Full Description
What does it mean to live in time, between the unforeseeable and the irreversible? In The Varieties of Temporal Experience, Michael Jackson demonstrates the significance of a phenomenology of time for ethnography, philosophy, and history through a multifaceted consideration of the gap between our cultural representations of temporality and the bewildering multiplicity of our experience of being-in-time.
Jackson explores temporality in a subjective mode as a form of literary anthropology. The first part of the book tells the story of John Joseph Pawelka, whose 1910 escape from prison and subsequent disappearance became one of New Zealand's great unsolved mysteries, discussing what it reveals about the interplay of popular stories, hidden histories, and media narratives in constructing allegories of national and moral identity. In the second, Jackson reflects on journeys up and down the islands of New Zealand, touching on the ways that personal stories are interwoven with social and historical events. Throughout this groundbreaking book, Jackson juxtaposes philosophy, history, and ethnography in an attempt to do justice to the extraordinary variety of temporal experience, at the same time exploring the ethical and existential quandaries that arise from the complexity of lived time.
Contents
Contents
Preface
The Blind Impress
Part One
Prologue
That Green Evening
The Blind Impress
The Other Side of the Tracks
Of the Woe That Is in Marriage
Manawatu
Fires of No Return
Fugue
Shots in the Dark
Recaptured
No Quarter
Escape
Starting Over
Part Two
Beyond the Call of Duty
Talking to Jack Hansen
Passing Strange
Still Life with Lading Lists
Part Three
The Remaining Pieces
Guilt and Shame
Death's Secretary
Stories Happen
Time and Space
The Enigma of Anteriority
First Things First
Braided Rivers
Against the Grain
No Direction Home
Crossing Cook Strait
Metaphor of the Table
Destruction and Hope
Distance Looks Our Way
The Illusion of Corsica
Return to the Manawatu
Burned Places
Revenant
Te Ãti Awa
Symbolic Landscape
Two Women
The Road to Karuna Falls
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Taking a Line for a Walk
Afterword
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
