Question 1

Where are you from?

Accepted Answer

I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1946, just after the end of World War II. My parents were both Jewish South Africans – my mother of German descent, and a convert to Judaism, and my father had Lithuanian and Ukrainian roots. Both of their families emigrated to South Africa in the late 1800s. My parents had come abroad before the war so my father, who had earned his first medical degree, could advance his specialization in obstetrics and gynecology. There were limited options for Jews at that time; he studied first in Ireland and then in Scotland, and joined the British Army Medical Corps when the war started. He and my mother hoped to remain in Britain, but once the war was over colonial servicemen were repatriated. I was 10 months old when we settled in Port Elizabeth, S.A., where my father ran a local clinic and my mother did community work.

Question 2

Was your family politically active?

Accepted Answer

Port Elizabeth was a highly segregated port city where there was significant Black activism and political unrest. My parents were part of a generation that had lived through the war and had experienced racism in Europe, and were understandably fearful of being highly visible, politically active Jews. My mother was more comfortable in her political efforts than my father. There was an interesting aspect to this – a real gender disparity in the way in which white middle classes responded; both (John and my) mother were much more radical than our fathers. The fathers had to be breadwinners, they didn’t like the political circumstances in which they lived.

My father used to run free clinics at an African hospital, and would fulminate against Afrikaner politics, but didn’t want to draw attention to their protest. My mother was born a Lutheran and converted to Judaism, but because she came from a German family she had an aptitude for learning Yiddish and spoke it with a wonderful sense of the idiomatic use of the language; when we went to Port Elizabeth she became involved, working with the elderly Jewish community, many of them German refugees, who spoke Yiddish. More significantly, unlike John’s mother who was a Zionist socialist, my mother believed that you started political work at home; went into the townships and ran soup kitchens and night schools. Many of these women got into political trouble; there was constant friction between them and the fathers who didn’t want trouble. I would come home from school sometimes to find there was no lunch as my mother would have given it to a hungry person who had come to the door; there was a sense that women were much more engaged with the immediacy of the lived circumstances of apartheid; its effects on families. Nadine Gordimer’s story ‘A Chip of Glass Ruby’ about an Indian community on the Witwatersrand where there was a similar sense, among the men, that they had to work within the system, while the mothers were unable to bear the injustices which they often saw in the lives of their own domestic workers, or among women begging on the streets.

Question 3

How did you discover anthropology?

Accepted Answer

I had no idea what I wanted to study when I began at the University of Cape Town so I started with ‘A’, and did courses in Afrikaans, archaeology and anthropology. I had the great fortune to have Monica Wilson as my anthropology professor. I had an epiphany in her classroom. This was the only context on that campus where there was some recognition that we were living in Africa, and that African society and culture had something to teach the world; it was an extraordinary experience. In English literature courses, at the time, you read only metropolitan literature. Monica Wilson was a woman in a predominantly male faculty, a missionary’s daughter, and a woman whose husband, Godfrey Wilson, committed suicide under difficult circumstances in Zambia as a conscientious objector during the WW2. Her whole relationship to South Africa, on the one hand, and ethnography on the other, was very much formed by her experience in this place and time. She gave us that these unusual circumstances could be the source of knowledge and insight of very general value.

Monica Wilson had written the paper called ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’ which was published in the American Journal of Sociology. It was classic structural-functionalism in many ways, yet insightful beyond the limits of its paradigm, comparing two different African societies in respect of their distinct idioms of witch belief. At the end, it made reference to McCarthyism in America, raising the question whether witchcraft was solely an African phenomenon; it was way ahead of its time. She was also writing books with titles like ‘Reaction to Conquest’, seeing anthropology inseparably enmeshed in a colonial encounter; this sort of work was inter-disciplinary, refusing the separate anthropology from history; also tracking the empirical effects of Apartheid. For instance, she was involved in the Keiskammahoek Survey, which documented extreme poverty in the Eastern Cape, and linked it to the impact of racial segregation on ordinary people in rural areas. Her research and teaching were unprecedented, one of the few contexts in which Africans spoke as collaborators in the production of knowledge. In the world of university education at the time, African voices were absent; there was a lot of protest but it was always mouthed by white theorists and activists.

Question 4

Where did you meet John Comaroff?

Accepted Answer

John and I met at the University of Cape Town. We were both Anthropology students. Monica Wilson took us both under her wing.

Question 5

Can you describe your early career?

Accepted Answer

John and I moved to England to study first at the London School of Economics at the University of London, where we both earned Ph.Ds. There were nepotism clauses in force in British Universities at that stage; husbands and wives could not be in the same department. I worked in the Medical School and in Medical Sociology.

We were there in 1967-68, which was a time of unparalleled social activism. If you came from outside the British system you didn’t move directly into a graduate programme and had to do a remedial year. Our peers in that class were largely draft dodgers from the US; there was a very particular kind of political environment there. When we first arrived at the LSE Mick Jagger had only quite recently ceased being a student there and was still holding concerts on campus to support the ferment of youth culture at that time – Grosvenor Square and the anti-Vietnam protests. Jagger and his band were just beginning to really make waves in Britain and he used to raise money for the Socialist Society at the LSE. That was before the LSE was purged and was still quite a radical place. When I first arrived at the entrance on Dover Street – it is now no longer an open street – big black cabs would come round very quickly; I was just walking across the street and was nearly knocked down by one and the driver who shouted at me: “If you want to be red, you’ve got to be quick!”

Question 6

Can you describe your early field work?

Accepted Answer

By the time we moved on to teaching at the University of Manchester, we had already done fieldwork in South Africa; again it was Monica Wilson who advised us to work near a border as it was almost impossible to do field research under Apartheid conditions. We were likely to be thrown out eventually; by working among people who straddle a border we could then continue our research on the other side. Which could be interesting, as one would be able to observe the same cultural legacy under two different kinds of state formations and sets of conditions. Monica was prescient; that is exactly what happened.
There was also the danger of putting people that you spoke to at risk, and it was incredibly difficult to establish any kind of trust across the color bar; the hazardous conditions brought one very close to the people one got to know well; we are still in touch with friends whom we worked with at the time, folks who are our own age – Batswana teachers, intellectuals, people once in underground politics – whom we still see, and whose children are now in touch with our children. It has been a long-standing set of connections, but they were very difficult to sustain in the repressive years.

Question 7

Why did you focus on African Christianity?

Accepted Answer

I was working on churches; I left the LSE assuming that I would study “traditional religion,” because African Christianity was what scholars of comparative religion did at the time. When I got there, Christianity was a major idiom of local life, forms of Christianity made under local conditions, an integrated aspect of Tswana history and life. Several of the leaders of the various local denominations were extraordinary leaders, involved in everything from feeding the hungry to giving asylum to those on the run; one close friend had actually been the priest for Robert Sobukwe, and he
took us to be ritually treated by a local healer to protect us against the security police. We soon found that the kind of structural-functionalist methods that we had learned at the LSE were totally inadequate when we got to this world, where you couldn’t separate religion from politics, “local” ethnography from the structure of the whole colonial, Apartheid state. There was no way that you could see these things as anything but a product of a very large history. The borders of our “field” were, in a sense, there and not there. This forced us into a kind of anthropology that was difficult to write when we got back to the LSE; some of that material was put on hold until we started writing our books and had independent jobs. But South Africa at the time was an amazing forcing ground; it also, very early, got us working with other scholars who were developing a new, generic kind of social science in southern Africa. That was the saving grace, for even in places where anthropology wasn’t inter-disciplinary, as it wasn’t in Manchester in the early 1970’s, there were South African comrades who worked together and read each other’s material, pulling one into other modes of thinking. In South Africa itself, there was a period of complete paralysis in the sense that it wasimpossible to know how to do anthropology. The discipline had been hijacked, in some quarters, to legitimate a politics of difference. And you couldn’t really do fieldwork; we couldn’t have done it if we had not come from a British university; we would never have got the necessary permission from a South African university, or had the confidence to even think it was possible. It was at this period that those who felt that anthropology had to somehow make itself relevant to this world began to read social history, and began to do a sort of political economy, Marxist social history – inspired by E.P. Thompson and the History Workshop Journal.

Question 8

How did you meet British anthropologist Isaac Schapera?

Accepted Answer

Our families had been interconnected in the old days in South Africa, and we would always visit him when we went to London. He had lived in the same hotel room since 1948; he moved to the corridor below just before he died.

The hotel had been a place for gentleman scholars which changed over time into a glitzy West-End joint, but there was one corridor where these elderly people lived. His world became more and more contracted but he kept in contact through various networks that spanned the entire Southern African anthropological world; everybody who was anybody went on pilgrimage to see him. We always went with a bottle in hand: he drank whisky throughout the day and night. He would relay the gossip of what was going on in the Diaspora and then you would tell him about what you and your students were doing.

He was an almost militant theoretical empiricist (to quote Leach on Malinowski) but he was also a very interesting person because there were certain orthodoxies (over-rigid structural models, for instance) that he had rejected early on. This was connected to the salience, and style of his photography; for him, photography was at one level just another extension of the empirical eye, but at the same time it was an unblinking gaze; he was very suspicious of people who were eager to create models which were based on exclusion; very suspicious of the overly systemic structural functionalist notions of tradition. In his writing and photography the world of the surrounding colonial labour market, for instance, the impact of depression-era Southern Africa on local peoples always bled in. The empiricism was a form of critical watch on what he saw as flights of theoretical fancy.

Along with that went an openness to the idea that rural African societies were hybridizing, dialectically entailed worlds; that you had to understand the impact of processes like migrant labour, that Africans were writing letters from the mines, and were operating with new genres, and were entailed in complicated ways with colonialism. There was an eye for small detail; he would keep the stock records of colonial traders so that when we ourselves went back and tried to trace the life of the commodity as one of the vectors of the colonization of life worlds among the Tswana, Schapera had kept all of these documents. Which colour blanket was sent to Bechuanaland, which were bought, and which stock was rejected; what styles did women not like to buy; he had an instinct for significant detail. There was a kind of material groundedness about the way he saw the world: you looked at what people did and there you found the concepts you needed to explain their actions, and you never closed your gaze prematurely because of an a-priori sense of the limits of your field.

The most poignant moment in our relationship was in dealing with his photographs: he was always in love with these pictures; in a way, the pictures spoke more clearly than he could. He was a very shy man; his father had committed suicide when he was quite young, and he had had a very strange and unrequited personal emotional history; so he was always more of an observer. We felt he was like a kind of Lewis Carroll figure who looked in, and was more comfortable with women and children in the field; it was not voyeuristic, just easier for him to relate directly to them. Also, he had been locked out of those kinds of intimacies as a child, and the pictures said more than he could about his affect. There was a tenderness in the pictures that he was never able to express directly; he was always gruff; he kept the picture as his life shrank in scope. He gave away most of his books, everything but the pictures. At Christmas or New Year he would send you a photograph, usually connected to what work you were doing, but he gave them out slowly and sparingly as though he were giving himself; he wanted to have these pictures published in a collection, and he started talking to an editor in Germany about this project. That editor got in touch with us, at Schapera’s suggestion, and asked if we could write an introduction. There were many problems getting the copyright for the various photographs which he had lodged in various places, so that the German publication fell through. We picked up the project. Schapera was then in his mid-nineties, but he so much wanted this book to come out; before we finally settled the copyright matter we wrote the essay, in Derbyshire in England, where we spend a lot of our time. We took a certain liberty because we wrote about photography and empiricism, but we also wrote about him and what we thought the camera told us about him that he had not said about himself. We sent it to him with some trepidation, but he wrote back to say that we had shown him something about himself and his work that he’d never fully understood, and that we had “made an old man very happy.” Sadly, he died before we finally got all the permissions together but the book did come out.

About Jean Comaroff

Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology at Harvard University

Frequently Asked Questions

Jean Comaroff

Updates

Archives

Links