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.
Profile picture of John L. Comaroff
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.
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.

Profile picture of John L. Comaroff
John and Jean Comaroff’ ‘s intellectual influence has been immense. It is to be...
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Achile Mbembe
Wits Institute for Economic and Social Research, University of Witwatersrand, Duke University
John and Jean Comaroff’‘s intellectual influence has been immense. It is to be found in various areas of academic enquiry, from law, cultural studies, political economy to sociology, social studies of health and religion, arts and design...Their very significant intellectual influence and moral authority [has been] strenuously  dedicated...to nurturing high quality scholarly  communities. They brought together many of us through consistent ethical behavior, always respectful and responsible conduct, and a huge and extraordinary generosity and sense of humor. [Their] work has consistently brought together finely detailed ethnography, a broad hermeneutic approach to the interpretation of cultural practices, and a striking literary – and almost cinematic – sensibility...This is what has allowed them to write captivating and theoretically sophisticated books. I cannot insist enough on the priceless work Jean and John Comaroff have done in firmly placing the African continent on the international research agenda and contemporary intellectual debates. Through their own research, they have shown that there is no better vantage point than “ex-centric” locations to look at the contemporary planetary order in its totality.
Achile Mbembe
Achile Mbembe
Wits Institute for Economic and Social Research, University of Witwatersrand, Duke University
Ever since the 1980s John Comaroff has been one of my most cherished anthropologists....
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Peter Geschiere
University of Amsterdam, Leiden University
Ever since the 1980s John Comaroff has been one of my most cherished anthropologists. Together with his wife Jean, he served as guide into a new, global anthropology; that is, an anthropology that retains the classic assets of the discipline -- fieldwork, micro ethnography, a focus on the articulation of material circumstances with cultural life -- but re-interprets these to remain relevant in a world that is rapid globalizing. A milestone in this respect was their two volumes <em>Of Revelation and Revolution,</em> in which they brought together detailed research on the history of the Tswana peoples of southern Africa with equally detailed research on the history of the British mission that was to play such a big role in the region. Of particular interest was the way in which the Comaroffs highlighted not just the contrast between these two histories, but also their convergences and mutual articulations. A more recent example of the theoretical creativity that makes their work so inspiring is <em>Theories from the South; Or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa </em>which made them forerunners in the present-day debate on ‘decolonizing’ anthropology. But their innovating impact in anthropology worldwide is not only related to the force and the inspirational quality of their publications. They have hosted many conferences and workshops where their brilliant debating style has helped participants open up new perspectives and try out new approaches. These qualities have also made them also exceptionally successful Ph.D. supervisors. I have also learned much from them in this respect: how to challenge students to ever deeper analytical efforts, but balancing this with deep personal involvement. No wonder that both in Chicago and at Harvard they attracted students from all over the world. The global span of their <em>Nachwuchs </em>guarantees that their work will continue to have an impact on anthropology long into the future as well.
Peter Geschiere
Peter Geschiere
University of Amsterdam, Leiden University
For decades, [Jean and John] Comaroff created generous and open intellectual and pedagogical environments...
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Ann Stoler
The New School for Social Research
For decades, [Jean and John] Comaroff created generous and open intellectual and pedagogical environments in anthropology, in African studies, and across the academy more broadly, galvanizing energy wherever they go, and teaching us that there is no anthropology that is not already historical to the core, on the premise that we and those we study, are equally and differently, shaped by our historical practices, and intimate and capacious historical machinations. They have an uncanny ability to take a seemingly local and banal subject, to convey truths about the times in which we live. Something they have done with witchcraft, crime, zombies, and the law. Unraveling both the fictions and force, the meanings and materialities, on which power is based. When the New York Times last week talked about the disenchantment with democracy across the globe, Jean and John were ahead of that story by miles. Not because they were in the throws of New York City politics, but because their antennas have long been glued to the frequencies where history unfolds, where the political is recast and to what emerges from new spaces from which the future is being made.”
Ann Stoler
Ann Stoler
The New School for Social Research
Few social scientists reach the status of contemporary classics. Jean and John Comaroff are...
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Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrandez
University of Sydney
Few social scientists reach the status of contemporary classics. Jean and John Comaroff are among those who could be included in that category. Their current work is indeed on the crest of the wave of social analysis, but at least since the 1980s it has been followed, debated and also challenged within the field of anthropology. Beyond this disciplinary area, their work has resonated and continues to resonate in the spheres of sociology, politics and legal studies, in a clear demonstration of the strength and the potential of anthropological knowledge when it engages the ‘big Issues.
Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrandez
Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrandez
University of Sydney
As a South African, I like to claim John Comaroff as one of our...
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Judge Dennis Davis
University of Cape Ttown
As a South African, I like to claim John Comaroff as one of our own in the light of his prodigious achievements in academic and general intellectual life. We first met when as a 15 year old member of a Jewish youth movement, I received lectures from him on Karl Marx. That said a lot about John:  educating school pupils in progressive thought was a bold move in repressive, racist Apartheid South Africa. It has thus not been a surprise that his teaching and writings over almost a half a century have so profoundly moved the progressive needle in his chosen fields and, more than this, have focused attention on the effects of colonialism, racism, and repression on the countries of the South. Few have researched more deeply and written more perceptively in an area which for decades was almost forgotten terrain. But it is in his mentoring of students that he has been a model for how to support and encourage students. I have personally witnessed the care, concern and intellectual guidance that he has given to [them]… I have never encountered a more dedicated teacher and academic mentor. Expressed in one word –John Comaroff is a true mensch.
Judge Dennis Davis
Judge Dennis Davis
University of Cape Ttown
This book is dedicated to Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff because they taught me how...
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Lisa Wedeen
University of Chicago
This book is dedicated to Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff because they taught me how to be a colleague. Their camaraderie, devotion to scholarship, playfulness, energy, sizzling intellects, political and philosophical commitments, and unwavering affection – their ability to show up for me (and for others) – remind me why I chose my peculiar form of political theory as my vocation. Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria.
Lisa Wedeen
Lisa Wedeen
University of Chicago
Together [John Comaroff] with his wife Jean, served as guides into a new,...
Read More
Peter Geschiere
Emeritus professor of Anthropology of Africa; University of Amsterdam; Leiden University
Together [John Comaroff] with his wife Jean, served as guides into a new, global anthropology; that is, an anthropology that retains the classic assets of the discipline -- fieldwork, micro ethnography, a focus on the articulation of material circumstances with cultural life -- but re-interprets these to remain relevant in a world that is rapid globalizing. A milestone in this respect was their two volumes Of Revelation and Revolution, in which they brought together detailed research on the history of the Tswana peoples of southern Africa with equally detailed research on the history of the British mission that was to play such a big role in the region. Of particular interest was the way in which the Comaroffs highlighted not just the contrast between these two histories, but also their convergences and mutual articulations. A more recent example of the theoretical creativity that makes their work so inspiring is Theories from the South; Or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa which made them forerunners in the present-day debate on ‘decolonizing’ anthropology. But their innovating impact in anthropology worldwide is not only related to the force and the inspirational quality of their publications. They have hosted many conferences and workshops where their brilliant debating style has helped participants open up new perspectives and try out new approaches. These qualities have also made them also exceptionally successful Ph.D. supervisors. I have also learned much from them in this respect: how to challenge students to ever deeper analytical efforts, but balancing this with deep personal involvement. No wonder that both in Chicago and at Harvard they attracted students from all over the world. The global span of their Nachwuchs guarantees that their work will continue to have an impact on anthropology long into the future as well.
Peter Geschiere
Peter Geschiere
Emeritus professor of Anthropology of Africa; University of Amsterdam; Leiden University
[John and Jean Comaroff] have an uncanny ability to take a seemingly local and banal ...
Read More
Ann Stoler
New School for Social Research
[John and Jean Comaroff] have an uncanny ability to take a seemingly local and banal subject, to convey truths about the times in which we live. Something they have done with witchcraft, crime, zombies, and the law. Unraveling both the fictions and force, the meanings and materialities, on which power is based. When the New York Times last week talked about the disenchantment with democracy across the globe, Jean and John were ahead of that story by miles. Not because they were in the throws of New York City politics, but because their antennas have long been glued to the frequencies where history unfolds, where the political is recast and to what emerges from new spaces from which the future is being made.
Ann Stoler
Ann Stoler
New School for Social Research
John and Jean Comaroff’ ‘s intellectual influence has been immense. It is to be...
Read More
Achile Mbembe
Wits Institute for Economic and Social Research, University of the Witwatersrand
John and Jean Comaroff’‘s intellectual influence has been immense. It is to be found in various areas of academic enquiry, from law, cultural studies, political economy to sociology, social studies of health and religion, arts and design...Their very significant intellectual influence and moral authority [has been] strenuously dedicated...to nurturing high quality scholarly communities. They brought together many of us through consistent ethical behavior, always respectful and responsible conduct, and a huge and extraordinary generosity and sense of humor. [Their] work has consistently brought together finely detailed ethnography, a broad hermeneutic approach to the interpretation of cultural practices, and a striking literary – and almost cinematic – sensibility...This is what has allowed them to write captivating and theoretically sophisticated books. I cannot insist enough on the priceless work Jean and John Comaroff have done in firmly placing the African continent on the international research agenda and contemporary intellectual debates. Through their own research, they have shown that there is no better vantage point than “ex-centric” locations to look at the contemporary planetary order in its totality.
Achille Mbembe
Achile Mbembe
Wits Institute for Economic and Social Research, University of the Witwatersrand
Over the past 40 years or so …[Jean] solo or jointly has changed the face...
Read More
Filip De Boeck
University of Leuven
Over the past 40 years or so…[Jean] solo or jointly has changed the face of anthropology and more generally our way of thinking about the African continent and its place in the world and in the global political economy. Her work has revolutionized African anthropology, starting with her seminal work Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance. It is a book which I still use in my teachings today…. 
Filip De Boeck
Filip De Boeck
University of Leuven