Essays
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Millennial Capitalism
We live in difficult times, in times of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes Slouching Toward Bethlehem The global triumph of capitalism at the millennium, its Second Coming, raises a number of conundrums for our understanding of history at the end of the century. Some of its corollaries—“plagues…
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Reflections on Liberalism, Policulturalism, and ID-ology
How do the nation-states of the twenty-first century – nation-states increasingly forced to come to terms with the ethnic heterogeneity of their citizens – deal with the problem of cultural difference? How, in particular, does the Constitution of post-apartheid South Africa – widely believed to be the most enlightened in the contemporary world, the most…
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Transparent Fictions, or the Conspiracies of a Liberal Imagination
“Only connect.” E.M. Forster, Howard’s End Ours, it appears, is an Age of Obsessions. It is an age in which people almost everywhere seem preoccupied, simultaneously, with transparency and conspiracy. With the lightness and darkness of being. So much is this so that, in 2001, a year that has long signified the cinematic surreal, an…
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After Labor
Concern has been steadily mounting, across the globe, that a “world without jobs” is fast approaching. And that wage labor as we know it is disappearing. “Work,” it seems, “is not working, for ever more people, in ever more ways.”1 But there is little agreement about how, why, where, or in what measure this is…
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A Silent Tribute to Tata Madiba
Thanks for asking us to write something on Nelson Mandela, which we appreciate. Alas, though, we both feel somewhat exhausted on the subject, having done any number of things for the media. The Harvard Gazette has already published a long interview with us, in which we try to contextualize Mandela’s legacy and move subtly away…
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Goodly Beasts and Beastly Goods
Abstract Among the 19th-century Tswana, we argue, cattle were like commodities; they linked processes of production and exchange, embodied an order of meanings and relations, and had the capacity to reproduce a total social world. They were, in sum, prime media for the creation and representation of value in a material economy of persons and…
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Cattle, Currencies, and the Politics of Commensuration on a Colonial Frontier
Regimes of value, and, even more, encounters between different regimes divided by cultural space and time, presume mediation, translation, and communication among particular species of value. And, therefore, currencies, at once verbal and material, that objectify them. Which, in turn, depends on one thing above all else: on mechanisms of commensuration, mechanisms that render negotiable…
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Occult Economies, Revisited
In an essay written 20 years ago—of which this version is an update1—we sought to explain an unforeseen effect of the rise of neoliberalism and, with it, the spread of democracy to places it had not been before. These two processes, then widely thought to infuse each other, were attributed an almost magical potential to…
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On Personhood
PROLEGOMENON The Autonomous Person: A European Invention. Is the idea of “the autonomous person” a European invention? The interrogative seems straightforward enough. Even ingenuous. But, hiding in the hypertext beneath its surface, is an- other, altogether less innocent question, one which carries within it a silent claim: To the ex- tent that “the autonomous person,”…
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Ethnography on an Awkward Scale
In what ways has the movement of anthropology off the reservation, and off the island, challenged the ethnographic practice that has historically been its raison d’être? How has the increasing historicization of the discipline, and its encounters with the variegated effects of globalization, altered its methodological orientations and strategies? How should those orientations and strategies…
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Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa
This essay explores the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. It offers a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it across the continent. Drawing on the comparative literature in…
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Reflections on the Anthropology of Law, Governance and Sovereignty
I. PROLEGOMENON Just over a quarter century ago, Simon Roberts and John Comaroff opened Rules and Processes, their study of African jurisprudence, with a statement that did not win them many friends among their colleagues at the time. “It is doubtful,” they wrote (1981:3), “whether [legal anthropology] should exist at all.” Their point was not…
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Policing Culture, Cultural Policing
This study transgresses the received distinction between two genres: the scholarly essay and the grant proposal. An extended reflection on a research endeavor still in progress, it interrogates the methodological and conceptual questions raised, ab initio, by the effort to explore and explain an unusually perplexing phenomenon: the dramatic rise, in post-apartheid South Africa, of…
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Criminal Obsessions, After Foucault:
“Perhaps it is because our lives are so chaotic, so filled with unsol- ved mysteries, incomplete stories, uncaught murderers that crime fiction is so popular. I believe that is why South Africans are so hooked on American TV crime series…because somewhere, some- how, someone is solving crimes. At least in fiction justice is served”….Michael Williams, The…
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Figuring Crime
Nothing rings with more authority to South African ears than a crime statistic. It is the music of our spheres: what the sound of an accordion is to a Marseilles sailor, or the jaunty plinkety-plunk of the banjo to a Louisiana woodsman, so is the rhythmic, measured refrain of a crime statistic to a South…
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Brave Noir World
Crime stories – in literature, art, film, theater, music – are now a global vernacular. Their popularity reflects the modernist fascination with the promise that detection — part intuition, part empirical reason – can unravel the mysteries of human evil, wrest law from lawlessness, return order to an unruly social world. But this history also…
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Through the Looking-Glass
Notwithstanding Gramsci or Foucault. there remains a tendency, in historical sociology. to explain processes of domination in terms of political and economic forces. In the study of state formation and imperialism. realpolitik is given precedence over ritual, material factors over the moral suasion of the sign. Yet European colonialism was also a cultural project. In…
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Home-Made Hegemony
The ideological struggle to naturalize the doctrine of domesticity was, from the first, part of the middle-class endeavor to secure its cultural hegemony. Vested in dispersed regimes of surveillance and in the texture of everyday habit, goes the general argument, the doctrine of domesticity facilitated new forms of production, new structures of inequality. In violation…
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Africa Observed
Excerpted from Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in Colonial South Africa (1991), this analysis of early to mid-nineteenth century European images of Africa explores the ways in which the “dark” continent was represented in scientific, religious, and secular public discourse as a foil to emerging concepts of modernity and enlightenment,…
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Postcolonial Politics and Discourses of Democracy in Southern Africa
Beginning with a critical reflection on the export of democracy from Europe and America to Africa, this essay–which opens with the birth of the “new” South Africa–explores a question of increasing significance across the continent: What might “democracy” actually MEAN in postcolonial Africa? How does it engage with vernacular cultures of participatory politics and with…