In recent decades, indigenous peoples in the Yukon have signed land claim and self-government agreements that spell out the nature of government-to-government relations and grant individual First Nations significant, albeit limited, powers of governance over their peoples, lands, and resources. Those agreements, however, are predicated on the assumption that if First Nations are to qualify as governments at all, they must be fundamentally state-like, and they frame First Nation powers in the culturally contingent idiom of sovereignty.

Based on over five years of ethnographic research carried out in the southwest Yukon, Sovereignty's Entailments is a close ethnographic analysis of everyday practices of state formation in a society whose members do not take for granted the cultural entailments of sovereignty. This approach enables Nadasdy to illustrate the full scope and magnitude of the "cultural revolution" that is state formation and expose the culturally specific assumptions about space, time, and sociality that lie at the heart of sovereign politics.

Nadasdy's timely and insightful work illuminates how the process of state formation is transforming Yukon Indian people's relationships with one another, animals, and the land.

About the Author
Paul Nadasdy is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University.

Reviews

"In Sovereignty's Entailments, Paul Nadasdy leverages an impressive array of scholarship from political theory, Indigenous studies and anthropology to caution against the widespread embrace of "Indigenous sovereignty" as the best vehicle for Indigenous empowerment especially in Canada's Yukon Territory."

-- Danielle DiNovelli-Lang, Carleton University * Anthropologica, vol 61 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781487522070
Author Paul Nadasdy
Format Paperback
Page Count 400
Imprint University of Toronto Press
Publisher University of Toronto Press
Weight(grams) 600g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm