The sense that well-being remains elusive, transitory, and unevenly distributed is felt by the rich as well as the poor, and in all societies. To explore this condition of existential dissatisfaction, the anthropologist Michael Jackson travelled to Sierra Leone, described in a recent UN report as the "least livable" country in the world. There he revisited the village where he did his first ethnographic fieldwork in 1969-70 and lived in 1979. Jackson writes that Africans have always faced forces from without that imperil lives and livelihoods. Though these forces have assumed different forms at different timesoslave raiding, warfare, epidemic illness, colonial domination, state interference, economic exploitation, and corrupt governmentothey are subject to the same mix of magical and practical reactions that affluent Westerners deploy against terrorist threats, illegal immigration, market collapse, and economic recession. Both the problem of well-being and the question as to what makes life worthwhile are grounded in the mystery of existential discontentothe question as to why human beings, regardless of their external circumstances, are haunted by a sense of insufficiency and loss. While philosophers have often asked the most searching questions regarding the human condition, Jackson suggests that ethnographic method offers one of the most edifying ways of actually exploring those questions.

Table of Contents

Contents Imagining Firawa; Fathers and Sons; Forty Days; Scenes from a Marriage; Smoke and Mirrors; Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World; The Reopening of the Gate of Effort; Something's Missing; The Politics of Storytelling; The Road to Kabala; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Albitaiya; The Year of Supernatural Abundance; Strings Attached; The Shape of the Inconstruable Question; Not to Find One's Way in a City; Coda Acknowledgments; Notes; Index

Prizes

Noted anthropologist Michael Jackson examines the problem of well-being and the question as to what makes life worthwhile

Reviews

"Michael Jackson has done it again. This is a beautifully observed essay on human well-being and the ethnographic process. There is an elegant blending of ethnography, travel memoir, and philosophical reflection." Michael Lambek, author of The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar "Life Within Limits is a book on Sierra Leonean realities, but it is also a work that tries to understand the human condition more generally. At its center is a trip to Sierra Leone, where Michael Jackson revisits the village where he did fieldwork almost forty years ago. Between the conversations in the 1970s and those of today falls a brutal civil war with immense human suffering, but also births and deaths, young people growing old, some dreams realized, others not. In its rare combination of accumulated knowledge and ongoing critical self-reflection, Life Within Limits is anthropological writing at its best."oSverker Finnstrom, author of Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda