Michael Jackson’s response to our beleaguered age is to ask what forms of speech and action are called for in ‘dark times’. He argues that experiences that fall outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible have both critical and redemptive power.

Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. Mistaken Identities: The Task of Thinking in Dark Times Chapter 2. Radical Empiricism and the Little Things of Life Chapter 3. The Witch as a Category and as a Person Chapter 4. The New Materialisms Chapter 5. Words and Deeds Chapter 6. Critique of Cultural Fundamentalism Chapter 7. Existential Scarcity and Ethical Sensibility Chapter 8. Identification and Description: An Essay on Metaphor Chapter 9. Islam and Identity among the Kuranko Chapter 10. In Defense of Existential Anthropology Notes Index

“Through trenchant analysis and interplay of such thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Theodor Adorno, he exposes how these survivors of trauma unpack the complexity of identity formation, the act of identifying, and the tendency to use categories to control complicated human standpoints…This book could be useful for courses in anthropology, philosophy, contemporary literature, and sociology. – Recommended.” • Choice “…a brilliant, masterful, and urgent book.” • Reading Religion “It is Jackson’s unmatched ability to pay attention to the details of human life using seemingly mundane interactions as the basis for developing a philosophy of human existence that makes his work so compelling to read and think with. Throughout the book, Jackson shows that he is not just a master of existential dialectical thinking, but also of existential dialectical writing…As a growing number of anthropologists are attempting to make sense of the breakdown in trust and understanding that increasingly characterizes socio-political spaces across the world, Critique of Identity Thinking offers crucial theoretical and epistemological guidance in troubled times.” • Zeitschrift für Ethnologie “Critique of Identity Thinking contains a wisdom, which comes from a lifetime of reading, writing, and doing ethnography, and it is a reminder of the redemptive power of not distinguishing so clearly between biography and ethnography as well as between science and art.” • Conflict & Society “The author is a master weaver. The tapestry he offers draws together many threads. Its colors are dusky and subdued. It is a dark work, the inspiration and provocation of which is the darkness of the times in which we presently live… a masterpiece.” • James Faubion, Rice University