The Wherewithal of Life engages with current developments in the anthropology of ethics and migration studies to explore in empirical depth and detail the life experiences of three young men – a Ugandan migrant in Copenhagen, a Burkina Faso migrant in Amsterdam, and a Mexican migrant in Boston – in ways that significantly broaden our understanding of the existential situations and ethical dilemmas of those migrating from the global south. Michael Jackson offers the first biographically based phenomenological account of migration and mobility, providing new insights into the various motives, tactics, dilemmas, dreams, and disappointments that characterize contemporary migration. It is argued that the quandaries of African or Mexican migrants are not unique to people moving between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ worlds. While more intensely felt by the young, seeking to find a way out of a world of limited opportunity and circumscribed values, the experiences of transition are familiar to us all, whatever our age, gender, ethnicity or social status – namely, the impossibility of calculating what one may lose in leaving a settled life or home place; what one may gain by risking oneself in an alien environment; the difficulty of striking a balance between personal fulfillment and the moral claims of kinship; and the struggle to know the difference between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ utopias (the first reasonable and worth pursuing; the second hopelessly unattainable).
And so we drove north, Francine at the wheel, myself beside her, and Paddy Jupurrula Nelson in the back with a fellow painter, Shorty Jangala. I'd planned to break our journey and camp that night at Mission Creek, but, when we prepared ...
Written entirely in verse, tells the story of a young man hiding from the draft during the Vietnam War in a San Francisco basement, who spends his time translating his mother's diaries about her experiences in German-occupied Poland in 1941 ...
To balance my religious education, my mother had me study Sanskrit and Hinduism with a private tutor. I graduated from high school in my fourteenth year, two years earlier than the average. Thanks to my principal, Rhea McCurdy Ewing, ...
Witches of Wherewithal
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact.
Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.
Told with Doyle’s signature warmth, wit, and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness, and the shifting of history ...
"An exceptionally stimulating work. . . . Likely to become a classic."—Donald Brenneis, Pitzer College
Celeste is having the worst summer ever. Her parents are off on an adventure and she's stuck at Gran's house with her annoying little sister, Esme, and strict instructions to...
Yaya’s Story is a book about Yaya Harouna, a Songhay trader originally from Niger who found a path to America. It is also a book about Paul Stoller—its author—an American anthropologist who found his own path to Africa.