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Reviews

To read a book by Michael Jackson is to be in his company: to hear a cultured and cosmopolitan voice relating stories that disclose how the human and universal inhabit the personal and particular. Art and religion, he avers, are transitional phenomena that facilitate links between inner experience and outer worlds such that human life is made more viable. To craft artworks and to engender religious cosmologies and practices is to create that artifice whereby pain may translate into comprehension and anonymity into a sense of control. Michael Jackson is a uniquely insightful and compassionate guide. -- Nigel Rapport, Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, University of St Andrews Michael Jackson's meditation on art and religion is an erudite blending of philosophy, personal biography, history and ethnography. Full of powerful time-space juxtapositions that weave Europe, West Africa, Australia, and New Zealand into the same sentences, paragraphs and pages, The Work of Art is a sustained inquiry into the affecting sociality of art in its making and sensuous resonance. This is a wonderful addition to Michael Jackson's elegant writings on key existential themes in anthropology: between-ness, becoming, and relationality. -- Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Music Emeritus, University of New Mexico and author of Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra; Sound and Sentiment Michael Jackson's lucid, elegant and incisive book is a laser beam piercing the murky discourse that surrounds contemporary art. His clarity restores the reciprocal relations between the work of art and our experience of it; his wisdom honours the age-old link between life, ritual and soul-making; most important of all, he shows again what it means to be alive in the world: bearing witness equally to joy and to pain. -- Martin Edmond, author of The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont The Work of Art is very well written. Jackson has the ability to converse with artists in very meaningful and productive ways about their work, and failing that to have recourse to literature about them. -- Fred R. Myers, New York University The Work of Art is deeply moving, inspirational, and intellectually compelling examination of the myriad ways in which art, religion, and ritual overlap. Combining phenomenological and existential insights with honest and intimate ethnographic reflection, Michael Jackson teases out the productive and transformative implications of art practice. -- Adrian Parr, University of Cincinnati

To read a book by Michael Jackson is to be in his company: to hear a cultured and cosmopolitan voice relating stories that disclose how the human and universal inhabit the personal and particular. Art and religion, he avers, are transitional phenomena that facilitate links between inner experience and outer worlds such that human life is made more viable. To craft artworks and to engender religious cosmologies and practices is to create that artifice whereby pain may translate into comprehension and anonymity into a sense of control. Michael Jackson is a uniquely insightful and compassionate guide. -- Nigel Rapport, Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, University of St Andrews Michael Jackson's meditation on art and religion is an erudite blending of philosophy, personal biography, history and ethnography. Full of powerful time-space juxtapositions that weave Europe, West Africa, Australia, and New Zealand into the same sentences, paragraphs and pages, The Work of Art is a sustained inquiry into the affecting sociality of art in its making and sensuous resonance. This is a wonderful addition to Michael Jackson's elegant writings on key existential themes in anthropology: between-ness, becoming, and relationality. -- Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Music Emeritus, University of New Mexico and author of Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra; Sound and Sentiment Michael Jackson's lucid, elegant and incisive book is a laser beam piercing the murky discourse that surrounds contemporary art. His clarity restores the reciprocal relations between the work of art and our experience of it; his wisdom honours the age-old link between life, ritual and soul-making; most important of all, he shows again what it means to be alive in the world: bearing witness equally to joy and to pain. -- Martin Edmond, author of The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont The Work of Art is deeply moving, inspirational, and intellectually compelling examination of the myriad ways in which art, religion, and ritual overlap. Combining phenomenological and existential insights with honest and intimate ethnographic reflection, Michael Jackson teases out the productive and transformative implications of art practice. -- Adrian Parr, University of Cincinnati

Author Information

Michael Jackson is Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of the prize-winning Paths Toward a Clearing (1989) and At Home in the World (2000). His most recent Columbia University Press books include As Wide as the World Is Wise: Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology (2016) and Harmattan: A Philosophical Fiction (2015). He is also the author of The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well-being (2013); Between One and One Another (2012); and Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology (2012).

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