Archives: Reviews

“As the editors point out in their insightful introduction, rising criminality in postcolonies is not merely an antisocial response to poverty, exclusion, or scarcity; nor is it simply the result of a breakdown in the state monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. It is also the expression of a “dialectic of law and dis/order, framed by neoliberal mechanisms of deregulation and new modes of mediating human transactions.” As such, “criminal violence does not so much repudiate the rule of law or the licit operations of the market as appropriate their forms—and recommission their substance.”… In a short review it is impossible to do justice to the richness of the ethnographic material presented in the individual chapters. This material not only shows the variety of situations in which we can detect the dialectic of law and dis/order that the Comaroffs theorize in their introductory summation. Equally important, they point to new directions in which the theorization can be usefully developed.”

This provocative book is critically important reading for anyone seeking to understand the economic and political transformations of the current period in both the global South and North. It offers a broad theoretical framework along with detailed and fascinating case studies. The book is valuable for law and society scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, criminologists, and anyone interested in understanding the postcolonial world. It is also a very good text for graduate and advanced undergraduate students interested in socio-legal studies, conflict and violence, criminology, and globalization.

This major collection, with a masterful introduction by the editors, presents new ways to understand how the globalized legal order bears the signs of its colonial heritage while providing a hyperlegal space for new negotiations about order, crime and justice in many postcolonial societies. It offers a feast of empirical insights that bring the anthropology of legality into the very center of postcolonial studies, places the South African experience in a highly original perspective, and shows that the relationship between law and legality is both contradictory and generative.

For the Comaroffs, capitalism at the end of the millennium is also millenarian capitalism. Globalization can be thought of as an economic process radically
addressing the nature of labour and provoking responses that highlight the occult or
spectral power of the global economy. Moreover, the nature of these responses is
dualist: it entails both the enchanted pursuit of wealth and the moralizing rejection of this pursuit by others as ‘satanic’. In this regard, globalization is a process with eschatological, indeed apocalyptic, dimensions. As the forces of Gog and Magog battle it out for the global space, the Comaroffs prophetically offer us a sense of this struggle’s inevitability. What is different from, say, the era of cargo cults is that, where these cults supposedly expressed the shock of the new on the imperial fringe and would eventually be swallowed by their own irrational absurdity, capitalist-inspired uncertainty is now everywhere and everywhere the cults of capitalism emphasize the role of unseen forces.

Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism “brings together nine informative
and insightful essays that address ‘the confounding effects of liberalization’ and prompt
new ways of thinking about the transnational contours of capitalism. Each contribution
offers an eye-opening analysis—grounded in solid research and, as with four of them,
in fieldwork—of capitalist crises involving consumption and speculation, labor and class
issues, mobility, autochthony, indigenous forms of religion, the global reach of
technologies and the media, and tourism capital. Reproductions of popular artwork,
photographs, and advertisements throughout the book reflect its global scope and
complement the text in intriguing ways. In the first essay, ‘Millennial Capitalism: First
Thoughts on a Second Coming,’ editors Jean and John L. Comaroff scrutinize ‘the
distinctly pragmatic qualities of the messianic, millennial capitalism of the moment: a
capitalism that presents itself as a gospel of salvation; a capitalism that, if rightly
harnessed, is invested with the capacity wholly to transform the universe of the
marginalized and disempowered.’” Laura Savu, University of North Carolina, Symploke.
“Comaroff and Comaroff begin the book with a compelling overview of millennial
capitalism’s distinguishing characteristics. It is a regime built upon consumption rather
than production, in which the value of labor has been eclipsed by the magic of capital.
As capital becomes distanced from the sites of production, an amoral ethos of gambling
and speculation comes to reign. Although finance is now popularly viewed as the prime
mover of millennial capitalism, the editors point to the continuing relevance of labor:
there are more industrial workers today than ever before. This global proletariat is more
feminized, more fragmented, and more removed from the centers of investment and
consumption. Moreover, this proletariat is increasingly mobile and decreasingly
regulated by states. The dismantling of the national arenas upon which class conflicts
traditionally raged inhibits the development of class consciousness, which in turn opens
up a subjective space increasingly filled by alternative identities and agendas: gender,
race, ethnicity, and, particularly, generation emerge as the salient tropes around which
individuals build self-consciousness…” Donna Perry, Western Oregon University,
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.

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.

Jean and John Comaroff put forward their case in the strongest possible terms, and they do so with flair, eloquence, and brilliance: that Africa in particular and the global South more broadly are in the vanguard of world history, generative of global futures and theory to match. This is a book that will be debated with vigor and profit.

Ethnicity, Inc. is a thought-provoking and novel commentary on this widely recognizable phenomenon and offers an important contribution to the classical anthropological themes of ethnicity, culture, and globalization… [T]he authors’ approach is not limited by the usual conventions of anthropology but, rather, takes the reader from one global example to another. These illustrations are woven into a comparative, far-reaching discussion that describes succinctly an emerging global phenomenon.

The writing is sharp…always likely to grab the reader’s attention with something new. The study of ethnicity and indeed of neoliberalism will never be the same after the publication of this book.

The Truth About Crime meets the expectations one may have of Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff: a book that is captivating, theoretically insightful and comprehensive, and appealing to scholars across disciplines interested in power, crime, and social (dis)order. Drawing from and expanding upon some of their previous work, this book is a valuable addition to a large body of scholarly work aimed at unraveling the intricate dynamics of crime, citizenship, and authority in contemporary South Africa and beyond.