In an essay written 20 years ago—of which this version is an update1—we sought to explain an unforeseen effect of the...
On Personhood
PROLEGOMENON The Autonomous Person: A European Invention. Is the idea of "the autonomous person" a European invention?...
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 change in proportion to transformations in the social and cultural geographies of the worlds inhabited by our ‘natives’? Is it possible to ‘do’ ethnography on an awkward scale in multiple dimensions? What are the epistemic implications of these questions for the anthropology of the future? Taking as its point of departure current debates over (i) the relationship between evidence and explanation in the social sciences, and (ii) the relative demands of the local and the global in focusing the ethnographic gaze, this article explores the premises and promises of contemporary ethnography. It invokes recent research on the rise of an ‘occult economy’ in the South African postcolony to argue for a radical expansion of the horizons of ethnographic methodology, for a method simultaneously inductive and deductive, empirical and imaginative.
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...
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...
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 witchcraft killings – and of their policing, both formal and informal, which has
produced distinctly hybrid styles of cultural justice. Our objective is to address a number of
interrelated questions concerning the description, interpretation, and analysis of (i) occult-
related violence, itself legitimized, locally, by populist appeals to “culture”; and (li) its regulation
by a secular modernist state committed to, yet challenged by, the constitutional recognition of
cultural difference. It is our thesis that this “epidemic” of occult-related violence, and the kinds
of cultural policing that accompany it, are stark expressions of a structural contradiction within
the “new” South Africa, a contradiction evinced in all postcolonies – and, increasingly, in other
nation-states as well.
Criminal Obsessions, After Foucault:
“Perhaps it is because our lives are so chaotic, so filled with unsol- ved mysteries, incomplete stories, uncaught...
Figuring Crime
Nothing rings with more authority to South African ears than a crime statistic. It is the music of our spheres: what...
Brave Noir World
Crime stories – in literature, art, film, theater, music – are now a global vernacular. Their popularity reflects the...