Essays
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Naturing the Nation
This paper examines the predicament of the postcolonial nation-state through the prism of environmental catastrophe: how is it that plant “invaders” can become an urgent political issue, and what might this reveal of the shifting relations among citizenship, community, and national sovereignty under neo-liberal conditions? Pursuing these questions in relation to a case from the…
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Criminal Justice, Cultural Justice:
What are the limits of liberalism in accommodating the growing demands of difference? Can a Euromodernist nation-state, founded on “One Law,” infuse itself with another, an African jurisprudence? And how is it to deal with cultural practices deemed “dangerous” by the canons of enlightenment reason? These questions are especially urgent in postcolonies like South Africa,…
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Beasts, Banknotes, and the Color of Money in Colonial South Africa
Encounters between different regimes of value – regimes divided by cultural space and time – presume mediation, translation and communication, and, therefore, currencies, at once verbal and material, that objectify them. This in turn, depends on one thing above all else: on mechanisms of commensuration, mechanisms that render negotiable otherwise inimical, apparently intransitive, orders of signs…
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Popular Justice in the New South Africa
For all the hope stirred by the end of apartheid, the transition to democracy in South Africa, beginning in 1994, opened up a social and moral vacuum—not to mention a huge wealth-gap—in which violence and disorder, real and imagined, became commonplace. By the late 1990s, a police service regarded as incompetent, toothless, and overzealously committed…
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Nations With/out Borders:
Anthropologists are fond of stories and riddles. The stranger, the more puzzling, the better. So let us first pose a riddle, then tell a story. The riddle: What might the Nuer, a remote Nilotic people in the southern Sudan, have to do with Carl Schmitt, the noted German philosopher, notorious apologist for Nazism, and, of…
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Theory from the South
The idea is very simple really, although its implications could be quite radical. We have essayed it many times over the past two decades. So have many others.1 Especially “other” others. It is this. Western enlightenment thought has, from the first, posited itself as the wellspring of universal learning, of Science and Philosophy, upper case;…