Table 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 is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action and the editor of the journal Public Culture, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"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, co-editor 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