What does “existential anthropology” encompass? Human existence entails a struggle between contending imperatives, Michael Jackson begins in Existential Anthropology. One wishes to strike a balance between being an actor and being acted on, between furnishing the wherewithal of life through one’s own capacities and through one’s memberships, and between a search for pure self and a search for belonging with and to others. One possesses a fluid consciousness that oscillates between speech and silence, reflection and habit, aimlessness and purposiveness, body and imagination, and passion and calm. Being is precarious and unstable, one’s sense of well-being waxing and waning continually, susceptible to subtle changes in mood, to one’s perception of another’s glance, gesture, or remark. One struggles for being in the face of the nothingness of a life wrought meaningless by adversity, exclusion, and violation. Does one win this struggle to strike a balance? The outcome derives neither from external circumstance nor from inner essence: Neither reductive nor determinate, the outcome is a “dynamic relationship,” a dialectic born of how “limiting conditions are shaped by the ways in which we respond to them” (p. xi).

In what ways are the above matters relevant to sociocultural anthropology? The question of being is universal, only its symbolic expression differs, and it is properly the starting point of any attempt to explore and compare human lifeworlds. Albeit individuality may be played down in the milieus in which anthropologists often work, identity and responsibility may be taken to be primarily matters of community belonging, and meaning and fate may be supernaturally lodged—such habits of mind are not ontologies. Existence does not reduce to category terms, whether “society,” “culture,” “individual,” “belonging,” “relationship,” “habitus,” “structure,” or “ideology.” Such terms cannot be made foundational to a theory of human being. These terms are rhetorical devices: some of the symbolical vehicles by which human beings have designated some of the modalities of their experience and sought solutions to the issue of existence. Category terms are manifestations of the “endless experimentation in how the given world can be lived decisively, on one’s own terms” (p. xii). An existential anthropology is an attempt to appreciate the means and the consequences of people always and everywhere attempting to exercise freedom: to see in their lives a reflection of their human capacities to make their own sense.

From this anthropology, Jackson is determined to bracket off questions of truth, of objective reality. He does not judge or rank the symbolical vehicles—cultures—that human beings deploy to give form to their work of securing being. He is more concerned that these be seen alike, as commensurate acts of everyday, individual, and collaborative effort, and that the universal consequences be appreciated of occasions when the work of being does not receive others’ due recognition. What, for instance, is the effect of feeling so ostracized and oppressed—objectified and depersonalized—that one’s sense of humanity disappears? Loss of ontological security and the need for redress can eventuate in the suicide bomber.

The testament that anthropology can provide of the existential effort of being is edifying rather than systematic in character. It comes from the interexperience of social interaction and offers detailed glimpses of the tensions and intentions of particular lifeworlds. Hence, Jackson focuses, in 11 chapters, on events whose moment and drama illuminate personal reasons and impersonal causes in the constitution of being. From suffering war and postwar in Sierra Leone and in Brooklyn, to being and being out of place in white Australia, to violations of human rights, to the interface between bodies and machines and globalization and technology, to mundane rituals and names, here are moments in which human beings variously create viable lives—emotionally, magically, rationally, corporeally, narratively—and the recognition, dignity, well-being, love, and respect they ubiquitously seek.

In a preface, Jackson notes that this book brings to an end an anthropological journey of 40 years: an appreciation of people’s longing to come into their own. At the book’s close, he hints at where his literary projects might take him next: toward more metaphysical exploration (now based at Harvard Divinity School) of that being-in-the-world which is defined by being-with-others-in-a-place and for which sitting on the ground, sinking back into the earth, manifests the welcome “state of nascence, of pure potentiality” (p. 192). This book is a thoroughly wise one, learned, patient, and humane: an inspiring companion with which to journey anthropologically to human lifeworlds at any stage of one’s life-project.