Abstract
Life within Limits skilfully blends history, philosophy and travel memoir to address a contemporary development problem: How can people achieve well-being in a world of finite resources? The book describes anthropologist Michael Jackson’s return to Sierra Leone and his field site of Firawa after 30 years of absence: the span of several generations in the lives of those he left behind. He is accompanied by his son and Sewa, the nephew of the late Sierra Leonean politician S.B. Marah. Sewa is now living in London and his experiences as a returning migrant, and what this says about the nature of well-being, are the central focus of the book. We also meet vivid characters such as Kaimah, who is unable to complete education or marry due to lack of money (echoing the frustration of African youth in other studies, for example, Masquelier, 2005) and Fina, whose disabled child was taken to the USA by an anonymous agency and then ‘adopted’ to give her a better quality of life. In relation to this claim, Jackson notes that while Sierra Leone regularly comes at the bottom of the quality of life surveys that measure social development and progress, this might change if family, friendship, community ties and attachment to home were included.
Jackson had planned to explore well-being by asking about the ‘sweetest’ and ‘hardest’ experiences of people’s lives; however, his ideas emerged instead from applying European and Kuranko philosophy to people’s experiences. For example, the origin of our sense of obligation towards others (Serres, 1995) is illustrated by Ferenkay, a young boy who writes to Jackson asking for help. Jackson struggles with drawing a line between ‘what we [in the West] feel we must give “to make a difference” or redress a historical wrong, and what we owe ourselves, what we must keep if we are to live’ (p. 86). This is a challenge also negotiated by returning migrants, as I describe later.
As an anthropologist, Jackson approaches well-being from an assumption of inter-subjectivity. He challenges Sen’s claim that fulfilment is through leading the kind of life we have reason to value – since human life is primarily social and ethical, Jackson feels fulfilment involves realising ourselves in relation to others (how to do this is a key question addressed in the book). For example, the local word for well-being ‘Kendeye’ emphasizes social health over physical or psychological, which implies a responsibility to decide ‘what is conducive to Life rather than just one’s own life’ (p. 28). This echoes the arguments of Deneulin and McGregor (2010) who characterize well-being as ‘living well together’. Jackson’s emphasis on the relational entails acknowledging that human wellbeing is not ‘a settled state but […] a field of struggle’(p. ix), that ethics is ‘a field of indeterminacy’ (p. 70) due to the impossibility of predicting what will be best for others, and that living together is hard work. Jackson describes ‘true’ poverty, rather than that which is measured, as the absence of social harmony, the neglect of duty and the selfish use of scarce resources. One example of this, and the social disruption it causes, is the ‘hungry time’ during the rainy season when adults act like children in putting their own needs first. He sees the hungry time as an extreme example of a generalized anxiety that one’s limited life-energy will be drained or taken by others, which reflects ‘a direct relationship between scarcity, secrecy and suspicion’ (p. 38). But he notes that hunger can also teach people what really matters; close relationships, working for the common weal and not quarrelling.
When Jackson asked Kuranko friends about the worst thing they could imagine, their responses related to ‘social’ death and disruption of social bonds, suggesting that fulfilment comes from ‘being more than merely oneself, of being part of a greater whole’ (p. 161). Nonetheless, being with others is only part of what enables people to endure and Jackson addresses the importance of having a sense of hope and agency through explorations of migration and religion. Both reflect an existential dimension to well-being in the tension between who we are and what we might become. He observes wryly that while it is rare to meet people who are satisfied, it is rarer still to meet people who do not expect anything from life. In the remainder of the review, I look at migration as a route to well-being and summarize Jackson’s reflections on ethnography as a research method.
Jackson explores migration through the lens of the Mande Fa Bori stories about a celebrated hunter who brings the power of the bush back to the town by transgressing the symbolic boundaries between home and the unknown. He describes how ‘global space is thus a kind of bush in which one hopes to trap or capture new forms of wellbeing without, however, becoming snared, captured, or lost’ (p. 45). Jackson previously coined the term ‘migrant imagination’ to describe how human consciousness continually searches for an object to strengthen it and change its relationship with the world, for example, the symbolic mobility of the mobile phone. Another example is the armour of expensive jewellery that Sewa wears to meet his peers and signal his status as ‘city boy’. But distinguishing himself in this way exposes Sewa to two problems: financial demands from people who threaten to ‘badmouth’ him if he does not comply and the pain of setting himself apart from others by ‘repudiating the bush, farm work and dirt’ (p. 140).
Jackson claims that one of the strengths of the ethnographic method is its faith that ‘all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine – and that they will therefore understand’ (p. 14). But for the ethnographer, this presents a number of challenges: how to provide an anthropological frame for individual narratives and use them to challenge or extend theory without compromising or homogenising them, whether bearing witness provides sufficient ‘respect’ to informants, and whether it is in fact possible to see the ‘other’ as oneself in different circumstances.
Writers in development studies have noted the misplaced assumption in the West that other’s lives are more problematic than our own and that material poverty impoverishes people’s humanity. An example provided by Jackson is the ‘widespread view that poverty and powerlessness make people susceptible to irrational, magical and occult behaviour, while, by implication, wealth, education and power make us more rational’ (p. 61). He notes that ‘life must always be lived within limits and the difference between traditional and modern societies is simply a difference between the kind of limits that people struggle against’ (p. 168): poverty and disease in Sierra Leone, stress and loneliness in the USA. Jackson concludes that ‘the ebullience, laughter and energy generated in face-to-face relations with others was precisely what compensated people for the lack of work, the lack of money, even the lack of food on one’s table’ (p. 156). However, he acknowledges that it is not the role of the anthropologist ‘to romanticise a lifeworld that so many saw as an obstacle to their self-realisation’ (p. 156).