Quandaries of Belonging

A lot of contemporary discourse, both in the academy and beyond, is predicated on essentialized notions of gender, class, and ethnic identity. In critiquing the either-or polarizations that characterize identity thinking, Jackson emphasizes human plurality as entailing both difference and identity. The assumption here is that, as a species, human beings share the same evolutionary history and confront similar existential dilemmas, yet no two individuals are alike, and very different adaptive strategies and worldviews have emerged in the course of human history. To speak of the human condition, therefore, is to imply not only that existence is replete with contradiction and conflict but characterized by ongoing struggles to resolve, accept, or overcome them.

The chapters of this book touch on a variety of issues, including the ambiguity of belonging, the struggle for indigenous rights, expatriate experience, the ethics of genetic engineering, experiments in communal living, and intercultural dialogue. These issues have both local and global relevance, and Jackson addresses them as an expatriate and an ethnographer who has discovered that the anxiety that springs from being an outsider is often compensated for by an ability to see the world from a novel point of view. Moreover, as an outsider, one is sometimes consoled to find that one’s dilemmas are not unique. While one may be struggling to adapt to new customs, learn a new language, or cope with bizarre customs and inhospitable surroundings, one’s new neighbors may be suffering social exclusion, embroiled in family feuds, fighting prejudice, or coming to terms with the effects of a Pandemic, climate-change or economic collapse. Indeed, it is often through such critical experiences that people from diverse backgrounds come to realize that they share a common world.

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.