Can you discuss your family’s background?

I was born in Cape Town. My mother’s family were Jews from Lithuania; my father’s father was from Ukraine and emigrated to England; during the recession of the 1890s, he went first to Rhodesia and then later to Cape Town. My parents grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. They were aware of the Holocaust and afraid. When the first National government came to power in 1948 under Prime Minister D.F. Malan, he was quoted as saying that had the Axis powers won the war, the Final Solution would have been applied in South Africa.

What was it like to live under the Apartheid regime?

I grew up in Cape Town during the dark years of Apartheid in a very, very violent society. I was radicalized, as were many of our generation, by the Zionist socialist movements, which were more socialist than Zionist at that time, and in which many South African scholars got their training in leftist social theory… What was interesting about the School of African Studies [at the University of Cape Town] in those days, where anthropology was situated along with archaeology and African languages, was that it was the only place on the campus which was licensed to have black and white faculty together – 1964-1966 – the period of the sabotage trials, the rise of ‘Umkhonto we Sizwe’, Pogo, etc. – it was a strange moment. Very repressive. It is hard to explain to our students what it was like growing up in a fascist education system. Under South African law anybody who had had any connection with the Communist Party could lose their jobs. This happened to a lot of our teachers: Jack Simons – who wrote a brilliant book, Caste and Colour in South Africa – and who trained many important South Africans, like Albie Sachs – was summarily banned during our second year. We were out of the classrooms as much as possible, protesting. Of course, many of the books that we teach now and take for granted were banned…

Anthropology in that world seemed to have a resonance with contemporary South Africa like nothing else did. It wasn’t a radical discipline, but it created a base from which one could think radical thoughts, and from which one could ask questions about the nature of South African society, which was almost impossible anywhere else.

How did you meet your partner, Jean?

Jean and I met in anthropology where Monica Wilson took us under her wing. She and her husband had been an anthropological couple. She had done a kind of historical anthropology and was co-editor of The Oxford History of South Africa . We went on to write historical anthropology and Jean worked on ritual, so there was a very strong genealogical link with her.

What was it like to work as a couple at the London School of Economics?

Jean had a wonderful line, which is absolutely true. Social anthropology was deeply gendered when we were at the LSE, so she ‘got religion’ and I ‘got’ politics. The LSE didn’t entertain any possibility of us doing a Ph.D. together. The model of the individual author really did apply. It was no different here (in the US). Basically, we started to write together as a way of arguing with that tradition. My doctoral work looked at the nature of African political life in the colonial and then Apartheid period. I wanted to re-theorize the nature of vernacular politics. Schapera, my teacher, had written of African government and politics in such a way as to render them sterile. They were about administration and order and had nothing to do with power – which struck me as fundamentally wrong. I worked on the historical records of Tswana chiefdoms before going into the field. It struck me that they operated on very different terms from those that had become the orthodoxy in anthropology. I went to the field wanting to take a radically different look at power in pre-colonial systems. Like Jean, I found that I was working in the world of Apartheid. The leader of the opposition faction in the chiefdom in which I was working happened to be the Treasurer of the African National Congress. The question became; how did these things (vernacular and national politics) interpenetrate? I wanted to show that these African worlds, which anthropologists since the 1940’s – since African Political Systems – had treated entirely as discrete islands, were built upon contradictions, not on principles of order, that they were riven with struggles over power and legitimacy in which the oratorical construction of competitive realities played a significant part, that they were dialectically entailed in the world beyond them. These things became (the core of) my work. Also, by coincidence, I became involved in law. One of the things we see nowadays throughout global politics is their judicialization. This was always the case amongst Tswana, and indeed in many African polities, where what we take to be political forms of contestation occur through and in the language of legalities. I got interested in this and landed, again through the intervention of Schapera, writing up papers with Simon Roberts, which led to a book, and a secondary life in the study of law. Schapera read every word we wrote. He was an amazing interlocutor. He had an encyclopedic grasp of Africa and seemed to know everything. The last thing that he read of our writing, other than a book of photographs, was “Of Revelation and Revolution.” He read through those two volumes with a fine-tooth comb and made amazingly precise comments on our footnotes.

Can you talk a little bit about The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera?

It was one of our lifelong struggles getting it out. It took us about fifteen years in the end, a labor of love. Had we known what it would take to do it, we would never have started. In the end, the RAI was very helpful, but there were many obstacles along the way. I hope that at ninety-five, if I am alive, I will be able to tell a student that they had taught me something I didn’t know about myself.

About John Comaroff

John Comaroff
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About John Comaroff

John L. Comaroff has spent five decades researching, lecturing, and writing about African societies and cultures, colonial and postcolonial political economy, crime and policing, and authoritarian states in Africa and elsewhere – both past and present. Growing up in Cape Town, his early work focused on Indigenous political and legal systems, kinship and marriage, and the violent impact of colonialism, culminating in the apartheid regime, on African populations in South Africa — often wrought by ostensibly legal means and the capacity of democracy to disenfranchise people of color. Along with his wife and colleague, Jean Comaroff, with whom he also often teaches highly popular undergraduate and graduate courses, he has written and edited fifteen or more books, many of them recognized as path breaking. Their prize-winning two-volume Of Revelation and Revolution, a study of the role of Christianity in African colonization, is read across the world and across the discipline. So is their Ethnicity, Inc., a study of the way in which more and more ethnic populations commodify their cultures and organize themselves as market-savvy corporations. Similarly, their Theory from the South; Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa has sparked active debate across the world about the unfolding history of globalization.

These are not the only fields in the social sciences and humanities on which John L. Comaroff, in collaboration with Jean Comaroff, has had a lasting impact. Their Ethnography and the Historical Imagination has had a major impact on methodology and is taught in many university courses; Modernity and its Malcontents is a widely cited study of the creative forms of modernity that have arisen outside of Europe and America; Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism is a highly original, critical look at why and how capitalism, in its neoliberal moment, has come to be so widely treated as the solution to all human problems; Zombies et Frontières A l’Ere Néolibérale, a collection in French of their essays on “occult economies,” explores the rising preoccupation with zombies and the occult at a moment in history when magical thinking was supposed to disappear, but, if anything, may be on the increase; Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, now a canonical text, and The Truth about Crime ask why so many societies have become obsessed with violent criminality when statistics show little reason for it. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony also develops an anthropological approach to the concept of “lawfare,” one radically different from that deployed by the US military, to explain when, why, and how the potential violence of the law is deployed for political ends. Many of these books have been translated into several languages, among them, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Mandarin.

John L. Comaroff has, on occasion, acted as an adviser for international legal and relief organizations on cultural, economic, and political issues, especially involving Africa, as well as the long-term effects of colonialism, and contemporary authoritarian regimes. He has also served on the editorial boards of many scholarly journals, and the advisory boards of several academic institutions. Other than his research, his passions include football (he has been a Manchester United supporter since he taught at the University of Manchester in the 1970’s), his family and especially his clutch of far-flung grandchildren, his teaching and his mentoring. He was voted one of Harvard’s favorite professors of the Class of 2019 “in recognition of [his] impact on the senior class’s Harvard experience” (Class of 2019’s Yearbook). In his letter to the Class of 2019, he wrote, “I want to thank you for the privilege of having taught you. You have no idea how much I learned from the diverse perspectives, and diverse life experiences, you brought into my classrooms; also, from the questions you asked, the provocative, discomforting things you said, the effort you put into the project of becoming informed, critical – and, I hope, compassionate – human beings. So please accept my gratitude. Not for my recognition, gratifying though that is, but for the education you have given me over these past years.”

Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology at Harvard University

Oppenheimer Research Scholar

Having also published well over a hundred essays, many of them also widely influential, John L. Comaroff continues to focus on the growing trend among political leaders across the world to weaponize the law and media for their political purposes – including the subversion of democracy–. His reflections on this form of lawfare have been the subject of videos viewed frequently across the world. His writings on contemporary African Indigenous law has been cited in the Constitutional Court of South Africa as well as in innumerable scholarly works in comparative law. He is also continuing to work on crime and policing, focusing, among other things, on the relationship between race, incarceration, and changing patterns of mass employment – and the murky relationship between the state, politics, and crime. Most recently, he and Jean Comaroff have begun a large-scale project entitled After Labor, addressed to the effects on work and workers with the rising effects of robotics, changing patterns in the global division of labor, the spread of the gig economy – and the reduction of many people who once produced commodities into commodities who must themselves be worked upon.

Center for African Studies: Monday Workshop

Before taking up his current position at Harvard, John L. Comaroff served as the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he was a faculty member for 34 years, and as a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. He earned his BA from University of Cape Town in South Africa – which he left in 1967, refusing to live under its apartheid regime — and his Ph.D from the London School of Economics at the University of London. He was named an Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town in 2004. He has been invited to present his work at over 60 universities in 28 countries, given very many distinguished lectures, and won numerous awards both for his writings and for his teaching. He and Jean Comaroff are renowned for their pedagogy in the classroom and for their mentoring of literally hundreds of doctoral students. Many of their alumni now hold senior professorships and other positions in universities across the world.

While at the University of Chicago, John and Jean Comaroff created a Study Abroad Program in South Africa, which ran from 2001 until they moved to Harvard in 2012. Teaching about Africa in Africa to 24 students every winter quarter, their Program became highly sought after among Chicago students, many of whom returned to Africa after they finished their degrees. A striking number of them have also gone on to become university professors — or to become lawyers, doctors, architects, NGO leaders, and community leaders — who have sought to make a difference to the societies in which they live. On moving to Harvard, they remodelled the program as a Summer Abroad for Harvard students. Many of its alumni, like their predecessors, remember their experience in that program as “life-changing,” a highly intensive, original form of pedagogy they never experienced anywhere else, before or after.