Jackson, John L.

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2003 - 200942010 - 20115
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  • Publication
    An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object
    (2004-03-01) Jackson, John L.
    Using the discussion of self-reflexivity as an organizing principle, this article examines how mobilizing digital video technology during fieldwork opens up empirical and theoretical space for reconceptualizing the relationship between anthropologists and informants. Placing the field of visual anthropology into critical conversation with long-standing theoretical arguments about the objectivist limitations of native anthropologists, I argue that the slipperiness of nativity as an anthropological designation helps to provide analytical tools for examining filmmaking as a kind of gift-giving process between native ethnographic filmmakers and the subjects of their films. This article highlights some of the ways in which my own filmic and videographic exploits in Harlem, New York, mark integral connections between seeing and being the proverbial other, probing social exchanges predicated on the usefulness of low-budget digital technology as a means of fostering politically and epistemologically valuable ethnographic collaborations.
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    On Ethnographic Sincerity
    (2010-10-01) Jackson, John L.
    This essay posits sincerity and humor as linked ways of politicizing the interactions that underpin all ethnographic encounters. This politicization is contrasted with conventional anthropological preoccupations with authenticity (and fetishizations of ethnographic writing), and it demands attention to the human bodies that constitute ethnographic intersubjectivity. Combining a discussion of Habermas’s public sphere with the exploits of a nineteenth‐century African American mesmerist and protoanthropologist, Paschal Randolph, I argue against one kind of “occulted anthropology” (the disembodied version attributed to Habermas) for an agential variety exemplified by Randolph’s differently framed investments in the political powers of occultist possibility. Instead of being seduced by would‐be objective attempts to access a disembodied (i.e., universal) subjectivity, I argue for a Paschal‐like reclamation of the vulnerable ethnographic body (in all of its contingent particularity), a reclamation that fuses rational minds to laughing bodies while opening up space for a critique of potentially impoverished conceptualizations of politics and political activity.
  • Publication
    On Ethnographic Sincerity
    (2010-10-01) Jackson, John L.
    This essay posits sincerity and humor as linked ways of politicizing the interactions that underpin all ethnographic encounters. This politicization is contrasted with conventional anthropological preoccupations with authenticity (and fetishizations of ethnographic writing), and it demands attention to the human bodies that constitute ethnographic intersubjectivity. Combining a discussion of Habermas’s public sphere with the exploits of a nineteenth‐century African American mesmerist and protoanthropologist, Paschal Randolph, I argue against one kind of “occulted anthropology” (the disembodied version attributed to Habermas) for an agential variety exemplified by Randolph’s differently framed investments in the political powers of occultist possibility. Instead of being seduced by would‐be objective attempts to access a disembodied (i.e., universal) subjectivity, I argue for a Paschal‐like reclamation of the vulnerable ethnographic body (in all of its contingent particularity), a reclamation that fuses rational minds to laughing bodies while opening up space for a critique of potentially impoverished conceptualizations of politics and political activity.
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    POSTRACE 101: Teaching and Unteaching Race in America's High Schools
    (2006-09-01) Jackson, John L.
    There are some telltale signs that we might really be living in the kind of moment that academic provocateurs have labeled “postracial” (i.e., indifferent to historically self-evident expectations about race relations and race-based identifications): Duke lacrosse players, all of them White, who taunt a Black collegian-cum-stripper with carefully crafted quips better suited for a comedy club than a Klan rally (“Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt”); a Black Ivy League professor testifying under oath that a baseball bat-wielding White vigilante who begins pummeling a Black man in Brooklyn by calling his victim a “nigger” does not necessarily harbor any race-specific animus; a former Education Secretary seemingly shocked and appalled that African Americans would be shocked and appalled by his comments regarding the hypothetical abortion of African American babies as a technique for lowering crime rates; and any of the dissenting judicial opinions penned by the lone Black justice on the nation's highest court. Race is doing some very strange things these days.
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    IN MEDIAS RACE (AND CLASS): Post-Jim Crow Ethnographies of Black Middleclassdom
    (2010-03-01) Jackson, John L.
    “Race is the modality in which class is lived” (Hall et al., 1978, p. 394). That's how Stuart Hall evocatively put it, emphasizing the extent to which class relations can actually and substantively “function as race relations” for working class Black Brits (and others). He was arguing, amongst other things, against the neatly reified distinctions scholars traditionally policed between class-based analyses and racial ones.