Michael Jackson is a New Zealand-born writer, presently Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He has published over thirty books of poetry, fiction, ethnography and memoir, and is internationally renowned for his innovations in ethnographic writing, his pioneering use of phenomenological and pragmatist methods in anthropology, and his contributions to existential anthropology and religious studies. In New Zealand, he is best known for his poetry and creative non-fiction (Latitudes of Exile was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1976, and Wall won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 1981). Since 1969 he has conducted extensive fieldwork among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, the Warlpiri and Kuku-Yalanji of Australia, and with African migrants in Europe. Perhaps the most central question in his work has been how human beings everywhere seek, separately and in concert with others, to strike a balance between a sense of closure and openness, between acting and being acted on, between acquiescing in the given and shaping their own destinies. Most of his books explore the ways in which inherited customs, habits and dispositions both constrain activity and consciousness and are reconstructed, resisted and replenished in quotidian practices, rites, narratives, and unspoken experience. In his view, one of the most urgent tasks of anthropology is to close the gap between theoretical and practical knowledge, and between the academy and the wider world, exploring the immediate, intersubjective underpinnings of abstract forms of understanding, disclosing the subject behind the act, and the vital activity that lies behind the fixed and seemingly final form of things. At the same time as one explores and discloses connections between worldviews and lifeworlds, one endeavors to test and critique one's views--whether personal, theoretical, ethical or political--through an engagement with others. One's goal is never absolute knowledge, but rather a deepened pragmatic understanding of the possibilities of human coexistence in a pluralistic world.