While offering new insights into the resurgence of chiefs (indigenous sovereigns) in contemporary Africa, the Politics of Custom also presents an illuminating complex counterpoint of the interplay of tradition and modernity, showcasing that chiefship is neither wholly of the state nor of the customary, but is always interlinked. As the editors point out in their introduction, contemporary African chiefship is narrated in two ways: one does so in the language of continuity, cyclicity, and reproduction, of the timeless past returned; the other situates it in linear historical time, in trajectory, transformation, and agency. …This book is insightful and a pleasure to read. It would appeal to anyone interested in traditional institutions, contemporary African politics, customary chieftaincies or democracy and democratisation….[It] makes a great contribution to our understanding of the resurgence of chieftaincy and indigenous power in postcolonial Africa.
Applies To: Jean Comaroff
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James Ferguson Array
The Politics of Custom is an incisive and original investigation of the stubbornly persistent role played by traditional authorities in modern Africa. Featuring a stellar cast of contributors and a superb synthetic introduction by the editors, this book is a major contribution that will appeal to a broad audience.
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The Politics of Custom
How are we to explain the resurgence of customary chiefs in contemporary Africa? Rather than disappearing with the tide of modernity, as many expected, indigenous sovereigns are instead a rising force, often wielding substantial power and legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the post–Cold War era—changes in which they are themselves deeply implicated.
This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises—from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers–but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that “traditional” authority enjoys in the late modern world. Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa’s history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the twenty-first century.
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The American Historical Review Array
The publication of Jean and John Comaroff’s monumental two-volume study of colonialism and religion in South Africa, Of Revelation and Revolution, was a signal event in historical anthropology in the 1990s. Pathbreaking in substance as well as method, the books analyze the colonial encounter in South Africa and explain its contemporary consequences. The two anthropologists issued a challenge to both anthropologists and historians to rethink their understanding of the construction of modernity…[T]hese critical works of scholarship and imagination have an importance far beyond their immediate subject matter.
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Shula Marks Array
This second volume is a tour de force. As in volume 1, the Comaroffs explore the ways in which consciousness is ‘made and unmade,’ and the relationship between culture, consciousness, and ideology. The argument is a brilliant and sustained demonstration of the complexities and unanticipated outcomes of the colonial encounter for both sides. It is a formidable achievement and worthy successor to the first volume.
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Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 2
In the second of a proposed three-volume study, John and Jean Comaroff continue their exploration of colonial evangelism and modernity in South Africa. Moving beyond the opening moments of the encounter between the British Nonconformist missions and the Southern Tswana peoples, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume II, explores the complex transactions—both epic and ordinary—among the various dramatis personae along this colonial frontier. It covers a wide spectrum in the theater of colonialism: engagements of theology, salvation, and ritual; over agricultural production and conceptions of nature; around money, cattle, and other currencies; about cloth, clothing, and the human body; over architecture, domesticity and the interiors of everyday life; over health, healing, and medicine; and, finally, over the essence of personhood, identity, rights, and the law. In this fascinating study, the Comaroffs shows how the initiatives of the colonial missions collided with local traditions, giving rise to new cultural practices, new patterns of production and consumption, new senses of style and beauty, and new forms of class distinction and ethnicity.
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Sally Falk Moore Array
Defining their enterprise as more in the direction of poetics than of prosaics, the Comaroffs free themselves to analyze a vivid series of images and events as objects of analysis. These they mine for clues to the 19th-century contents of the British imagination and of Tswana minds. They are themselves imagining the imagination of others, and they do the job with characteristic aplomb. The first volume creates an appetite for the second.
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Shula Marks Array
The two volumes of Jean and John Comaroff’s Of Revelation and Revolution (RR) are a tour de force, and raise major questions about the nature of consciousness and the impact of modernity over the past two centuries…I read both volumes of RR with a rare sense of exhilaration. The scope and span are extraordinary, as is their ability to match the truly global sweep of their imagination with attention to detail and the ability to tell a spellbinding but pointed story Given its span and sophistication, the Comaroffs’ work stands as a challenge to historians of southern Africa, wherever our interest falls. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a more central task for understanding the world we live in than an exploration of the ways in which cultures and consciousness have been reconfigured and reconstructed in their encounter with ‘mod- ernity’, however it is construed…
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Diana Wylie Array
This sophisticated study should ideally prevent colonialism from ever again being reduced to a simplistic paradigm of domination and resistance…[T]he Comaroffs have succeeded in writing a richly creative book that no student of the colonial encounter anywhere in the world can afford to ignore.
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Nadine Gordimer Array
The Comaroffs achieve an extraordinary double combination; they are coauthors of a book which also marries the fascination of erudition with beautiful prose. This is a scholarly work that reads with the grace of imaginative literature. Original and wonderful, rising on the horizon of ideas that inform our present, it is certainly one of my Books of the Year.
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Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 1
Of Revelation and Revolution is at once a highly imaginative, richly detailed history of colonialism, Christianity, and consciousness in South Africa, and a theoretically challenging consideration of the most difficult questions posed by the nature of social experience. In this first of two volumes, Jean and John Comaroff explore the early phases of the encounter between British missionaries and the Tswana peoples of the South African Frontier. Tracing the cultural backgrounds of both parties, they pay particular attention to the rise of European modernity and its colonizing impulse, to the contemporary images of Africans embedded in that impulse, and to the complex worlds of precolonial Africa. They show how the efforts of evangelists to change the social and material practices of the Tswana produced new forms of consciousness in both colonizer and colonized – and subtle forms of agency, appropriation, and resistance on the part of the latter. The Comaroffs grapple in exciting new ways with issues of power and resistance, agency and intention, ideology and hegemony, culture and materiality that have long vexed social scientists and humanists They reveal how structures of inequality in the colonial encounter were often fashioned as much by quiet means of domination as by naked violence. In reflecting on “the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonization,” the Comaroffs provide fresh insight into the dialectics of culture and power that shape all historical processes.
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Giovanni Arrighi Array
“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.”
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Sally Engel Merry Array
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.
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Arjun Appadurai Array
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.
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Law and Disorder in the Postcolony
From Keynote Roundtable, Law and Society Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: Celebrating Ten Years in Print and Practice,” 2016.
Are postcolonies in Africa and elsewhere haunted more by unregulated violence, un/civil warfare, and disorder than are other twenty-first century nation-states? The reflex answer to this question, from critical scholars, conservative intellectuals, and the popular media, is yes. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony argues that the question itself is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their situation in a contemporary global order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth – an order that tends to criminalize poverty, race, and social marginality, entraps the global “south” in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the law. But, as these essays show, there is another side to the story. While many postcolonies evince signs of endemic disorder, they also fetishize the law, its ways and means. Even where they are mocked and mimicked, those ways and means are often central to the politics of everyday engagement, to practies of authority and citizenship, to the interaction of states and subjects. New constitutions are repeatedly written, appeals to rights repeatedly made, claims of material and moral inequity repeatedly litigated. How is this to be explained, this coincidence of disorder with a fixation on law? And, more generally, what does it tell us of more general significance about the unfolding history of the nation-state? Law and Disorder in the Postcolony addresses these questions, entering into dialogue with such theorists as Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Carl Schmitt. It also demonstrates how postcolonies have become especially critical sites for the production of social theory, not least because they are harbingers of a global future under construction. -
Roger Bastian Array
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. -
Donna Perry Array
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. -
Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism
The essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism pose a series of
related questions: How are we to understand capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first
century? Is it a singular or hydra-headed creature? What are we to make of the culture
of neoliberalism that appears to accompany it, taking on simultaneously local and
translocal forms? To what extent does it make sense to describe the present juncture in
world history, after the end of the Cold War, as an “Age of Revolution,” one not unlike
1789–1848 in its potential to change the world? In exploring the material and cultural
dimensions of the Age of Millennial Capitalism – carefully laid out in a wide-ranging
theoretical introduction by John and Jean Comaroff – the contributors interrogate the
so-called ‘crisis’ of the nation-state, the triumph of the free market and its more or less
hidden effects, rising tides of violence and cultures of exclusion, and the growth of new
forms of identity politics. The collection also investigates the tendency of neoliberal
capitalism to produce a world of increasing inequality, environmental degradation,
heightened flows of people and value across the planet, moral panics and social
impossibilities, bitter generational antagonisms and gender conflicts, yawning class
distinctions, and “pariah” forms of economic activity. In the process, it opens up an
empirically grounded, conceptual discussion about the world-at-large at a particularly
momentous historical time—when the social sciences and humanities are in danger of
ceding intellectual initiative to the masters of the market and the media. -
Achille Mbembe Array
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.
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Charles Piot Array
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.