"The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism" by Elizabeth A. Povinelli

This book is an exploration of liberal multiculturalism from the perspective of Australian indigenous social life. Authorargues 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. Povinelli draws on seventeen years of ethnographic research among northwest coast indigenous people and her own experience participating in land claims, as well as on public records, legal debates, and anthropological archives to examine how multicultural forms of recognition work to reinforce liberal regimes rather than to open them up to a true cultural democracy.

The book demonstrates that the impact of the globalization of liberal forms of government can only be truly understood by examining its concrete—and not just philosophical—effects on the world.

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