Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem

by John L. Jackson Jr.

Overview

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are often dismissed as a fringe cult for their beliefs that African Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites and that veganism leads to immortality. But John L. Jackson questions what “fringe” means in a world where cultural practices of every stripe circulate freely on the Internet. In this poignant and sophisticated examination of the limits of ethnography, the reader is invited into the visionary, sometimes vexing world of the AHIJ. Jackson challenges what Clifford Geertz called the “thick description” of anthropological research through a multidisciplinary investigation of how the AHIJ use media and technology to define their public image in the twenty-first century.

Moving far beyond the “modest witness” of nineteenth-century scientific discourse or the “thick descriptions” of twentieth-century anthropology, Jackson insists that Geertzian thickness is an impossibility, especially in a world where the anthropologist’s subject is a self-aware subject—one who crafts his own autoethnography while critically consuming the ethnographer’s offerings. Thin Description takes as its topic a group situated along the fault lines of several diasporas—African, American, Jewish—and provides an anthropological account of how race, religion, and ethnographic representation must be understood anew in the twenty-first century lest we reenact old mistakes in the study of black humanity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674049666
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	11/04/2013
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	404
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

John L. Jackson, Jr., is Richard Perry University Professor of Communication, Anthropology, and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

1 Passover 1

2 Introductions 11

3 Artscience 21

4 Megiddo 31

5 Chicago 39

6 Exiles 47

7 Backstage 53

8 Analogies 59

9 Asiel 71

10 Hustling 79

11 Ignorance 89

12 YMCA 95

13 UnAfrican 101

14 Empress 109

15 Camps 113

16 Liberia 119

17 Visitations 125

18 Immortality 133

19 Jungle 143

20 Thin 149

21 Carrel 157

22 Orientalism 163

23 Digital 175

24 Children 179

25 Eden 187

26 Disciplining 193

27 Zimreeyah 199

28 Sincere 207

29 Casein 215

30 Prodigal 221

31 Esau 227

32 Soul 233

33 Laughing 239

34 Occulted 245

35 Order 253

36 Genesis 265

37 Insincerities 275

38 Sumerians 281

39 Munir 289

40 Brochure 293

41 Rabbi 299

42 Hebrews 305

43 Zombie 309

44 MLK 315

45 Seconds 321

Notes 329

Acknowledgments 377

Index 381

Editorial Reviews

Thin Description stands in a tradition of powerfully critical research and scholarship that questions the problematics by which race, religion, and disciplinary limits converge and collapse into crises in the context of Western Civilization’s ‘Holy Land’ and the tensions of multiple Zions with regard to Africa and West Asia.

Lewis R. Gordon

A dazzling, brilliant book, with astonishing things to say about immortality, race, and ethnography.

Noah Feldman

In engaging and novelistic style, John Jackson has written the first definitive history of the fascinating African Hebrew Israelite emigrant community residing in Israel. He’s exposed their dreams and their demons with the appropriate blend of criticism and respect due their journey. This is an empathetic, deeply human, and impeccably researched work of cultural anthropology sure to draw many readers.

Emily Raboteau