1. Barawa, Or The Ways Birds Fly in the Sky: An Ethnographic Novel (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986); At Home in the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); The Blind Impress (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1997); In Sierra Leone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes (Dunedin: Rose Mira, 2012).
2. Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature,” in Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 73.
3. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” interview with Richard Kearney, in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, ed. Richard Kearney (Man chester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 105–126 (116, 117).
4. One of the surprises of the Human Genome Project was the discovery that the human genome contains only twenty to twenty-five thousand protein-coding genes, about a fifth the number researchers had expected to find. To search for the missing pieces that could account for this discrepancy, researchers started looking toward other sources of genetic material that contribute to human function. One of these sources was the human microbiome—defined as the collective genomes of the microbes (composed of bacteria, bacteriophage, fungi, protozoa, and viruses) that live inside and on the human body. We have about ten times as many microbial cells as human cells, and an analysis of the full gene content and composition of these microbiomes (i.e., the metagenome) predicts that there may be more than eight million unique microbial genes associated with the microbiomes across the human body of these healthy adults. When compared to the total number of human genes, this suggests that the genetic contribution of the microbiome to the human supraorganism may be many hundreds of times greater than the genetic contribution from the human genome. Joy Yang, “The Human Microbiome Project: Extending the Definition of What Constitutes a Human,” www.genome.gov/27549400.
5. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999), 101.
6. Davíd Carrasco, “Desire and the Frontier: Apparitions from the Unconscious in The Old Gringo,” in The Novel in the Americas, ed. Raymond Leslie Williams (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1992), 102.
7. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1920), 293.
8. Michael Jackson, “The Kuranko: Dimensions of Social Reality in a West African Society,” PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1971, viii–xi.
9. Joe Simpson, Touching the Void (London: Vintage, 1997), 214–215.
10. William Earle, “Introduction,” Reason and Existenz: Five Lectures by Karl Jaspers, trans. William Earle (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997), 10.
11. Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 98–100.
12. Carl Jung, “Psychology and Religion,” in Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 6.
13. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 315. Cf. William James: “Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is He? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.” The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Signet, 1958), 382.
14. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 316.
15. “What I find intriguing about Spinoza’s notion of conatus,” Ricoeur writes, “is that it refuses the alternative between act and potency. . . . For Spinoza, each concrete thing or event is always a mélange of act and possibility.” And this defines the field of ethics. Ricoeur, “The Power of the Possible,” in Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 44.
16. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 383–384.
17. Bronnie Ware, The Top Ten Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing (New York: Hay House, 2011).
18. Michael Jackson, “Custom and Conflict in Sierra Leone,” in Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 125–126.
19. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Dutton, 1908), 105.
20. Mattijs van de Port, Gypsies, Wars, and Other Instances of the Wild: Civilization and its Discontents in a Serbian Town (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 5, 7.
21. Per Brandström, “Seeds and Soil: The Quest for Life and the Domestication of Fertility in Sukuma-Nyamwezi Thought and Reality,” in The Creative Communion: African Folk Models of Fertility and the Regeneration of Life, ed. Anita Jacobson-Widding and Walter van Beek (Stockholm: Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 15, 1990), 178.
22. Ibid., 181.
23. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).
24. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937), 271.
25. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (New York: Grove, 1961), 76.
26. Frederico García Lorca, “Theory and Play of the Duende,” trans. A. S. Kline, www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm. According to some etymologies, the word duende derives from duen de casa, lord of the house. It is a capricious household spirit, depicted in folklore as a little boy or old man, who sometimes plays tricks on the householders, sometimes helps them with their chores. Jennifer Sime, “Exhumations: The Search for the Dead and the Resurgence of the Uncanny in Contemporary Spain,” Anthropology and Humanism 38, no 1: 36–53 (48).
27. As Bataille puts it, “myth is identified not only with life but with the loss of life—with degradation and death.” Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 82.
28. For Lévi-Strauss, the origin of myth lies in the unconscious structuring processes of the human mind, in which case, he writes, “it is immaterial whether . . . the thought processes of the South American Indians take shape through the medium of my thought, or whether mine take place through the medium of theirs.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 13. The case for the psychoanalytic view that “mythology is psychology projected upon the external world” has been eloquently argued by Dundes. Alan Dundes, “Earth-Diver: Creation of the Mythopoeic Male,” American Anthropologist 64, no. 5 (October 1962): 1032–1051 (1037).
29. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psycho-analysis (New York: Permabooks, 1953), 328. For analogous fantasies and myths of anal birth, see Dundes, “Earth-Diver,” 1038–1040.
30. Samuel H. Elbert and Torben Monberg, From the Two Canoes: Oral Traditions of Rennel and Bellona (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1965), 112–113.
31. L. Bishop, “A Note on the Composition of a Maori Compost from Taranaki,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 33, no. 4 (1924): 317–320.
32. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 85. I allude here to André Breton’s denunciation of Georges Bataille as an “excremental philosopher” (in his 1929 Second Surrealist Manifesto), undoubtedly a comment on the latter’s anal obsessions and “excremental fantasies.” Allan Stoekl, “Introduction,” in Bataille, Visions of Excess, xi.
33. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
34. Kilson Stewart, “Dream Therapy in Malaya,” in Altered States of Consciousness, ed. Charles T. Tart (New York: Wiley, 1969), 159–167 (163, 162).
35. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 354.
36. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 21, 92.
37. Karl Cordell and Stefan Wolff, “Ethnic Germans in Poland and the Czech Republic: A Comparative Evaluation,” in Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 33, no. 2 (2005): 255–276 (272).
38. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 205), 8.
39. Ibid., 9.
40. Graeme Lay, “Murder in Moaville,” electronic document, http://quoteunquotenz.blogspot.com/2010/07/graeme-lay-on-inglewood.html.
41. In one cross-cultural research project, individuals aged sixteen to eighteen from eleven different countries were assigned tasks involving such contentious issues as an unfaithful spouse, a romantic triangle, disciplining a child, a public dispute, conflict at work, international conflict, etc. and asked to write an imaginative story about how characters in these situations will respond to conflict. Potential solutions ranged from violent to nonviolent. The highest frequency of violent responses was found among New Zealanders. Dane Archer and Patricia McDaniel, “Violence and Gender: Differences and Similarities Across Societies,” in Interpersonal Violent Behaviors: Social and Cultural Aspects, ed. R. Barry Ruback and Neil Alan Weiner (New York: Springer, 1995), 63–87.
42. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 7.
43. Ibid., 3–5.
44. Michael Silverblatt, “A Poem of an Invisible Subject,” interview with W. G. Sebald, in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. B. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories, 2010), 84–85.
45. Henry Miller, Remember to Remember (London: Grey Walls, 1952), 191.
46. Douglas Collins, Mr. Mole’s Tunnel (London: Collins, 1946).
47. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 137.
48. Cited in Futurism à Paris, ed. Didier Ottinger (Paris: Centre Pompidou: 5 Continents, 2008), 311.
49. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 327–328.