John Comaroff

All Essays

  • CHIEFSHIP, PTY unLTD.:

    Reflections on sovereign un/accountability, past and present

    ABSTRACT  A number of “customary” African kings and chiefs – historically accountable to the will of their subjects – have sought to turn their offices into lucrative sources of accumulation; indeed, into a form of monopoly capital founded on the assertion of a political sovereignty unaccountable to any other. What historical conditions have laid the…

  • LAW AND CULTURE

    ABSTRACT  In its founding decades, the anthropology of law, largely centered in Britain, paid little  explicit attention to culture, although it often did so implicitly by addressing vernacular  ideas and beliefs involved in legal processes. Explicit focus on the cultural foundations  of law came, in the USA, with a turn to cultural hermeneutics and the…

  • AN UN/THINKABLE REVOLUTION?

    C.L.R. James’ THE BLACK JACOBINS REVISITED

    C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg 1938 [1963]) is surely one of the twentieth century’s most generative works of critical thought (Hartman 2017). Its audacious scope and theoretical virtuosity offer, alongside texts like Gramsci’s’ Prison Notebooks (1971), a compelling analysis of the forms of political,…

  • On Inter-generationality, Trans-generationality, and the ‘Generation War’

    ABSTRACT How are relations between generations shifting? As anthropologists, our take on inter-generational relations and the rationalities on which they are based–i.e., generationality–is historically situated. In many parts of the world, generation has become a major axis of social and political struggle, sometimes of bitter conflict. This, we argue, is a corollary of post-Cold War…

  • RE(DIS)COVERING THE EXTRAORDINARY

    A reflection on the Plaatje Diary, 50 years on

    In the half-century since the now famed Plaatje Diary was “discovered” – disinterred, more accurately, thence re(dis)covered – both Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje and South Africa have undergone radical refiguration. Plaatje has emerged from the shadows of history, from being a bit player in a past willfully erased by the apartheid regime to becoming a major…

  • Foreward: Everyday State and Democracy in Africa

    Ethnographic Encounters

    Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters, notable for both its timeliness and breadth of vision, mobilizes the distinctive, decentering perspectives of ethnography to capture the living practices, the everyday vernaculars, of the state and democracy in contemporary Africa. It exemplifies the turn in African studies—perhaps, more accurately, return—to treating these phenomena, in the…

  • The Wealth of Ethno-nations

    Notes on the Identity Economy

    The significance of ethnicity – of ethnicity understood as a foundational basis for forging selfhood and collective identity, feelings of primal attachment and shared affect, political claims to rights and the protection of interests, even for national belonging – has grown visibly over the past few decades. Needless to say, the phenomenon itself is hardly…

  • Preface: Lawfare

    Waging War Through Law

    Lawfare, as both a concept and a species of political practice, has exploded over the past decades, from the late twentieth century into ours, the twenty-first. Google it, and 1,590,000 results come up in less than half a second.1 Despite this digital overload, a comprehensive history of the term is yet to be written, although…

  • Reflections on the Political Theology of Conflict

    From Medieval Scandinavia to the Global Future

    I. Is war, civil or uncivil, simply politics by other, primarily necro-violent means? Or is there more to it than this suggests? Is politics simply war, civil or uncivil, by means of the suspension of immanent violence? The dialectical entanglement of politics and conflict, of which war is typically taken to be the epitomizing instance,…

  • After Labor

    Concern has been steadily mounting, across the globe, that a “world without jobs” is fast approaching. And that wage labor as we know it is disappearing. “Work,” it seems, “is not working, for ever more people, in ever more ways.”1 But there is little agreement about how, why, where, or in what measure this is…

  • Brave Noir World

    Crime stories – in literature, art, film, theater, music – are now a global vernacular. Their popularity reflects the modernist fascination with the promise that detection — part intuition, part empirical reason – can unravel the mysteries of human evil, wrest law from lawlessness, return order to an unruly social world. But this history also…

  • Southern Futures

    Keith Hart and John Comaroff in conversation with Ravinder Kaur

    RK: The 2013 Human Development Report entitled The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World offered an optimistic account of the ‘rise’ of the Southern nations long seen as ‘lagging behind’ the Northern industrialised nations. Celebrating the “unprecedented scale and speed” of this rise, the uplifting narrative pitched Asia, Africa and Latin…

  • The Legalization of Everyday Life

    Reflections on Law/fare, Politics, and the History of the Present

    For the special juridikum issue on „Knowledge in Law“ Andrea Kretschman has interviewed John Comaroff regarding the contemporary role of the law and its significance for lay people. John Comaroff is the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African- American Studies and of Anthropology, and Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies, at Harvard University. Besides…

  • Does Anthropology Matter to Law?

    Reflections, Inflections, Deflections

    Does Anthropology matter to Law? As phrased, this provocation, worthy of address though it certainly is, may ultimately be unanswerable. The reason? Because, like all questions of this sort, it harbours others within it. Precisely which “anthropology”? “Law” as what? As everyday practice, as theorized praxis, as pedagogy, as politics by other means? What, moreover,…

  • Occult Economies, Revisited

    In an essay written 20 years ago—of which this version is an update1—we sought to explain an unforeseen effect of the rise of neoliberalism and, with it, the spread of democracy to places it had not been before. These two processes, then widely thought to infuse each other, were attributed an almost magical potential to…

  • Cattle, Currencies, and the Politics of Commensuration on a Colonial Frontier

    Regimes of value, and, even more, encounters between different regimes divided by cultural space and time, presume mediation, translation, and communication among particular species of value. And, therefore, currencies, at once verbal and material, that objectify them. Which, in turn, depends on one thing above all else: on mechanisms of commensuration, mechanisms that render negotiable…

  • Thoughts on Theorizing from the South

    An Interview with John Comaroff

    The following interview with John Comaroff (JC), conducted by Social Transformations editor Lisandro Claudio (LC), took place in Copenhagen in November 2014. Its content arises largely out of the recent publication of Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa , by Jean and John Comaro” (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012).

  • A Silent Tribute to Tata Madiba

    Thanks for asking us to write something on Nelson Mandela, which we appreciate. Alas, though, we both feel somewhat exhausted on the subject, having done any number of things for the media. The Harvard Gazette has already published a long interview with us, in which we try to contextualize Mandela’s legacy and move subtly away…

  • Ethnicity, Inc.

    In October 2000, Business Day, a leading South African newspaper, published an extraordinary story. Its title read: Traditional Leaders Form Private Firm for Investment.1 Contralesa, the Congress of Traditional Leaders, is the voice of ethnicity in this postcolony. It speaks for culture, customary law, and the collective rights of indigenous peoples. Also for the authority…

  • Policing and Contemporary Governance

    Foreward

    Common though it may be, it is always dangerous to announce a new book – or any scholarly project, for that matter – by speaking of a lacuna in the literature that it is about to fill. For one thing, to presume a “gap” in existing knowledge is to presume that the contours of that…