Elizabeth Povinelli

Elizabeth A. Povinelli (b. 1962) is an American-Australian anthropologist and critical theorist whose work analyzes the contemporary form of liberal governance through long-term ethnographic engagement with Indigenous communities in northern Australia. She is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective.

¶Core ideas

• Late liberalism. The current phase of liberal governance, after liberalism’s recognition of its colonial-racial-gender violence, in which the system manages that recognition through procedural inclusion and administrative reform rather than structural transformation.
• Economies of abandonment. The mode of governance in which populations and places are assessed, classified as unviable, and abandoned through administrative procedure. The withdrawal produces the evidence of failure that retroactively justifies it.
• Geontologies / geontopower. Power that operates through the distinction between Life and Nonlife — the ontological classification that determines what can suffer, what is available for extraction, what is properly within the sphere of moral and political concern. More fundamental than biopolitics because it determines what counts as alive in the first place.
• The quasi-event. A managed disturbance that looks like a crisis but functions as ordinary input — the system’s capacity to process disruption as part of its normal operation.
• Endurance. The political practice of persisting under conditions where the world has been organized to make one’s persistence irrelevant — not heroic resistance but the ongoing work of continuing to exist.

¶Key works

• The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (2002)
• The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (2006)
• Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011)
• Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016)
• Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (2021)

¶Where her work figures in this library

Povinelli is foundational across the povinellian subdomain — late-liberalism, economies-of-abandonment, geontologies, quasi-event. She is also upstream of cybernetic postliberalism’s account of californication and harm-governance.