The Genealogical Imagination

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.

Preamble 1 Chronicles of the Barawa Marah Being-in-Time 7 Being of Two Minds 13 Koinadugu 23 Jihad and Colonization 33 Albitaiya 36 Primus inter Pares 41 Lifelines and Lineages 45 Prospero and Caliban 51 Tina KomE 56 Abdul's Reminiscences 63 Limitrophes 71 Noah's Story 78 Taking Stock 89 Ferensola 95 S. B.'s Story 99 After the War 107 Within These Four Walls 111 Passages 119 Relationship and Relativity 122 Endings 135 Only Connect 152 Transition 156 Fathers and Sons Part 1 Black Mountain 167 Clearing Out the Garage 174 A Hidden History 188 New Lives for Old 191 Billy 206 The Wet 208 Part II Aground on the Great Barrier 219 University 223 Maya 232 Families 237 Breaking Point 241 Part III The Unanimous Night 253 Weary Bay 259 Bulbul 267 Toby 270 The Reef 281 The Return 285 Postscript 288 Notes 293 Index to Chronicles of the Barawa Marah 305

"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)