In this timely collection of essays, thirteen contemporary ethnographers demonstrate the importance of phenomenological and existential ideas for anthropology. In emphasizing the link between the empirical and the experiential, these ethnographers explore the relationship between phenomenology and other theories of the lifeworld, such as existentialism, radical empiricism, and critical theory. Contents include: Introduction: Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthropological Critique, by Michael Jackson; Honor and Shame, by Lila Abu-Lughod Struggling Along, by Robert Desjarlais; The Cosmology of Life Transmission, by Ren Devisch; Reflections on a Cut Finger: Taboo in the Umeda Conception of the Self, by Alfred Gell; Space and Sociality in a Dayak Longhouse, by Christine Helliwell; In Defiance of Destiny: The Management of Time at a Cretan Funeral, by Michael Herzfeld; Suffering and Its Professional Transformation: Toward an Ethnography of Interpersonal Experience, by Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman; Hand Drumming: An Essay in Practical Knowledge, by Shawn Lindsay; On Dying and Suffering in Iqwaye Existence, by Jadran Mimica; If Not the Words: Shared Practical Activity and Friendship in Fieldwork, by Keith Ridler; and, After the Field, by Jim Wafer.

Michael Jackson's "Lifeworlds" is a masterful collection of essays, the culmination of a career aimed at understanding the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. Seeking the truths that are found in the interstices between examiner and examined, world and word, and body and mind, and taking inspiration from James, Dewey, Arendt, Husserl, Sartre, Camus, and, especially, Merleau-Ponty, Jackson creates in these chapters a distinctive anthropological pursuit of existential inquiry. More important, he buttresses this philosophical approach with committed empirical research. Traveling from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone to the Maori in New Zealand to the Warlpiri in Australia, Jackson argues that anthropological subjects continually negotiate - imaginatively, practically, and politically - their relations with the forces surrounding them and the resources they find in themselves or in solidarity with significant others. At the same time that they mirror facets of the larger world, they also help shape it. Stitching the themes, people, and locales of these essays into a sustained argument for a philosophical anthropology that focuses on the places between, Jackson offers a pragmatic understanding of how people act to make their lives more viable, to grasp the elusive, to counteract external powers, and to turn abstract possibilities into embodied truths.