Jackson is the founder of existential anthropology, a non-traditional sub-field of anthropology using ethnographic methods and drawing on traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, and critical theory, as well as American pragmatism, in exploring the human condition from the perspectives of both lifeworlds and worldviews, histories and biographies, collective representations and individual realities.
Jackson's published work fully discloses the contexts in which understandings are negotiated, arrived at, or, in some instances, unattainable.
He has conducted fieldwork among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone from 1969, among the Warlpiri of Australia's Northern Territory between 1989 and 1991, and among the Kuku Yalangi of Cape York Peninsula in 1993 and 1994.
One critic wrote: In Dead Reckoning, Jackson deploys "a navigator’s term for estimating one’s location based upon extrapolations of distance and direction from one’s last-known position.
The critic Vincent O'Sullivan writes, "What one hears in his readings is the modest, confidant, international voice that drives his poems, the conversing of a man who, as ever, is on one road to find another.