In the best tradition of the rethinking genre of anthropological critiques, John and Jean Comaroff and this volume’s eight contributors brilliantly review the notion of civil society — largely developed and utilized by non-anthropologists – from both theoretical and ethnographically grounded perspectives. Beginning with an expansive introduction to the concept of civil society, or what the editors and others refer to as “the Idea” or abstraction, they lay bare the concept in contexts that have to do as much with the West as Africa. The authors reexamine the concept of civil society, thought to be universally applicable in its scope because of its level of abstraction. They see it, however, as a Western-centric concept that breeds invidious comparisons when applied to Africa. The locations in sub-Saharan Africa vary, and the ethnographic sampling is eclectic, but several themes and approaches run through the essays: the tendency to savage and then salvage the concept of civil society, an awareness of the problems with relativity, and an acceptance of the ambiguities found in studying civil and state relationships…
Applies To: John Comaroff
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Violence and the Law in Post Colonies:
Criminal obsessions after Foucault: post colonialism, police surveillance and the metaphysics of disorder
“In recent years, depictions of postcolonial nations have congealed into a terrifying epic of lawlessness and violence, adding a brutal edge to older European archetypes of underdevelopment, abjection, and ethnic strife. But the similarities between the post colony and the world beyond it are unmistakable. And growing. The global north is evolving toward Africa. Everywhere, criminal violence has become an imaginative vehicle, a hieroglyph, for thinking about the nightmares that threaten the nation.” This short book contains two essays: each first explores an aspect of the global preoccupation, expressed most volubly in postcolonies, with criminal violence – and the complex, ambivalent ways in which police play into that preoccupation, feeding it in order to claim a sovereign right to violence in enforcing the law.”
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Nancy Howell, University of Toronto; David Lee, University of South Florida Array
…this is a wonderful book for lovers of Southern African cultures, as well as for students of classic ethnography and visual culture. There is value in these photographs on a number of levels. They are valuable as data and as illustrations of Schapera’s studies. They have considerable historical importance for Botswana, as documented by Kgosi Linchwe II in a letter included in the introduction to the book, and they provide convincing evidence that the various cultural/ethnic groups of Botswana were interacting in the 1930s as they are now. Finally, there is much value in the aesthetic beauty of these photographs, reminding us that cultures reassert their values in a wide range of contexts… The editors have thoughtfully considered the long career of Schapera to create the present volume. It is a book that is satisfying as a record of colonial times, enriching our understanding of Schapera and his subjects of study.
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Robert James Gordon Array
These spectacular photographs reveal a much more complex Schapera than his writings allow and provide a more complete and aesthetically charming supplement to his work. The combination of clear, insightful, and entertaining scholarship – written by some of the foremost anthropologists of the region – and stunning photographs makes this a highly original and important book with a wide appeal.
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Shula Marks Array
Isaac Schapera’s photographs magnificently capture everyday life among the Kgatla [chiefdom in the former Bechuanaland Protectorate, now Botswana] at a period of great social change through a seemingly artless focus on artifacts and architecture, dress and deportment. In their introduction, Jean and John Comaroff – Schapera’s most outstanding successors – provide a scintillating and thought-provoking portrait of Schapera as ethnographer and photographer. This splendid volume will be a most valuable resource to anthropologists and historians and a source of illumination and enjoyment to readers interested in southern Africa.
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Picturing a Colonial Past
This volume presents for the first time the selected photographs of the renowned British anthropologist Isaac Schapera (1905–2003). Taken between 1929 and 1934, largely during his earliest work among the Kgatla peoples of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), the 136 images in this selection reveal an emotional engagement and aesthetic impulse that Schapera seldom expressed in his writings. Covering a broad spectrum of daily activities, they include depictions of everything from pot making, thatching, and cattle herding to village architecture, vernacular medicine, and rainmaking ceremonies. Visually fascinating and of exceptional quality, these images capture the uniqueness of an African people in a particular time and place. They are contexualized and their significance explained in Jean and John Comaroff’s insightful introduction, while Adam Kuper’s illuminating biographical sketch of Schapera provides new insight into the life of the photographer. Picturing a Colonial Past reveals not only a rare side of old Botswana, but also of one of the most famous anthropologist who worked there.
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Zombies and Frontiers in the Age of Neoliberalism
Postcolonial South Africa, like other postrevolutionary societies, appears to have witnessed a dramatic rise in occult economies: in the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends. These embrace a wide range of phenomena, from the ubiquitous presence of thoroughly contemporary zombies, through “ritual murder” and the sale of body parts for “medicinal” purposes, to pyramid schemes and other financial scams. And they have led, in many places, to violent reactions against people accused of illicit accumulation. In the struggles that have ensued, the major lines of opposition have been not race or class but generation—mediated by gender. Why is all this occurring with such intensity, right now? Why has the figure of the zombie taken on such salience at this historical moment? An answer to the question, and to the more general problem of making sense of the enchantments of modernity, is sought in the encounter of rural South Africa with the contradictory effects of millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. This encounter brings “the global” and “the local”—treated here as imaginative constructs rather than explanatory terms or empirical realities—into a dialectical interplay. It also has implications for the theory- work and methodological practice of the social sciences and humanities in making sense of twenty-first century world, its material, moral, social, and political lineaments.
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Rules and Processes
Rules and Processes is at once a compelling essay in social theory and a path-breaking ethnography of dispute in an African society. On the basis of a richly detailed study among the Tswana of southern Africa, John Comaroff and Simon Roberts challenge most of the orthodoxies of legal anthropology. They argue that the social world, and the dispute processes that occur within it, are given form and meaning by a dialectical relationship between complex, contradictory sociocultural structures and individual experience. The authors explore in a novel way the relations between culture and ideology, system and practice, social action and human intention. They develop a model that lays bare the form and content of “legal” and “political” discourse in all its variations – a model that accounts for the outcome of conflict processes and explains why Tswana, like people in other cultures, conceive of their world in an apparently contradictory manner: as rule-governed yet inherently open to pragmatic individualism, orderly yet inherently fluid and shifting. Rules and Processes offers a highly original, highly persuasive approach to our understanding of the dialectics of social life.
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Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa
Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa sets out to show that civil society is an inherently protean phenomenon: that it is, simultaneously, one thing and many, absolute and refractory, actual and chimerical, a big Idea and an ill-defined popular aspiration. Therein, the Comaroffs argue, has lain its potency, past and present, as both a call-to-arms and an analytic construct; its very plasticity allows an ostensibly universal term, European in origin, to take on distinctive forms at quite different times in quite different places. And to become the subject of distinctly local struggles–especially at moments of existential, epistemic, political crisis. The essays in this volume attest, in vividly rich detail, to the diverse and unexpected deployment of the concept in, and in respect of, Africa. Their concerns range from the impact of colonial ideology and development practice on discourses of civility, through populist movements for reform of the public sphere and the substance of politics, to everyday attempts to conjure up new modes of selfhood and moral community. Together, they compose an incisive interrogation of the paradoxes and problems, the possibilities and impossibilities, raised by the invocation of the term in its many and various guises both here and elsewhere. As it turns out, the circulation of the Idea of Civil Society across Africa in recent times reveals a great deal about larger historical forces; in particular, about the radical reconfiguration of economy and society, and of the nation-state, in the post-cold war epoch. These essays also make a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology, boldly and broadly conceived, to transdisciplinary discourses on the making of the so-called “new” world order.
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Modernity and its Malcontents
What role does ritual play in the everyday lives of modern Africans? How are so-called “traditional” cultural forms deployed by people seeking empowerment in a world where “modernity” has failed to deliver on its promises? Several of the essays in Modernity and Its Malcontents address familiar anthropological issues—among them, witchcraft, myth, and the politics of reproduction—but treat them in fresh ways, situating them amidst the realities and polyphonies of life in Africa today. Others explore distinctly nontraditional subjects—like the Nigerian popular press and soul-eating in Niger—in such a way as to confront the conceptual limits of Eurocentric social science. Together they demonstrate how ritual may be powerfully mobilized in the making of history, present, and future, subjecting such concepts as modernity, ritual, power, and history to renewed critical scrutiny. Writing about a variety of phenomena, the authors are united in the effort to pay respect to the diversity and historical specificity of local signs and practices, voices and perspectives. Their work makes a substantial and original contribution toward the historical anthropology of Africa.
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Donald S. Sutton Array
Work of this quality will likely exercise a wide influence among cultural historians.
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Joseph R. Manyoni Array
This captivatingly provocative book falls firmly into the current genre of critical ethnographic and methodological literature in anthropology. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination is a tour de force of the ethnographic enterprise and attempts to locate ethnography squarely within the boundaries of the broader historical contexts which have shaped the discipline of anthropology in all its manifestations. It…also raises some fundamental questions of epistemology in the construction and presentation of so-called “savage societies” to Western readers.
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Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
Over the years John and Jean Comaroff have broadened the study of culture and society with their reflections on power and meaning. In their work on Africa and colonialism they have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) effaced, empowered and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated? How does the social imagination take shape in novel yet collectively meaningful ways?Addressing these questions, the essays in this volume—several never before published—work toward an “imaginative sociology,” demonstrating the techniques by which social science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction, the authors offer their most complete statement to date on the nature of historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade.
Part One of the volume, “Theory, Ethnography, Historiography,” includes chapters on ethnographic method and imaginative sociology, totemism and ethnicity, and the anthropology of the body as an historical practice. Part Two, “Dialectical Systems, Imaginative Sociologies,” covers the analysis of African societies and polities over time, the relationship between cattle and capital in those societies, and the meaning of labor in apartheid South Africa. Finally, Part Three, “Colonialism and Modernity,” explores the impact of imperialism on African polities, medicine and colonialism, the impact of colonization on African consciousness, and the ways in which colonization reconstructed concepts of home reciprocally in Africa and Europe.
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Sasha Newell Array
Back cover of volume
Just over a decade after the publication of Ethnicity, Inc., the heady cocktail of commoditization, culture, and corporation originally modelled there has only further entangled itself in global social processes. This stunning new collection traces myriad extensions and analogs of ethnocommodities within contemporary late capitalism, while courageously exploring the limits of the model in places where the economic logic of ethnic distinction is muddled by pan-regional identities, nation-branding, and economies of violence. As these authors deftly demonstrate, even as the Durkheimian enchantment of the collective can conjure quantifiable brand value, the capacity of the brand itself to enchant is increasingly the dominant mode with which to produce―and consume―collectivity.
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Ethnicity, Commodity, In/corporation
In the economics of everyday life, ethnicity has become a potential resource to be tapped, generating new sources of profit and power, new ways of being social, new expressions of solidarity and affect, and new visions of the future. Throughout much of Africa, ethnic corporations have been repurposed to do business in mining, tourism, and the culture industry; in the USA, Native American groupings have expanded their involvement in gaming, design, and other domains of the market; and all over the world, the commodification of culture has sown itself deeply into everything from medicine through music to fashion – and much else besides. Ethnic groups increasingly seek empowerment by formally incorporating themselves, by deploying their sovereign status for material ends, and by copyrighting their cultural practices as intellectual property. Building on ethnographic case studies from Kenya, Nepal, Peru, Russia, and several other countries, this collection poses the question: Does the turn to the incorporation and commodification of ethnicity really herald a new historical moment in the global politics of identity, or is it merely an extension of long existing practices and potentials? The answer offer in this volume is…both, albeit in complicated ways.
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The Mafeking Diary of Sol T. Plaatje
Acutely insightful, humorous, engrossing, and lyrically written, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary – published over several decades in three editions under slightly different titles (1973, 1990, and 1999), with a 50th Anniversary planned – provides an extraordinary account of the Siege of Mafeking, itself one of the most famous episodes of the South African War (1899-2001) and a critical episode in British imperial history. The only diary of the war by a black South African to have survived, it opens to entirely new scrutiny the part played by the African population of the town in what was supposedly `a white man’s war` – and offers a critique of the conduct of the siege by the two colonial powers involved in it, British and Boer. At the same time, it affords keen insight into the mind and spirit of a man who was to become co-founder and the first general secretary of the South African Native National Congress (later the ANC) in 1912 and to serve as a major international spokesmen for black rights in the early part of the twentieth century; a man who, despite very limited education, was also to emerge as a prolific journalist and cultural producer, translator of Shakespeare into an African language, author of the first novel by black South African (Mhudi) and a critically acclaimed political text (Native Life in South Africa), as well as a famously multilingual public intellectual. For the centenial edition of the Mafeking Diary the editors have returned to the original manuscript in order to provide the fullest, most accurate version possible, augmented by new archival and additional documentary research.
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The Diary of Sol T. Plaatje
Acutely insightful, humorous, engrossing, and lyrically written, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary – published over several decades in three editions under slightly different titles (1973, 1990, and 1999), with a 50th Anniversary planned – provides an extraordinary account of the Siege of Mafeking, itself one of the most famous episodes of the South African War (1899-2001) and a critical episode in British imperial history. The only diary of the war by a black South African to have survived, it opens to entirely new scrutiny the part played by the African population of the town in what was supposedly `a white man’s war` – and offers a critique of the conduct of the siege by the two colonial powers involved in it, British and Boer. At the same time, it affords keen insight into the mind and spirit of a man who was to become co-founder and the first general secretary of the South African Native National Congress (later the ANC) in 1912 and to serve as a major international spokesmen for black rights in the early part of the twentieth century; a man who, despite very limited education, was also to emerge as a prolific journalist and cultural producer, translator of Shakespeare into an African language, author of the first novel by a black South African (Mhudi) and a critically acclaimed political text (Native Life in South Africa), as well as a famously multilingual public intellectual. For the centennial edition of the Mafeking Diary the editors have returned to the original manuscript in order to provide the fullest, most accurate version possible, augmented by new archival and additional documentary research.
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Mafeking Diary
Acutely insightful, humorous, engrossing, and lyrically written, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary – published over several decades in three editions under slightly different titles (1973, 1990, and 1999), with a 50th Anniversary planned – provides an extraordinary account of the Siege of Mafeking, itself one of the most famous episodes of the South African War (1899-2001) and a critical episode in British imperial history. The only diary of the war by a black South African to have survived, it opens to entirely new scrutiny the part played by the African population of the town in what was supposedly `a white man’s war` – and offers a critique of the conduct of the siege by the two colonial powers involved in it, British and Boer. At the same time, it affords keen insight into the mind and spirit of a man who was to become co-founder and the first general secretary of the South African Native National Congress (later the ANC) in 1912 and to serve as a major international spokesmen for black rights in the early part of the twentieth century; a man who, despite very limited education, was also to emerge as a prolific journalist and cultural producer, translator of Shakespeare into an African language, author of the first novel by black South African (Mhudi) and a critically acclaimed political text (Native Life in South Africa), as well as a famously multilingual public intellectual. For the centenial edition of the Mafeking Diary the editors have returned to the original manuscript in order to provide the fullest, most accurate version possible, augmented by new archival and additional documentary research.
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Napandulwe Shiweda Array
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.
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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.