Through sixty-one beautifully crafted, concise essays, the anthropologist Michael Jackson reflects on life situations where we are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding ourselves and connecting with others.

Preface xi 1. Ancestral Roots The Real 1 Only Connect 2 93 Irving Street 4 Reconnecting 8 Missed Connections 11 Tertium Quid 14 The Dead 19 Mind the Gap 23 The Genealogical Imagination 29 The Penumbral 34 After Midnight 38 Second Skins 40 On Not Severing the Vine When Harvesting the Grapes 42 Corrupted Con-texts 46 The Broken Heart 48 2. Primary Bonds Incarnations 52 The Matrixial 57 A Letter from Athens 61 Emily's Journal 62 Beginnings 65 The Pain in Painting 69 Paths 73 Parallel Lives 75 My Lunch with arthur 81 The Wellness Narratives 84 Night 94 Outside the Window 98 "What Really Matters" 99 3. Elective Affinities Knots 103 Marina del Rey 106 In Limbo 108 In Media Res 108 In Wellington 112 The Enigma of Anteriority 116 Survivor Guilt 119 Ventifact 123 Measured Talk 129 Heaven and Hell 131 Manifest Destiny 134 The Nature of Things 148 The Road of Excess 159 The Eternal Ones of the Dream 162 Strange Lights 15 Recognitions 168 The Other Portion 173 It Happens 176 Ships That Pass in the Night 178 4. Competing Values Cafe Stelling 182 Value Judgments 184 The Bottle Imp 189 Marginal Notes 193 A Storyteller's Story 195 Big Thing and Small Thing 200 Sacrifice 203 Prince Vessantara 208 The Girl Who Went Beneath the Water 210 Ill-Gotten Gains 216 Is Nothing Sacred? 221 Return to the Cafe Stelling 229 Metanoia 232 The Place Where We Live 236 Acknowledgments 239

“Michael Jackson’s sixty-one short essays, based on his experiences in disparate geographical settings, are designed to speak to each reader individually like a sophisticated musical composition, rather than advancing a linear argument. . . . Jackson’s case that ‘history, religion, spirituality, culture are shop-worn terms,’ and should be replaced by ‘the image of life at the edge of language, a shoreline on which the sea washes ceaselessly,’ is given substance by his own literary skill. And it is possible to glimpse here the makings of a shared ‘religious’ sensibility that may be fitfully emerging to unite different peoples and traditions, in ways influenced by, but not entirely decreed by, the gods of the marketplace.” - Jonathan Benthall, Times Literary Supplement

Through sixty-one beautifully crafted, concise essays, anthropologist Michael Jackson reflects on life situations where we are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding ourselves and connecting with others