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ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002, xi + 339 p.
In R. v. Marshall (S.C.R. 1999[3]), the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that a community-based right of fishing existed for Aboriginal descendants of the Mi'kmaq or Maliseet signatories to eighteenth-century Peace and Friendship treaties. However, while such descendants were entitled to participate in the commercial fishery, their involvement was limited to obtaining "a moderate livelihood." This term, "a moderate livelihood," came from American jurisprudence. In a series of cases involving a Wisconsin Chippewa band, expert testimony from an economist was used to set "a moderate standard of living" at the poverty level or the "zero savings level of income" (Lac Courte Oreille Band of Chippewa Indians v. Wisconsin, 686 F. Supp. 226 [1988]). Povinelli addresses similarly perverse case law in Australia, and the resulting 1993 federal Native Title Act, which requires that Aboriginal people demonstrate an unbroken line of adherence to traditional law in order to qualify for native title to land-despite a long history of murder, resettlement, and state seizure of Aboriginal children. Furthermore, under the Act, if one can establish an unbroken line of legal difference, it must not sanction any behaviour of the sort to generate moral repugnance among the dominant members of society. One might wonder about such mean-spirited recognition of the Aboriginal right to share in the prosperity of the liberal state, and it is this curiosity to which Povinelli has addressed herself in The Cunning of Recognition.
Povinelli explores the implications of the state recognition of alterity, expanding the relevance of such case law to address wider questions of the multicultural society. These questions are as vital to our understanding of the discipline of anthropology as they are to the multicultural nation state, as the role of anthropology is implicated in many of them. How does the liberal nation state deal with (internal) cultural difference? How does indigenousness and multiculturalism interrelate? How do people deal with a conflict between moral sense and liberal reason-between a modernist logical stance, for example, that privileges difference, and a moral stance that designates (other cultural)...