At Home in the World-C

Ours is a century of uprootedness| with fewer and fewer people living out their lives where they are born. At such a time| in such a world| what does it mean to be “at home?” Perhaps among a nomadic people| for whom dwelling is not synonymous with being housed and settled| the search for an answer to this question might lead to a new way of thinking about home and homelessness| exile and belonging. At Home in the World is the story of just such a search. Intermittently| over a period of three years| Michael Jackson lived| worked| and traveled extensively in Central Australia. This book chronicles his experience among the Warlpiri of the Tanami Desert. Something of a nomad himself| having lived in New Zealand| Sierra Leone| England| France| Australia| and the United States| Jackson is deft at capturing the ambiguities of home as a lived experience among the Warlpiri. Blending narrative ethnography| empirical research| philosophy| and poetry| he focuses on the existential meaning of being at home in the world. Here home becomes a metaphor for the intimate relationship between the part of the world a person calls “self” and the part of the world called “other”. To speak of “at-homeness”| Jackson suggests| implies that people everywhere try to strike a balance between closure and openness| between acting and being acted upon| between acquiescing in the given and choosing their own fate. His book is an exhilarating journey into this existential struggle| responsive at every turn to the political questions of equity and justice that such a struggle entails. A moving depiction of an aboriginal culture at once at home and in exile| and a personal meditation on the practice of ethnography andthe meaning of home in our increasingly rootless age| At Home in the World is a timely reflection on how| in defining home| we continue to define ourselves.