Ethnohistory Home

This Year's Workshops

Previous Workshops

About the Program

Join Our Contact List

Elizabeth Povinelli
Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

Abstract

At its broadest, this chapter reflects on the substitution of a practice of textual deletion, ellipsis, and paraphrase for a fuller social theory of the politics and ethics of alterity and similarity. At its narrowest, the chapter analyzes the material emergence of ritual sexuality as such in the colonial context of "radical interpretation" and why sexuality was the site in which an emergent ethical relationship to colonial cohesion and the customary was played out. Thus, the chapter at once meditates on the emergent meta-modality of liberalism motivating these textual practices, a philosophy not merely of the ought but of the emergence of a new normative relation to liberalism's own and others' moral philosophies, their oughts. And at the same time, it attempts to understand the limits and possibilities of "radical interpretation" in colonial contexts and its retroactive inscription in present political and social imaginaries as discussed in the last chapter.

This chapter is only obliquely a history of sexuality; a study of the emergence of "sex" as a distinct act, of sexuality as a form of desire, subjectivity and identity; and of the puzzling "manner in which what is most material and most vital in [bodies] has been invested" in indigenous Australia. I hope to suggest how the super-animation of liberal discourse lifted "sex" out of local corporeal practices and to gesture toward the legal and cultural consequences of this artifactualization. But, the chapter does not examine sex. Instead it examines a feeling radical interpretation chases, produces, and aspires to incite-The feeling of a destabilizing indeterminate "something" that lurks beside and rattles liberal understanding; A teetering into the sublime that this indeterminate something threatens and promises; And the deferred ethics of alterity haunting the politics of freedom and cultural difference in Australia. This chapter then examines: What Spencer and Gillen were chasing in the Arrente desert. What they found. What they missed, foreclosed, destroyed. And what, in foreclosing, they set in motion and help inlay into the fabric of national discourse. This chapter is, in short, an attempt to understand why one form of nationalism developed in Australia rather than another and how this form of nationalism figures a form of social coercion as a moment of cultural recognition and translation.