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"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"
List of contents
Acknowledgments
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
About the author
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Summary
An exploration of liberal multiculturalism from the perspective of Australian indigenous social life. It explains that, while aboriginal peoples have an official "place" in Australia, they must uphold stereotypically authentic ways of being.
