Politics of storytelling : violence, transgresion and intersubjectivity

322 Pages·2002·4.14 MB·English

by  Arendt

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Hannah Arendt argued that the “political” is best understood as a power rela-
tion between private and public realms, and that storytelling is a vital bridge h
between these realms—a site where individualized passions and shared perspec- e

tives are contested and interwoven. Jackson explores and expands Arendt’s ideas P
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through a cross-cultural analysis of storytelling that includes Kuranko stories o
from Sierra Leone, Aboriginal stories of the stolen generation, stories recounted l
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t Politics
before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and stories of
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refugees, renegades, and war veterans. c
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Focusing on the violent and volatile conditions under which stories are and of
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are not told, and exploring the various ways in which narrative reworkings
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of reality enable people to symbolically alter subject-object relations, Jackson
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Storytelling
shows how storytelling may restore existential viability to the intersubjective
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fields of self and other, self and state, self and situation. o
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michael jackson, currently Distinguished Professor of World Religions at
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Harvard Divinity School, is internationally renowned for his work in the field of e
existential anthropology. He is a leading figure in contemporary philosophical ll Variations on a Theme
anthropology and widely praised for his innovations in ethnographic writing. i
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His most recent books include Being of Two Minds, Road Markings: An Anthro- g by Hannah Arendt
pologist in the Antipodes, The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing, and Life-
worlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology, all published in 2012.
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“ Michael Jackson’s The Politics of Storytelling is a radical book for our time. I have never
i
read a more compelling vision of how human beings creatively negotiate the borderlands c
between their private and public worlds. Not since Clifford Geertz has an anthropologist h
written with such innovative narrative skill, reaching beyond the academy to illuminate a
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what is culturally at stake in our needs to tell stories about the shared worlds we inhabit
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and remake. ” j michael jackson
—Davíd Carrasco, author of City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in a
Civilization c
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“ Our lives are for the most part unsayable, Jackson argues, yet we say them nonetheless, out o
of an exis tential imperative, in the company of others and in the teeth of social horrors. n
The practice of storytelling takes place in times and places in-between, as we struggle to
make something new of the conditions that predetermine us. Humans tell stories within
webs of relationships, and Jackson gives a compelling account of how social worlds, inter-
subjective bonds, and individual subjectivities are made, unmade and remade in nev-
er-ending rounds of stories. Especially powerful are his reflections on what becomes of
storytelling at the edges of human endurance, when political crisis or natural disasters
threaten to eviscerate language. This is a beautiful book and an important piece of Jack-
son’s larger project of existential anthropology.
”
—Robert A. Orsi, author of Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make
and the Scholars who Study Them
ISBN 978 87 635 4036 0
museum tusculanum press
www.mtp.dk
The Politics of Storytelling
aritical
nthropology
General series editor:
Michael Jackson, Harvard University
Vol. 1. Matters of Life and Longing: Female Sterilisation
in Northeast Brazil by Anne-Line Dalsgaard
2004, 253 pages
ISBN 978 87 7289 901 5
Vol. 2. Managing Uncertainty: Ethnographic Studies of Illness,
Risk and the Struggle for Control, edited by Richard Jenkins,
Hanne Jessen, and Vibeke Steffen
2005, 287 pages
ISBN 978 87 7289 963 3
Vol. 3. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression,
and Intersubjectivity, by Michael Jackson
2002, reprint 2006, 320 pages
ISBN 978 87 7289 737 0
2nd edition 2013, 319 pages, ISBN 978 87 635 4036 0
Critical Antropology explores life
on the margins of the modern world,
and demonstrates the power of
ethnography to provide new insights
into the human condition.
Critical Anthropology
ISSN 1811 0665
The Politics of Storytelling
Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt
Second Edition
michael jackson
museum musculanum press
university of copenhagen
2013
Michael Jackson, currently Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Har-
vard Divinity School, is internationally renowned for his work in the field of
existential anthropology. He is a leading figure in contemporary philosophical
anthropology and widely praised for his innovations in ethnographic writing. His
most recent books include Being of Two Minds, Road Markings: An Anthropologist
in the Antipodes, The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing, and Lifeworlds:
Essays in Existential Anthropology, all published in 2012.
The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt
© 2013, Museum Tusculanum Press and Michael Jackson
Second edition
First edition, 2002
Layout and composition by Jordy Findanis
Printed in Denmark by Specialtrykkeriet Viborg
ISBN 978 87 635 4036 0
Museum Tusculanum Press
Birketinget 6
2300 Copenhagen S
www.mtp.dk
Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the
greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of
the mind, the delights of the senses—lead to an uncertain, shadowy kind of
existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindivid-
ualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. The most
current of such transformations occurs in storytelling…
—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

For Brijen K. Gupta

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments 11
Preface to Second Edition 13
Introduction 31
PART I DISPLACEMENTS
The Stories that Shadow Us 57
“You Never Saw Your Own Faces”: Reflections on Privacy
and Publicity in the Lives of Refugees 79
In Extremis: Refugee Stories/Refugee Lives 99
Displacement, Suffering, and the Critique of Cultural
Fundamentalism 117
PART II RETURNS
Preamble 137
Retaliation and Reconciliation 143
From the Tragic to the Comic 171
Prevented Successions 191
PART III HISTORIES
Preamble 225
The Social Life of Stories 227
Storytelling and Critique 245
The Singular and the Shared 259
Notes 275
Bibliography 289
Index 313