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The Palm at the End of the Mind

The Palm at the End of the Mind

Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real

  • Author: Jackson, Michael
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822343592
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822392439
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2009
  • Month: February
  • Pages: 256
  • DDC: 828/.91409
  • Language: English
In many societies and for many people, religiosity is only incidentally connected with texts or theologies, church or mosque, temple or monastery. Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic work among people for whom religion is not principally a matter of faith, doctrine, or definition, Michael Jackson turns his attention to those situations in life where we come up against the limits of language, our strength, and our knowledge, yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, to new ways of connecting with others.

Through sixty-one beautifully crafted essays based on sojourns in Europe, West Africa, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, and taking his cue from Wallace Stevens’s late poem, “Of Mere Being,” Jackson explores a range of experiences where “the palm at the end of the mind” stands “beyond thought,” on “the edge of space,” “a foreign song.” Moments of crisis as well as everyday experiences in cafés, airports, and offices disclose the subtle ways in which a single life shades into others, the boundaries between cultures become blurred, fate unfolds through genealogical time, elective affinities make their appearance, and different values contend.

  • Contents
  • Preface
  • 1. Ancestral Roots
    • The Real
    • Only Connect
    • 95 Irving Street
    • Reconnecting
    • Missed Connections
    • Tertium Quid
    • The Dead
    • Mind the Gap
    • The Genealogical Imagination
    • The Penumbral
    • After Midnight
    • Second Skins
    • On Not Severing the Vine When Harvesting the Grapes
    • Corrupted Con-texts
    • The Broken Heart
  • 2. Primary Bonds
    • Incarnations
    • The Matrixial
    • A Letter from Athens
    • Emily’s Journal
    • Beginnings
    • The Pain in Painting
    • Paths
    • Parallel Lives
    • My Lunch with Arthur
    • The Wellness Narratives
    • Night
    • Outside the Window
    • “What Really Matters”
  • 3. Elective Affinities
    • Knots
    • Marina del Rey
    • In Limbo
    • In Media Res
    • In Wellington
    • The Enigma of Anteriority
    • Survivor Guilt
    • Ventifact
    • Measured Talk
    • Heaven and Hell
    • Manifest Destiny
    • The Nature of Things
    • The Road of Excess
    • The Eternal Ones of the Dream
    • Strange Lights
    • Recognitions
    • The Other Portion
    • It Happens
    • Ships That Pass in the Night
  • 4. Competing Values
    • Café Stelling
    • Value Judgments
    • The Bottle Imp
    • Marginal Notes
    • A Storyteller’s Story
    • Big Thing and Small Thing
    • Sacrifice
    • Prince Vessantara
    • The Girl Who Went Beneath the Water
    • Ill-Gotten Gains
    • Is Nothing Sacred?
    • Return to the Café Stelling
    • Metanoia
    • The Place Where We Live
  • Acknowledgments

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  • Loan duration: 21 days
  • Format: PDF

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