Jean Comaroff

Author: John L. Comaroff

  • Violence and the Law in Post Colonies:

    Violence and the Law in Post Colonies:

    Criminal obsessions after Foucault: post colonialism, police surveillance and the metaphysics of disorder

    “In recent years, depictions of postcolonial nations have congealed into a terrifying epic of lawlessness and violence, adding a brutal edge to older European archetypes of underdevelopment, abjection, and ethnic strife. But the similarities between the post colony and the world beyond it are unmistakable. And growing. The global north is evolving toward Africa. Everywhere, criminal violence has become an imaginative vehicle, a hieroglyph, for thinking about the nightmares that threaten the nation.” This short book contains two essays: each first explores an aspect of the global preoccupation, expressed most volubly in postcolonies, with criminal violence – and the complex, ambivalent ways in which police play into that preoccupation, feeding it in order to claim a sovereign right to violence in enforcing the law.”

  • Picturing a Colonial Past:

    Picturing a Colonial Past:

    This volume presents for the first time the selected photographs of the renowned British anthropologist Isaac Schapera (1905–2003). Taken between 1929 and 1934, largely during his earliest work among the Kgatla peoples of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), the 136 images in this selection reveal an emotional engagement and aesthetic impulse that Schapera seldom expressed in his writings. Covering a broad spectrum of daily activities, they include depictions of everything from pot making, thatching, and cattle herding to village architecture, vernacular medicine, and rainmaking ceremonies. Visually fascinating and of exceptional quality, these images capture the uniqueness of an African people in a particular time and place. They are contexualized and their significance explained in Jean and John Comaroff’s insightful introduction, while Adam Kuper’s illuminating biographical sketch of Schapera provides new insight into the life of the photographer. Picturing a Colonial Past reveals not only a rare side of old Botswana, but also of one of the most famous anthropologist who worked there.

  • Zombies and Frontiers in the Age of Neoliberalism

    Zombies and Frontiers in the Age of Neoliberalism

    Postcolonial South Africa, like other postrevolutionary societies, appears to have witnessed a dramatic rise in occult economies: in the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends. These embrace a wide range of phenomena, from the ubiquitous presence of thoroughly contemporary zombies, through “ritual murder” and the sale of body parts for “medicinal” purposes, to pyramid schemes and other financial scams. And they have led, in many places, to violent reactions against people accused of illicit accumulation. In the struggles that have ensued, the major lines of opposition have been not race or class but generation—mediated by gender. Why is all this occurring with such intensity, right now? Why has the figure of the zombie taken on such salience at this historical moment? An answer to the question, and to the more general problem of making sense of the enchantments of modernity, is sought in the encounter of rural South Africa with the contradictory effects of millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. This encounter brings “the global” and “the local”—treated here as imaginative constructs rather than explanatory terms or empirical realities—into a dialectical interplay. It also has implications for the theory- work and methodological practice of the social sciences and humanities in making sense of twenty-first century world, its material, moral, social, and political lineaments.

  • Ethnography and the Historical Imagination

    Ethnography and the Historical Imagination

    Over the years John and Jean Comaroff have broadened the study of culture and society with their reflections on power and meaning. In their work on Africa and colonialism they have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) effaced, empowered and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated? How does the social imagination take shape in novel yet collectively meaningful ways?Addressing these questions, the essays in this volume—several never before published—work toward an “imaginative sociology,” demonstrating the techniques by which social science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction, the authors offer their most complete statement to date on the nature of historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade.

    Part One of the volume, “Theory, Ethnography, Historiography,” includes chapters on ethnographic method and imaginative sociology, totemism and ethnicity, and the anthropology of the body as an historical practice. Part Two, “Dialectical Systems, Imaginative Sociologies,” covers the analysis of African societies and polities over time, the relationship between cattle and capital in those societies, and the meaning of labor in apartheid South Africa. Finally, Part Three, “Colonialism and Modernity,” explores the impact of imperialism on African polities, medicine and colonialism, the impact of colonization on African consciousness, and the ways in which colonization reconstructed concepts of home reciprocally in Africa and Europe.

  • Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 2

    Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 2

    In the second of a proposed three-volume study, John and Jean Comaroff continue their exploration of colonial evangelism and modernity in South Africa. Moving beyond the opening moments of the encounter between the British Nonconformist missions and the Southern Tswana peoples, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume II, explores the complex transactions—both epic and ordinary—among the various dramatis personae along this colonial frontier. It covers a wide spectrum in the theater of colonialism: engagements of theology, salvation, and ritual; over agricultural production and conceptions of nature; around money, cattle, and other currencies; about cloth, clothing, and the human body; over architecture, domesticity and the interiors of everyday life; over health, healing, and medicine; and, finally, over the essence of personhood, identity, rights, and the law. In this fascinating study, the Comaroffs shows how the initiatives of the colonial missions collided with local traditions, giving rise to new cultural practices, new patterns of production and consumption, new senses of style and beauty, and new forms of class distinction and ethnicity.

  • Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

    Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

    The essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism pose a series of
    related questions: How are we to understand capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first
    century? Is it a singular or hydra-headed creature? What are we to make of the culture
    of neoliberalism that appears to accompany it, taking on simultaneously local and
    translocal forms? To what extent does it make sense to describe the present juncture in
    world history, after the end of the Cold War, as an “Age of Revolution,” one not unlike
    1789–1848 in its potential to change the world? In exploring the material and cultural
    dimensions of the Age of Millennial Capitalism – carefully laid out in a wide-ranging
    theoretical introduction by John and Jean Comaroff – the contributors interrogate the
    so-called ‘crisis’ of the nation-state, the triumph of the free market and its more or less
    hidden effects, rising tides of violence and cultures of exclusion, and the growth of new
    forms of identity politics. The collection also investigates the tendency of neoliberal
    capitalism to produce a world of increasing inequality, environmental degradation,
    heightened flows of people and value across the planet, moral panics and social
    impossibilities, bitter generational antagonisms and gender conflicts, yawning class
    distinctions, and “pariah” forms of economic activity. In the process, it opens up an
    empirically grounded, conceptual discussion about the world-at-large at a particularly
    momentous historical time—when the social sciences and humanities are in danger of
    ceding intellectual initiative to the masters of the market and the media.

  • Theory from the South

    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.

  • Ethnicity, Inc.

    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.