This was a ground-breaking book when it first came out. It helped catapult Jean Comaroff into the realms of anthropological stardom. Her analysis of the structural violence of life in South Africa, as experienced at the level of the social body and the individual body was (is) lucid and compelling. Her descriptions of everyday forms of resistance – domestics and their nail polish, the neo-church of Zion, for example – helped an entire generation of anthropologists understand that the body was (is) an important theoretical object of study, and that one could move beyond the very important work of Mary Douglas. Comaroff’s work, paralleled with Alan Young’s earlier work on Zar possession cults, offers important insights into the ways in which history, gender, the state, racism, religion and resilience collide with heart-wrenching and yet inspiring impacts. HyL, Goodreads
Retailer: Amazon
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ethnicity, Commodity, In/corporation
In the economics of everyday life, ethnicity has become a potential resource to be tapped, generating new sources of profit and power, new ways of being social, new expressions of solidarity and affect, and new visions of the future. Throughout much of Africa, ethnic corporations have been repurposed to do business in mining, tourism, and the culture industry; in the USA, Native American groupings have expanded their involvement in gaming, design, and other domains of the market; and all over the world, the commodification of culture has sown itself deeply into everything from medicine through music to fashion – and much else besides. Ethnic groups increasingly seek empowerment by formally incorporating themselves, by deploying their sovereign status for material ends, and by copyrighting their cultural practices as intellectual property. Building on ethnographic case studies from Kenya, Nepal, Peru, Russia, and several other countries, this collection poses the question: Does the turn to the incorporation and commodification of ethnicity really herald a new historical moment in the global politics of identity, or is it merely an extension of long existing practices and potentials? The answer offer in this volume is…both, albeit in complicated ways.
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Law and Disorder in the Postcolony
From Keynote Roundtable, Law and Society Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: Celebrating Ten Years in Print and Practice,” 2016.
Are postcolonies in Africa and elsewhere haunted more by unregulated violence, un/civil warfare, and disorder than are other twenty-first century nation-states? The reflex answer to this question, from critical scholars, conservative intellectuals, and the popular media, is yes. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony argues that the question itself is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their situation in a contemporary global order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth – an order that tends to criminalize poverty, race, and social marginality, entraps the global “south” in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the law. But, as these essays show, there is another side to the story. While many postcolonies evince signs of endemic disorder, they also fetishize the law, its ways and means. Even where they are mocked and mimicked, those ways and means are often central to the politics of everyday engagement, to practies of authority and citizenship, to the interaction of states and subjects. New constitutions are repeatedly written, appeals to rights repeatedly made, claims of material and moral inequity repeatedly litigated. How is this to be explained, this coincidence of disorder with a fixation on law? And, more generally, what does it tell us of more general significance about the unfolding history of the nation-state? Law and Disorder in the Postcolony addresses these questions, entering into dialogue with such theorists as Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Carl Schmitt. It also demonstrates how postcolonies have become especially critical sites for the production of social theory, not least because they are harbingers of a global future under construction.