Elizabeth A. Povinelli is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. Her first two books, Labor's Lot: The Power, History and Culture of Aboriginal Action (The University of Chicago Press, 1994) and The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Duke University Press, 2002), examine the governance of the otherwise in late liberal settler colonies from the perspective of the politics of recognition. Her last two books, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2011) and The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Geneology, and Carnality. A Public Planet Book. (Duke University Press, 2006), examined the same from the perspective of intimacy, embodiment, and narrative form. Her ethnographic analysis is animated by a critical engagement with the traditions of American pragmatism and continental immanent theory.
