Elizabeth Povinelli is a Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. She has several publications including The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Geneaology, and Carnality (2006). This book, as Povinelli herself writes, “examines how a set of ethical and normative claims about the governance of love, sociality, and the body circulate in liberal settler colonies in such a way that life and death, rights and recognition, goods and resources are unevenly distributed there.” Her work has focused on “developing a critical theory of late liberalism.” With regard to this she says, “This critical task is grounded in theories of the translation, transfiguration and the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms.”
“…I want to show how the uneven distribution of the flesh—the creation of life-worlds, death-worlds, and rotting worlds—is a key way in which autology, genealogy, and their intimacies are felt, known, and expressed. The dynamic between carnality and the discourses of the autological subject and the genealogical society is in this sense more like a skein than a skin—like a length of yarn or thread wound loosely and coiled together, a flock of birds flying across the sky in a line, or a tangled or complex mass of material.” —The Empire of Love p.8 (2006)
Committing Anthropology 