Identity politics

Both right-wing and left-wing identity politics involve maintaining identities by psychological projection, for both compel people to comply with limiting  ideas about the world.

Intellectual shamanism considers "identity" to spring from anything or everything in the natural world.  
It is so  subject to change in exactly the same way natural environments change over time

In truth, there can never be a nature or an essence that can eternally define one's identity.   Rather, one was born to move naturally  within an open field of experience.

My memoir was written as a tacit critique of identity politics,  suggesting that life is far more complicated than having to do with easily identifiable identities.

Nonetheless, conservatives draw their boundaries of identities along nationalist lines, whereas liberals often mistakenly maintain that historical scores can be settled by attributing fixed identities to groups of people who have been the unfortunate victims of historical oppression.  

The historical "oppressors"* are also compelled to wear an eternal and fixed identity as evil-doers.  

Intellectual shamanism runs counter to this contemporary ideology that rules the world, for  it urges that a robust sense of identity is possible only when one does not to attach meaning or value to claims about whom one is essentially.   

Positioned in a hostile relationship to shamanistic notions of freedom are those who use guilt and shame to manipulate others.   They use identity politics to shift their disgust with themselves onto those whom they believe to be less worthy -- often onto they believe to be moral inferiors for not playing their game.   

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*  Sometimes the apparent evil-doers are not at all oppressors, but people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.