Jean and John Comaroff put forward their case in the strongest possible terms, and they do so with flair, eloquence, and brilliance: that Africa in particular and the global South more broadly are in the vanguard of world history, generative of global futures and theory to match. This is a book that will be debated with vigor and profit.
Applies To: John Comaroff
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Theory from the South
“The Global South” has become a shorthand for the world of non-European, postcolonial peoples. Synonymous with uncertain development, unorthodox economies, failed states, and nations fraught with corruption, poverty, incivility, and strife, it is that half of the world about which the “Global North” spins theories. Rarely is it seen as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events. Yet, as many nation-states of the northern hemisphere experience increasing fiscal meltdown, the state privatization, populist authoritarianism, corruption, ethnic conflict, and other crises, it seems as though they are “evolving” southward, so to speak, in both positive and problematic ways. Is this so? How? In what measure? In this volume, anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff take on these questions, seeking to reverse the usual order of things. Drawing on their long experience of living in Africa and teaching in Europe and the US, they address a range of familiar themes – democracy, law, national borders, labor and capital, religion and the occult, liberalism and multiculturalism – with the imagination, theoretical acuity, originality, and agile prose for which they are well- known. In particular, they ask how we might understand these things anew with theory developed from the south. Their ethnographic eye stresses the salience of the local without losing sight of the large-scale processes in everyday lives are everywhere enmeshed. This view from the South renders key problems of our time at once strange and familiar, giving an ironic twist to the explanatory pathways long assumed by social scientists – and offering fresh insights into the workings of the twenty-first century global order.
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Elizabeth Hull Array
Ethnicity, Inc. is a thought-provoking and novel commentary on this widely recognizable phenomenon and offers an important contribution to the classical anthropological themes of ethnicity, culture, and globalization… [T]he authors’ approach is not limited by the usual conventions of anthropology but, rather, takes the reader from one global example to another. These illustrations are woven into a comparative, far-reaching discussion that describes succinctly an emerging global phenomenon.
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Keith Hart Array
The writing is sharp…always likely to grab the reader’s attention with something new. The study of ethnicity and indeed of neoliberalism will never be the same after the publication of this book.
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Ethnicity, Inc.
The politics of cultural identity, far from receding with the modernity, appears to have taken on new force in the wake of the cold war — especially with the triumphal rise of neoliberal capitalism on a global scale. This has yielded many efforts to explain the continued salience of ethnicity in a “new” world order that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was widely predicted to dissolve difference in the face of global flows of people, objects, currencies, signs, styles, desires. Less attention, however, has been paid to a subtle shift in the nature of ethnicity: its commodification. This lecture is devoted to showing that, increasingly, ethnic groups across the planet are beginning to act like corporations that own a “natural” copyright to their “culture” and “cultural products” — framed in terms, also, of heritage and indigenous knowledge — which they protect, often by recourse to the law, and on which they capitalize in much the same way as do incorporated businesses in the private sector. Why is this occurring? What are its political, economic, social, and ethical consequences? How is it transforming the nature of ethnicity and citizenship in the nation-state? And what are its theoretical implications for understanding such foundational social science concepts as culture and identity? It is these questions, finally, that Ethnicity, Inc. is addressed. In Ethnicity, Inc. anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff analyze a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. Through a wide-ranging exploration of the changing relationship between culture and the market, they address a pressing question: Wherein lies the future of ethnicity? Their account begins in South Africa, with the incorporation of an ethno-business in venture capital by a group of traditional African chiefs. But their horizons are global: Native American casinos; Scotland’s efforts to brand itself; a Zulu ethno-theme park named Shakaland; a world religion declared to be intellectual property; a chiefdom made into a global business by means of its platinum holdings; San “Bushmen” with patent rights potentially worth millions of dollars; nations acting as commercial enterprises; and the rapid growth of marketing firms that target specific ethnic populations are just some of the diverse examples that fall under the Comaroffs’ incisive scrutiny. These phenomena range from the disturbing through the intriguing to the absurd. Through them, the Comaroffs trace the contradictory effects of neoliberalism as it transforms identities and social being across the globe. Ethnicity, Inc. is a penetrating account of the ways in which ethnic populations are remaking themselves in the image of the corporation—while corporations coopt ethnic practices to open up new markets and regimes of consumption. Intellectually rigorous but leavened with wit, this is a powerful, highly original portrayal of a new world being born in a tectonic collision of culture, capitalism, and identity.
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Tessa Diphoorn Array
The Truth About Crime meets the expectations one may have of Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff: a book that is captivating, theoretically insightful and comprehensive, and appealing to scholars across disciplines interested in power, crime, and social (dis)order. Drawing from and expanding upon some of their previous work, this book is a valuable addition to a large body of scholarly work aimed at unraveling the intricate dynamics of crime, citizenship, and authority in contemporary South Africa and beyond.
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The Truth About Crime
In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves—it is by our crimes. Surveying an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing—from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions to the collateral damage of war – they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world. Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen.
To do so, the Comaroffs draw on their vast knowledge of South Africa, especially, and its struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of law out of the wreckage of long years of violence and oppression. There they explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion, drawing illuminating comparisons to the United States and United Kingdom. Going beyond South Africa, they offer a global criminal anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral panics voiced, and populations ruled.
The result is a disturbing but necessary portrait of the modern era, one that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, how we think about morality, and how we are going to proceed as a global society.
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Eminent husband-and-wife anthropologist named Visiting J Y Pillay Professors
By Jiang Haolie
Eminent anthropologists Professors Jean and John Comaroff, renowned for their joint work in African Studies and anthropology as a husband-and-wife team, were recently named Visiting J Y Pillay Professors at Yale-NUS College. The Professorship is part of the J Y Pillay Global-Asia Programme, which was established to honour Professor J Y Pillay, a pioneer who made ground-breaking contributions to Singapore as a top civil servant and corporate leader.
Describing the J Y Pillay Professorship as “greatly meaningful”, both Comaroffs effusively shared that they were very honoured to be its recipients. Prof Jean also praised the Professorship’s important role in building important links across global communities of researchers and attracting academic talent to Singapore as well as to Southeast Asian research.
Commending the Comaroffs as “outstanding scholars”, Professor Joanne Roberts, Executive Vice President (Academic Affairs), expressed delight at the Comaroffs being awarded the Professorship. “It is wonderful for our students and faculty to get the opportunity to learn from them,” she said. It matches well with our goals of having visiting professorships bring in world class scholars and also, where possible, to have these visitors broaden and diversify the scope of our offerings.”
In their short time teaching and interacting with the Yale-NUS community, both professors remarked that they were profoundly impressed by the dynamism, intelligence and talent of Yale-NUS students and faculty, describing the students as approaching classes with “maturity, entrepreneurial spirit and intellectual vibrancy”. Prof John said, “Jean and I love to challenge students. Our classes are not easy. Yet, our students have dealt well with complicated ideas and joined in very thoughtful discussions.”
Both Comaroffs were also convinced that the College’s Anthropology faculty and students are well-placed to take the lead in the reinvention and renewal of anthropology as a discipline here. Prof Jean noted that Yale-NUS, while small, has access to the larger research community at the National University of Singapore, affording it an immense advantage. She added that its position in Singapore offers opportunities to reflect on modernity and postcoloniality.
“You have all the virtues of youth and experimentation! Everything is possible!” Prof Jean remarked. Prof John also pointed out how Yale-NUS’s philosophy of decentring academia might contribute to shifting the postcolonial axis of anthropological discourse “from the vertical to the horizontal” – giving increasing voice to the subaltern, thus to shift knowledge-production and its authority away from the west. Altogether, Yale-NUS, according to both Comaroffs, also contributes to the ongoing renewal of liberal arts and science education around the world.
The Comaroffs also spoke enthusiastically about the relevance that Singapore has for their own research on Africa – from the Asia-African axis to our shared postcolonial experiences. In their assessment, Yale-NUS’ youthful dynamism was also emblematic of Singapore and its place in the global order. In this regard, Singapore, according to Prof Jean, is emerging as the chosen model for other nation-states, including ones in the Global North; this because of the way in which it has managed a whole host of issues such as development, education, employment and environmental issues. “It’s like the metropole looking to a [former] colony for inspiration” – a delicious irony and reversal of relations, Prof John noted.
While they have spent decades living and researching on the African continent, the Comaroffs are no strangers to Singapore or to Yale-NUS. Their son, Joshua Comaroff, is an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Urban Studies) here at Yale-NUS and – together with his partner, Ms Ong Ker-Shing – was also involved in the landscape design of the campus. When the Comaroffs are not in the classroom, they spend their time playing with their Singaporean grandchildren or eating delectable local dishes. “You can’t be in Singapore and not be eating really well!”, quipped Prof John, who singled out laksa and otah-otah as two of their guilty favourites.
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Lecture: Interrogating the Global Dis/Order
New York – In 2018, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff spoke at The New School for Social Research about
“Crime, Sovereignty, and the State: the Metaphysics of Global Disorder.” “The Global South” has become a shorthand for the universe of non-European, postcolonial peoples; it is that half of the planet about which, conventionally, the “Global North” spins theories. Rarely is it seen as a source of explanations for world historical processes, past or present, let alone as the source of those processes. Yet, as much of the northern hemisphere experiences increasing fiscal inscrutability and rising inequality, state privatization, crime and corruption, ethnic conflict, authoritarian populism, and other “crises,” it looks as though it is evolving southward, so to speak. Is this so? Might the relation of “north” and “south” be more a matter of complementary inequity, more a construct of the dialectical imagination, than a hard-and-fast empirical reality? In this seminar, we shall reverse the usual order of things, addressing a range of familiar themes in order to theorize them anew from the “eccentric location” of the “south,” broadly conceived: among those themes, neoliberalism and its futures; the changing relations among capital, the state and governance; democracy, authoritarian populism, and new forms of political life; the fetishism of the law and the judicialization of the public sphere; the paradoxes of twenty-first century nationhood and its jurisdictions; new magical economies; the crisis of liberalism; the meaning of crime and the metaphysics of disorder; and the present and future political economy of identity. This re-imagining of the contemporary global dis/order renders key problems of our time at once strange and familiar, giving an ironic twist to the evolutionary pathways long assumed by social scientists.
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Interview with John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
Between 1976 and 2010, Alan Macfarlane, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University, conducted a series of interviews with anthropologists from around the world. Two of those anthropologists included John and Jean Comaroff. They discussed their early lives, their work in the field, life under the Apartheid regime and anthropology, among other things.