Jean Comaroff Forthcoming in “Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices.” (eds) Raquel Romberg, Andea Nehring, Brill. l. Liberal modern personhood presumes a coherent, indivisible subject. Yet there is plentiful evidence to suggest that selfhood in modern times is often experienced as inchoate: as split, doubled, even overtaken by the haunting presence of intimate others, benevolent or…
The Case of the Wendy House Jean Comaroff Housing is the social issue of the twenty-first, claimed Jon Henley in The Guardian in May 2024.i European governments, he added, have failed abysmally to ensure affordable accommodation in the face of soaring property prices, fueling right-wing anger and a rising resentment of immigrants. The report featured…
The laboring body is a curious thing. In the modern sense of homo faber, it enacts the psycho-physical activity through which humans produce their modes of life, and in doing so, produce themselves as substantial, sensuous, value producing beings. If, in Western thought, the capacity for mindful work sets humankind apart as a distinctive species,…
Is masculinity the inevitable consequence of being male? Scholars and journalists report that in Africa today masculinity is widely in distress, with a growing proportion of young men struggling to gain access to the social and material means needed to marry, found families, and secure recognition as adult men. Yet patriarchal authority persists in many…
Anthropological Explorations of Violent Transfigurations of State, Crime and Politics across Contexts
Claudio Lomnitz discusses Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation with Jean Comaroff
This lecture was a part of ANTHUSIA Summer School 3: Dissemination: Writing, Presenting and Communicating.The Politics and Poetics of Representation in a Post-Colonial World. ANTHUSIA is a multi-disciplinary research project in the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa conducted by a consortium of four universities in Aarhus (Denmark), Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Leuven (Belgium) and Oslo…
Jean Comaroff of Harvard University speaks on “Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa”.
Concern has been steadily mounting, across the globe, that wage work is disappearing. Why do we seem unable to think beyond a universe founded on mass employment? If mass employment has always been threatened by erasure, why does it remain so central both to popular and theoretical understandings of life under capitalism? As we fail…
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,…
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…
Sponsored by The New School, this conference is grounded in the premise that while seemingly of different orders, invasive others — whether people, plants, ideas, or pathogens — are described in similar ways and are patrolled and controlled through similar technologies, logics, and policies. The conference explores the way the language and technologies intersect and…
Jean Comaroff, an anthropologist who is a leading expert on South Africa, its societies and cultures, gave the 2011 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture on Tuesday, May 17, at the Max Palevsky Cinema in Ida Noyes Hall. Comaroff, the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor in Anthropology and the College at the…