Excursions

Michael Jackson’s Excursions invites you to join a series of thought-provoking journeys across diverse cultural terrains. The book leads us from a modest village in Sierra Leone and along a refugee trail over the Pyrenees in French Catalonia, to a historic copper mine in Sweden and the rugged Shuf mountains in Lebanon. It then carries you through the dramatic vistas of the Swiss Alps and into southeast London, the vibrant heart of the West African diaspora, before returning to Jackson’s native New Zealand. In these expeditions, Jackson challenges us to break away from familiar routines and certainties, suggesting that every journey is an opportunity to engage with the unpredictable flow of life. Emphasizing the need to replace conventional mindsets with open-minded, critical engagement, he addresses themes at the core of cultural anthropology – from state power and violence to exile, belonging, labor, and indigenous rights. By exploring the gaps between control and chaos, insularity and openness, Jackson reveals that understanding how people persevere in the face of hardship may indeed matter more than simply explaining why things happen.