Quandaries of Belonging: Notes on Home, from Abroad

Those who leave their homelands, either under duress or by design, will see them in a different light than those who have stayed put. Michael Jackson argues that the perspective of the expatriate may be compared with what ethnographers call ‘stranger value’. In moving between detachment and deep immersion, this bifocal perspective implicates a bicultural one, which is why Jackson has recourse to Māori traditional knowledge, not in order to impose a Eurocentric interpretation on them, but to show how cross-cultural conversations and interactions can promote new forms of sociality and coexistence. 

Table of Contents:
Preface; 1. Taranaki; 2. Neither Here nor There; 3. Being Out of Place; 4. The Pare Revisited; 5. Talking with Te Pakaka; 6. The Road to Karuna Falls; 7. The Social Life of Stories; 8. A Landscape with Too Few Lovers; 9. Distance Looks Our Way; 10. At Home in the World; 11. Fires of No Return; 12. Critique of Colonial Reason; Coda; Acknowledgments, Epigraphs, and Sources; Index.

About the Author :
Michael Jackson is the author of forty books of ethnography, memoir, fiction and poetry. 

Review :
It is said that inside each person is the universe. Jackson’s book is a stunning illustration of this. Narrating the self and the places integral to his own making, he reaches out and grasps a shared humanity that strives to comprehend a poetics of fit in the world'. — Amanda Kearney, Professor of Anthropology and Indigenous Studies at Flinders University and author of Violence in Place, Environmental and Cultural Wounding The catchment of Michael Jackson’s meditation upon home, identity and ‘the mysterious elsewhere’ is wide—in terms of both place and time—yet his attention is always precise and finely tuned to patterns of thinking and living. Quandaries of Belonging is a paean to evolving consciousness and a rejection of the notion of ‘firstness or the idea that foundations are necessarily more real than anything we built on them’. He is a student of conversation, interaction and growth, of the life-as-lived, rendered with an often novelistic or poetic elan. — Gregory O’Brien, author of 'Always song in the water' (Auckland University Press, 2019) In Quandaries of Belonging Michael Jackson brings an astute blend of anecdote, characterisation, history, philosophy and reminiscence to bear upon two great questions of our time: where is our home and how shall we know it? Jackson’s thought is elegant and persuasive; but never prescriptive. This is a book all New Zealanders, and everyone else too, should read. — Martin Edmond author of 'Luca Antara' and 'The Expatriates' “Michael Jackson's experience of living abroad yet longing for home invites New Zealanders, not just expatriates, to consider the ways we are all at home in the world. Current tensions and bi-cultural issues within Aotearoa New Zealand are discussed with urgency, yet Jackson thinks globally and writes with poignant empathy.” — Jennifer Shennan, Author of 'The Māori Action Song - waiata-ā-ringa, waiata kõri - nõ whea tēnei āhua hou?