind, and taking inspiration from James, Dewey, Arendt, Husserl, Sartre, Camus, and, especially, Merleau-Ponty, Jackson creates in these chapters a distinctive anthropological pursuit of existential inquiry. More important, he buttresses this philosophical approach with committed empirical research. Traveling from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone to the Maori in New Zealand to the Warlpiri in Australia, Jackson argues that anthropological subjects continually negotiate—imaginatively, practically, and politically—their relations with the forces surrounding them and the resources they find in themselves or in solidarity with significant others. At the same time that they mirror facets of the larger world, they also help shape it. Stitching the themes, peoples, and locales of these essays into a sustained argument for a philosophical anthropology that focuses on the places between, Jackson offers a pragmatic understanding of how people act to make their lives more viable, to grasp the elusive, to counteract external powers, and to turn abstract possibilities into embodied truths.

迈克尔-杰克逊的《生活世界》是一部杰出的论文集，是他旨在理解人类学和哲学之间关系的职业生涯的巅峰之作。杰克逊从詹姆斯、杜威、阿伦特、胡塞尔、萨特、加缪，特别是梅洛-庞蒂那里获得灵感，在这些章节中创造了一种独特的人类学对存在主义的探究追求，寻求在检查者与被检查者、世界与文字、身体与心灵之间的夹缝中发现真理。更重要的是，他用坚定的实证研究来支持这种哲学方法。从塞拉利昂的库兰科人到新西兰的毛利人，再到澳大利亚的瓦尔皮里人，杰克逊认为，人类学的研究对象不断地协商--想象地、实践地和政治地--他们与周围力量的关系，以及他们在自身或与重要他人的团结中发现的资源。在他们反映更大的世界的各个方面的同时，他们也在帮助塑造这个世界。杰克逊将这些文章中的主题、民族和地点拼接成一个持续的论点，即关注两者之间的地方的哲学人类学，他提供了一个务实的理解，即人们如何采取行动，使他们的生活更加可行，掌握难以捉摸的东西，抵制外部力量，并将抽象的可能性变成具体的真理。