Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want PDF
Preview Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want
Life Within Limits Michael Jackson Life Within Limits Well-being in a World of Want duke university press durham and london 2011 © 2011 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Whitman by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the waiter turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. —Zora Neale HurstoN, Their Eyes Were Watching God The gospel of detachment is as well suited to a culture of ex- cess as it is to a society of radical poverty. It thrives in circum- stances in which one’s wants are dangerous because they are surely going to be deprived—or because they are pulled in so many directions that they pose a threat to the integrity, the unity of one’s self. Of course, wanting too much, wanting the wrong thing, wanting what you can’t have is one definition of the human condition; we all have to learn how to make some liveable compromise between the always insatiable self and the always insufficient reality principle. —eva HoffmaN, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language Contents Imagining Firawa ix Fathers and Sons 1 Forty Days 13 Scenes from a Marriage 30 Smoke and Mirrors 46 Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World 63 The Reopening of the Gate of Effort 77 Something’s Missing 88 The Politics of Storytelling 100 The Road to Kabala 112 Their Eyes Were Watching God 122 Albitaiya 134 The Year of Supernatural Abundance 145 Strings Attached 158 The Shape of the Inconstruable Question 172 Not to Find One’s Way in a City 187 Coda 199 Acknowledgments 201 Notes 203 Index 225 Imagining Firawa tHis book is aN essay in understanding human well-being, not as a settled state but as a field of struggle. As with goodness and reasonableness, our difficulty of achieving wellness does not dimin- ish its hold over our imaginations, for it signifies a hope without which existence would be untenable—that life, for ourselves and those we care about, holds more in store for us than less. Though it is rare to meet people who are completely and permanently sat- isfied with their lot, it is rarer to meet people who expect nothing of life, abjectly accepting the status quo, never imagining that their situations could or should be socially, spiritually, or materially im- proved. This sense that well-being remains elusive, transitory, and unevenly distributed is felt by the rich as well as the poor, and in all societies. To explore this condition of existential dissatisfaction, I traveled to a West African country described in a recent uN report as the “least liveable” in the world.1 In going to Sierra Leone, I wanted to see if current Western preoccupations with socioeconomic devel- opment and human rights prevent us from adequately understand- ing the priorities and values of ordinary Africans and whether, on balance, Sierra Leoneans have a harder time of it than Europeans and Americans in dealing with scarcity and insufficiency. African people have always faced forces from without that imperil lives and livelihoods. Though these minatory forces assume different forms at different times—slave raiding, warfare, epidemic illness, colonial domination, state interference, religious zealotry, economic exploi- tation, and corrupt government—they are subject to the same mix of magical and practical reactions that we in the affluent West de- ploy against terrorist threats, illegal immigration, market collapse, and economic recession. But well-being is always contingent on more than one’s particular historical or cultural situation. It reflects a sense of discontinuity between who we are and what we might become2—questions of existential well-being and personal fate that
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