I
AM GRATEFUL TO THE C
ENTER FOR THE S
TUDY OF W
ORLD R
ELIGIONS (Harvard Divinity School) for a research grant that covered the costs of my travel and fieldwork in Australia and New Zealand in 2014–2015. I owe particular thanks to Anne Monius, Cory O’Brien, Matthew Whitacre, and Charles Anderson who administered this grant so efficiently and expeditiously. In the USA, my children, Joshua and Freya Jackson, and my wife, Francine Lorimer, engaged with and supported my research, while Wendy McDowell, senior editor of the
Harvard Divinity Bulletin, offered encouragement and generously published an account of my work in progress. In Germany, Craig Barris and Carola Faller-Barris offered warm hospitality and gave me penetrating insights into Carola’s graphic art. In Australia, my daughter Heidi Jackson provided crucial references, accompanied me to galleries, and made incisive comments that reflected her experiences of painting and of teaching art. Simryn Gill, Kathy Golski, and Susan Norrie gave generous feedback on draft essays about their work, while fellow anthropologists and writers Martin Edmond, Ute Eickelkamp, Rachel Perkins, Denis Taylor, and Souchou Yao shared their own parallel work with me and helped illuminate my own path. In New Zealand, my greatest debt is to Vincent O’Sullivan whose friendship and support have, for almost fifty years, been a spiritual mainstay. The hospitality he and his wife Helen extended to me in Dunedin was only equaled by the warm welcome given to me in Central Otago by Grahame Sydney, Jillian Sullivan, and Brian Turner and in Auckland by Bronwen Nicolson and Brian Boyd, who welcomed me into their home and offered timely scholarly assistance. In Sydney and Melbourne, conversations with Ghassan Hage triggered my initial interest in this project. I also wish to thank Angela Zito for sharing her work on
Writing in Water with me. It helped bring my work to a close and give it the Taoist touch I had sought from the outset. In the production of this book, I am grateful for the expertise and input of Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, and Susan Pensak at Columbia University Press as well as for Will Morningstar’s assistance in securing permissions and preparing images and Jennifer Conforti’s help in preparing the final draft of the manuscript.