Description
Book SynopsisArgues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with their colonizers but by demanding that they identify with an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture.
Trade Review“An intelligent, valuable, and absorbing study. Povinelli relentlessly dissects the legal and affective bases of contemporary multicultural liberalism, while bringing the Australian case squarely into an ethics debate that has up to now been dominated by the North American experience.”—James Ferguson, coeditor of
Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology“Elizabeth Povinelli’s
The Cunning of Recognition is a breakthrough work that has major implications for redefining the relations between cultural studies and anthropology. With a consistently high level of intellectual excitement and commitment, Povinelli draws together work from a variety of fields in new and provocative ways.”—Benjamin Lee, author of
Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity“The Cunning of Recognition is one of the most challenging books I have read in years, a passionate and moving account of what the practice of multiculturalism looks like on the ground. Along the way, Povinelli inventively reframes debates within anthropological theory over kinship, culture, and the state. Without platitudes or readymade postures of critique, she shows us an impasse in liberal thought that stems not from its weaknesses, but from its strongest ethical sense of obligation toward those who are different. This is dialectical thinking at its best, painfully and excitingly honest.”—Michael Warner, author of
The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life"Ambitious and bold. . . . Offers much of interest for those understanding the Australian scene and liberal practice and should be read by those interested in Australia and in liberalism more generally." -- Francesca Merlan * Journal of Anthropological Research *
"An impressive application of both political and cultural theory to anthropology and makes a decisive contribution to the debate on the cultural politics of multiculturalism." -- Gerard Delanty * American Journal of Sociology *
"Povinelli's critique of liberal multiculturalism is relentless and often ingenious." -- Duncan Ivison * Australian Journal of Political Science *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Critical Common Sense
1. Mutant Messages
2. The Vulva Thieves (
Atna Nylkna): Modal Ethics and the Colonial Archive
3. Sex Rites, Civil Rights
4. Shamed States
5. The Poetics of Ghosts: Social Reproduction in the Archive of the Nation
6. The Truest Belief is Compulsion
Notes
Selected Works Cited
Index
