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