The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Michael D. Jackson

Published by Columbia University Press 2016

The Work of Art

Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Michael D. Jackson

In the series Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

https://doi.org/10.7312/jack17818

Overview
Contents

About this book

Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia and West Africa, as well as insights from psychoanalysis, religious studies, literature, and the philosophy of art Michael Jackson focuses on how art effects transformations in our lives. Art opens up transitional, ritual, or utopian spaces that enable us to reconcile inward imperatives and outward constraints, thereby making our lives more manageable and meaningful.

Art making as a way of mediating between inner and outer realities.

Author / Editor 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).

Reviews

[The Work of Art] offers intriguing insights into how we might understand art and religion as two modes of the same creative impulse.

Adrian Parr, author of The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics:
The Work of Art is a 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, Jackson teases out the productive and transformative implications of art practice.

Martin Edmond, author of The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont:
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 honors 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.

Steven Feld, author of Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana:
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. A wonderful addition to Jackson's elegant writings on key existential themes in anthropology: between-ness, becoming, and relationality.

Nigel Rapport, author of I Am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power:
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. Jackson is a uniquely insightful and compassionate guide.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
List of Figures Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Preamble Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
Part 1 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part 2 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
Part 3 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Permissions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 256
Illustrations
- Other: 16 color and 12 b&w illustrations

eBook

Published: October 25, 2016
ISBN: 9780231541992