Since the midnineteenth century there has been a notable acceleration in the development of the techniques used to confirm identity. From fingerprints to photographs to DNA we have been rapidly amassing novel means of identification even as personal individual identity remains a complex chimera. The Art of Identification examines how such processes are entangled within a wider sphere of cultural identity formation.Against the backdrop of an unstable modernity and the rapid rise and expansion of identificatory techniques this volume makes the case that identity and identification are mutually imbricated and that our best understanding of both concepts and technologies comes through the interdisciplinary analysis of science bureaucratic infrastructures and cultural artifacts.