Geontologies

Geontologies is a dense work that resists being described in telegraphic terms, based as it is in dazzling and far-reaching theoretical and philosophical readings. But Povinelli's key concepts of 'geontology' and 'geontopower' are an invaluable contribution to our much-needed critical lexicon, [and] the concepts and modes of engagement presented in Geontologies, though firmly rooted in the experience and particular governance of Australian settler late liberalism, demand to be taken up and translated in other contexts. -- Shela Sheikh * Avery Review * Elizabeth A. Povinelli's writing remains a continual confrontation with the otherwise. On one hand we have a classical anthropologist totally at home and committed to her field; on the other hand, gone are the attempts to 'capture' and 'explain.' Instead, we have indigenous categories engaging in an exciting intellectual gymnastics with philosophy and theory to help us think our moment: the moment when the nonliving erupts into our spaces, transforming itself from a background to something that makes demands on us. -- Ghassan Hage, author of * Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination * Between bios and geos, Life and Nonlife: not an opposition, rather a composition. Beyond biopolitics lies the realm of 'geontology,' where the living and the nonliving co-compose to produce singular modes of existence and forms of power-and empowerment. In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli presents exemplary figures of geontology that are once symptomatic of the late liberal condition and open it onto its own beyond. Her thought-provoking analyses engage political and ontological complexities with an uncommon richness of detail and insight toward a rethinking of cultural politics. -- Brian Massumi, author of * Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception *