BETWEEN ONE AND
ONE ANOTHER
Michael Jackson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2012 by Michael Jackson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jackson, Michael, 1940–
Between one and one another / Michael Jackson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978–0-520–27233-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978–0-520–27235-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Philosophical anthropology. 2. Ethnopsychology. 3. Intersubjectivity. 4. Self-perception. 5. Other minds (Theory of knowledge).
I. Title.
BD450.J235 2012
128—dc23
2011025178
Manufactured in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ANSI/NISO (z 39.48) requirements.
Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.
—R. D. Laing, The Divided Self
All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation; moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other…. There is no mi-lieu (between place). It is a matter of one or the other, one and the other, one with the other, but by no means the one in the other.
—Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural
CONTENTS
2. The Philosopher Who Would Not Be King
3. Hermit in the Water of Life
5. How Much Home Does a Person Need?
8. It's Other People Who Are My Old Age
9. Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
12. Reading Siddhartha to Freya at Forest Lake
13. On the Work and Writing of Ethnography
CHAPTER 1
Preamble
Lived experience is always simultaneously present to itself and absent from itself.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
In the late 1930s, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead did pioneering ethnographic fieldwork in a Balinese village, using still and movie cameras to capture some of the “intangible aspects” of Balinese culture and everyday life, including trance, eating, gesture, mourning, family interactions, children's play, art, and shadow-play puppets. In her introductory essay to their 1942 monograph, Mead speaks of a Balinese passion for being part of a noisy, festive crowd. Whether a marketplace, temple court, theatrical event, elaborate carving, or close-packed array of offerings on an altar, “the crowd preference is seen everywhere in Balinese life.”1 Women are said to love crowds and crowdedness even more than men, “and to be less able to stand the silence of empty fields.”2 However, every four hundred days, Bali falls silent for the new year. At this time, the roads are deserted, families withdraw to their houses, markets are closed, and no music is heard. This change from convivial boisterousness (rame) to silence and calm (njepi) echoes another change that Bateson and Mead document in compelling photographic detail—the Balinese “habit of withdrawal into vacancy—letting themselves suddenly slip into a state of mind where they are, for the moment, no longer subject to the impact of inter-personal relations.”3 One photo shows a carver who, having completed a difficult piece of work, sits staring into space, “utterly empty and spent.” Other photos show children, with dreamy and absentminded expressions on their faces, sitting or standing close to a parent. Entitled Awayness, this page of photographs also includes a “psychopathic vagrant” sitting incommunicado in the anthropologists' compound.
When I first encountered this innovative ethnographic work in the early 1970s, I failed to see what was singularly Balinese in these images. As Herman Melville observes in Moby Dick, this oscillation between moments of association and dissociation is as true of whale calves as of human infants. “As human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the same time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; —even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born sight.”4 Active one minute, an infant will grow still the next, as if taking stock of one experience before seeking another. Crying will give way to calm, and a bout of vigorous kicking, grasping, or smiling will be followed by a period of passivity, the infant seemingly absorbed by something far off or deep within. Recent