How Lifeworlds Work

Download or read book How Lifeworlds Work written by Michael Jackson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In How Lifeworlds Work, distinguished anthropologist of religion Michael Jackson starts from the premise that individual well-being and social viability depend on a vital relationship between inner and outer realities, self and other, desire and constraint. In asking how lifeworlds 'work, ' Jackson wants to trace the production of one's individual and communal life while also understanding how people create emotionally satisfying lives through reciprocal relations with people, objects, animals, and ideas. In other words, how do the ritual structures of the outer and the emotional structures of the inner meet? Jackson brings his signature phenomenological approach to bear on the issue of how the dynamic, temporally inflected tension between order and affect is negotiated. By mixing ethnography, philosophy, and personal reflection, Jackson produces a work that is in some ways his definitive and most intimate statement on a lifetime of study.