Ever since the publication of Maitland’s famed dictum that anthropology must become history or be nothing a gradually burgeoning literature has called for convergence between the two. But that call typically begs the fundamental question, ‘Which anthropology, what history?’ As a result, the point is often lost that any substantive relationship between disciplines is determined not by the intrinsic nature of those disciplines if any such thing exists but by prior theoretical considerations. It would seem obvious, for example, that historical analysis assumes different significance for structural functionalism than it does for either Marxist or structuralist approaches. In this essay, Comaroff develops a dialectical approach to the analysis of African social systems, based on a detailed account of Southern Tswana economy, politics, and society, an approach that explains both the endogenous historicity of such systems and their complex engagement with colonialism.
Applies To: John Comaroff
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Introduction, In The Meaning of Marriage Payments
Prestations on the occasion of marriage are commonly exchanged in African societies, past and present. Anthropologists have analyzed these exchanges – often misnamed “bride price – from a number of different theoretical perspectives, stressing the rights and duties conveyed by them, their social, political, and economic implications, and their structural effects. This essay reviews, critically, those received anthropological approaches to marriage prestations, but goes on to ask what they actually mean to those involved in them, what vernacular messages might they carry, how do we make sense of them both as material and meaningful cultural practices.
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Rules and Rulers
Most Southern African political ethnographies have relied heavily upon the analytical assumption that careers of indigenous politicians are largely determined by ascriptive factors. It is shown here that, among the Barolong boo Ratshidi (Tswana), ascriptive rules rarely determine the devolution of authority; rather, they represent a code through which the complexities of political competition are ordered and comprehended. Indeed, ascription and achievement, far from being opposed principles of political determination, constitute co-existent levels of a single reality. Competition for the chiefship, moreover, is not limited to interregna; it is a continuous process, of which succession to office is one potential outcome. Under these conditions, the meaning of political rules, and their systematic relationship to the political process, require re-assessment. In providing such a re-assessment, an attempt is made to explore its implications for a comprehension of genealogical manipulation and political history among the Barolong.
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Talking Politics
In this analysis of political oratory in a South African chiefdom, John Comaroff analyses the ways in which public speech is deployed as a vehicle for the negotiation of relations of power and authority – and their contestation. Isolating two different forms of oratory that are used in juxtaposition with one another as a means of establishing and extending – or conversely, undermining – the legitimacy of rulers, the essay explores the connection between the grammar of expressive practices in strategic public performances and their impact on the exercise of sovereignty. And on freedom of speech in everyday political life.