A Certain Disservice

Elizabeth A. Povinelli. (2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

I'm not an anthropologist, though I've played one in the minds of the AAA bureaucracy. A couple of years ago, I received a letter noting that I had done ethnographic-style work, and inviting me to pay money to the AAA. I thought I'd better comply. The book under review is thus being done a certain disservice (hence, the title given to this review), in that I cannot comment professionally on its ethnography of Aboriginal social and territorial relations. But I also read it as a book about cultural policy and the management of populations in Australia, a topic with which I have been involved for many years, along with many other expatriate and local Australian scholars and activists. In addition, the book is being privileged, in that a major journal is featuring it via a lengthy article when the book is just appearing in print—a remarkable event for an academic text, really. And perhaps the reason why I can write a lengthy review is that Elizabeth Povinelli's monograph says it is about the heart murmurs of liberal subjectivity, another topic with which I am familiar. For Povinelli, these murmurs are to be understood via dilemmas over multiculturalism, as interpreted through speeches by politicians about tribal Aborigines, court cases over their land claims (the celebrated Mabo and Wik judgments plus the claim to Kembi, in which she has played a distinguished part as both participant and chronicler ¹ ), and fieldwork she has conducted with the Belyuen people. These studies enable her to encounter multiculturalism as a "social ethics and social technology for distributing the rights and goods, harms and failures, of liberal capitalist democracies" (7). In other words, the book derives general propositions about the intersection of white Australians, multiculturalism, and liberalism from research into relations between the Australian state and tribal Aborigines. My concern is not with her work on the land claims and Aboriginal culture, which form the empirical heart of this book and seem well-put together and thought out. Rather, I am exercised by The Cunning of Recognition's general claims in the context of Australian multiculturalism and the book's position within a particular intellectual field—the use of black Australia as a trope to renew Northern social and cultural theory.

I am struck that Povinelli does not engage very much with the literature on either liberalism or multiculturalism produced from and about Australia by key local intellectuals. This may be because she is most concerned with where multiculturalism "emerges in the neighborhood of indigenous subjects and societies." But at the same time she says she is investigating what she calls "the liberal diaspora," which appears to be a set of beliefs that "society should be organized on the basis of rational mutual understanding" (6). One of the things I wish to do here is provide readers with access to different views on the topics this book says it is about. These topics include liberalism (Hancock, 1931; Rowse, 1978; Kukathas, 1989; Davidson and Spegele, 1991); governmentality (Dean and Hindess, 1998; Bennett and Carter, 2001); multiculturalism (Jupp, 1989, 1998; Zubryczki, 1995; Jakubowicz, 1981, 1989; Castles et al., 1992; Connell and Irving, 1992; Jayasuriya, 1997); citizenship (Kukathas, 1993; Davidson, 1997; Castles and Davidson, 2000); and the impact of Aboriginality on white folks (Hodge and Mishra, 1991).

Why does this matter? After all, it's only one book. It matters because it is part of an old trend that is undergoing renewal. Aborigines have provided raw material for social theory and cultural production to the North since the nineteenth century. The Cunning of Recognition is the latest example, albeit with a twist. For me to write about the book, two moves have therefore been necessary. First, to locate it within this intellectual history; and second, to address its ostensible topic.

I

Aboriginal Australia gave nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western Europe a...