I would like to acknowledge how difficult it is, in this noisy age of ours…to nurture a scholarly and public voice that can be legitimately regarded as daring, original and authentic. Yet, this is exactly what Jean and John Comaroff have achieved not only throughout their previous scholarly works (the depth and breadth of which have been widely lauded), but specifically in this new book…The voice in this new book is unmistakably theirs—the eloquence, the prose, a certain kind of rhetorical style, a new lexicon that makes new thought, even moments of polyphony, possible. Theirs is also an effort to work from, within, through, and at times against the archive of their first love, anthropology. Time and again, in this book as in Rules and Processes, Body of Power, Ethnicity Inc., Millennial Capitalism, Law and Disorder and countless other essays, they return to the centers of their discipline while, at the same time, mining its peripheries, They play the peripheries of the discipline against its centers and other bodies of knowledge against anthropology itself. This is because theirs is a mode of thought whose primary object is to delineate the crucial fault lines and turbulences that constitute our world today as well as the world of contemporary criticism. Reading this many-faceted book, a complicated tapestry threaded with multiple strands and sub-themes but with one master thesis, we are faced once again with what we have come to expect from them – a generosity of spirit and a polymorphous intelligence capable of sweeping claims, starting with the seemingly outrageous (and yet plausible) idea that “Euro-America is evolving toward Africa”; or the more heuristically productive one that “in the present moment, it is the Global South that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large,” which is why, in accounting for these workings of the world, “our theory-making” ought to be coming from there, ‘at least in significant part.