Archives: Reviews

This is an exciting but also frightening collection of articles. The central issue is how people in postcolonial Africa try to come to grips with ‘modernity’ – its premises and disappointments. The contributors come from the Africanist circle around Jean and John Comaroff at the University of Chicago, who have collaborated for some time…Together the essays give a powerful image of the creativity and dynamism with which African societies use their cultural heritage in order to deal with modern changes. The collection is all the more exciting since most contributions are based in recent fieldwork, using vivid scenes from the field. This makes them also quite frightening. Together they convey a forceful image of the depth of disappointment about modernity on the continent – of desperate struggles to participate at least to some degree in its dreams and the fierce internal tensions that follow from this.The introduction by the Comaroffs is overwhelming in the speed and riches of its ideas.

…a magnificent assembly of essays in which each effectively tackles the symbolic, historical, political, social, and economic forces that have continued to give life meaning in sub-Saharan Africa over the past century. As such this book should quickly establish itself as a landmark volume that finds a place of the shelves of all who are interested in processes of postcolonial change and what they signify all over the globe…The eight essays, written by current and former students and colleagues of the editors, [explore] ‘the extent to which modernity – itself always an imaginary construction of the present in terms of the mythic past – has its own magicalities, its own enchantments.’ As such, the essays all evince the strong influence of the Comaroffs who…have long charted a path toward analyzing the many imaginative representations of colonialism and its disastrous aftermath.

In the best tradition of the rethinking genre of anthropological critiques, John and Jean Comaroff and this volume’s eight contributors brilliantly review the notion of civil society — largely developed and utilized by non-anthropologists – from both theoretical and ethnographically grounded perspectives. Beginning with an expansive introduction to the concept of civil society, or what the editors and others refer to as “the Idea” or abstraction, they lay bare the concept in contexts that have to do as much with the West as Africa. The authors reexamine the concept of civil society, thought to be universally applicable in its scope because of its level of abstraction. They see it, however, as a Western-centric concept that breeds invidious comparisons when applied to Africa. The locations in sub-Saharan Africa vary, and the ethnographic sampling is eclectic, but several themes and approaches run through the essays: the tendency to savage and then salvage the concept of civil society, an awareness of the problems with relativity, and an acceptance of the ambiguities found in studying civil and state relationships…

…this is a wonderful book for lovers of Southern African cultures, as well as for students of classic ethnography and visual culture. There is value in these photographs on a number of levels. They are valuable as data and as illustrations of Schapera’s studies. They have considerable historical importance for Botswana, as documented by Kgosi Linchwe II in a letter included in the introduction to the book, and they provide convincing evidence that the various cultural/ethnic groups of Botswana were interacting in the 1930s as they are now. Finally, there is much value in the aesthetic beauty of these photographs, reminding us that cultures reassert their values in a wide range of contexts… The editors have thoughtfully considered the long career of Schapera to create the present volume. It is a book that is satisfying as a record of colonial times, enriching our understanding of Schapera and his subjects of study.

These spectacular photographs reveal a much more complex Schapera than his writings allow and provide a more complete and aesthetically charming supplement to his work. The combination of clear, insightful, and entertaining scholarship – written by some of the foremost anthropologists of the region – and stunning photographs makes this a highly original and important book with a wide appeal.

Isaac Schapera’s photographs magnificently capture everyday life among the Kgatla [chiefdom in the former Bechuanaland Protectorate, now Botswana] at a period of great social change through a seemingly artless focus on artifacts and architecture, dress and deportment. In their introduction, Jean and John Comaroff – Schapera’s most outstanding successors – provide a scintillating and thought-provoking portrait of Schapera as ethnographer and photographer. This splendid volume will be a most valuable resource to anthropologists and historians and a source of illumination and enjoyment to readers interested in southern Africa.

Work of this quality will likely exercise a wide influence among cultural historians.

This captivatingly provocative book falls firmly into the current genre of critical ethnographic and methodological literature in anthropology. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination is a tour de force of the ethnographic enterprise and attempts to locate ethnography squarely within the boundaries of the broader historical contexts which have shaped the discipline of anthropology in all its manifestations. It…also raises some fundamental questions of epistemology in the construction and presentation of so-called “savage societies” to Western readers.

Back cover of volume

Just over a decade after the publication of Ethnicity, Inc., the heady cocktail of commoditization, culture, and corporation originally modelled there has only further entangled itself in global social processes. This stunning new collection traces myriad extensions and analogs of ethnocommodities within contemporary late capitalism, while courageously exploring the limits of the model in places where the economic logic of ethnic distinction is muddled by pan-regional identities, nation-branding, and economies of violence. As these authors deftly demonstrate, even as the Durkheimian enchantment of the collective can conjure quantifiable brand value, the capacity of the brand itself to enchant is increasingly the dominant mode with which to produce―and consume―collectivity.

While offering new insights into the resurgence of chiefs (indigenous sovereigns) in contemporary Africa, the Politics of Custom also presents an illuminating complex counterpoint of the interplay of tradition and modernity, showcasing that chiefship is neither wholly of the state nor of the customary, but is always interlinked. As the editors point out in their introduction, contemporary African chiefship is narrated in two ways: one does so in the language of continuity, cyclicity, and reproduction, of the timeless past returned; the other situates it in linear historical time, in trajectory, transformation, and agency. …This book is insightful and a pleasure to read. It would appeal to anyone interested in traditional institutions, contemporary African politics, customary chieftaincies or democracy and democratisation….[It] makes a great contribution to our understanding of the resurgence of chieftaincy and indigenous power in postcolonial Africa.

The Politics of Custom is an incisive and original investigation of the stubbornly persistent role played by traditional authorities in modern Africa. Featuring a stellar cast of contributors and a superb synthetic introduction by the editors, this book is a major contribution that will appeal to a broad audience.

The publication of Jean and John Comaroff’s monumental two-volume study of colonialism and religion in South Africa, Of Revelation and Revolution, was a signal event in historical anthropology in the 1990s. Pathbreaking in substance as well as method, the books analyze the colonial encounter in South Africa and explain its contemporary consequences. The two anthropologists issued a challenge to both anthropologists and historians to rethink their understanding of the construction of modernity…[T]hese critical works of scholarship and imagination have an importance far beyond their immediate subject matter.

This second volume is a tour de force. As in volume 1, the Comaroffs explore the ways in which consciousness is ‘made and unmade,’ and the relationship between culture, consciousness, and ideology. The argument is a brilliant and sustained demonstration of the complexities and unanticipated outcomes of the colonial encounter for both sides. It is a formidable achievement and worthy successor to the first volume.

Defining their enterprise as more in the direction of poetics than of prosaics, the Comaroffs free themselves to analyze a vivid series of images and events as objects of analysis. These they mine for clues to the 19th-century contents of the British imagination and of Tswana minds. They are themselves imagining the imagination of others, and they do the job with characteristic aplomb. The first volume creates an appetite for the second.

The two volumes of Jean and John Comaroff’s Of Revelation and Revolution (RR) are a tour de force, and raise major questions about the nature of consciousness and the impact of modernity over the past two centuries…I read both volumes of RR with a rare sense of exhilaration. The scope and span are extraordinary, as is their ability to match the truly global sweep of their imagination with attention to detail and the ability to tell a spellbinding but pointed story Given its span and sophistication, the Comaroffs’ work stands as a challenge to historians of southern Africa, wherever our interest falls. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a more central task for understanding the world we live in than an exploration of the ways in which cultures and consciousness have been reconfigured and reconstructed in their encounter with ‘mod- ernity’, however it is construed…

This sophisticated study should ideally prevent colonialism from ever again being reduced to a simplistic paradigm of domination and resistance…[T]he Comaroffs have succeeded in writing a richly creative book that no student of the colonial encounter anywhere in the world can afford to ignore.