an incredibly easy and captivating read, devoid of any jargon typically found in anthropological texts. brings to light so many interesting and important beliefs and concepts surrounding home, kinship and the Warlpiri. i cant recommend this enough

For anthropologist who despairs that anthropology as often practiced and studied today in academic departments is without soul--without humanness, without emotions and feelings, where macro-processes write out the human from the picture and where human lives become simply incidental in the face of larger macro-processes--turn to this book to see how we can revive anthropology that has been overtaken by literary/textual and macro/historical approaches.

I first encountered Jackson when I designed and taught a course on anthropology in West Africa and assigned his book « In Sierra Leone ». The book was written in such a humanistic and poetic way that captures the struggles of individuals in the aftermath of Sierra Leon's long civil war and how those individuals come to re-embed themselves back into life by re-creating living in a war torn place. I was fascinated that an anthropologist spoke to me so deeply, after being inculcated in the kind of cultural anthropology approaches I've encountered in my training. So I went on to look at other books by Jackson and came to his book « At Home in the World ».

« Home » looks at how aborigines of Australia have worked with reclaiming colonised land as their home. It brings into perspective larger existential questions about home and belonging in a world where you can be uprooted and not belonging even though that place is supposed to be your "home".

For me, this book gave me the sense that I could reclaim anthropology for myself (that is, legitimise it for myself) because so many of my own interests in the discipline fall out of the perspectives of the dominant strains of anthropology and yet those interests are legitimately studied and discussed by anthropologists in the small field of phenomenological/existential anthropology.