Between 1976 and 2010, Alan Macfarlane, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University, conducted a series of interviews with anthropologists from around the world. Two of those anthropologists included John and Jean Comaroff. They discussed their early lives, their work in the field, life under the Apartheid regime and anthropology, among other things.
Category: Neo/Liberalism
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At Home with Literati: Claudio Lomnitz and Jean Comaroff
Claudio Lomnitz discusses Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation with Jean Comaroff
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Lecture: The Secret Life of Work, Present and Future
This lecture was a part of ANTHUSIA Summer School 3: Dissemination: Writing, Presenting and Communicating.The Politics and Poetics of Representation in a Post-Colonial World. ANTHUSIA is a multi-disciplinary research project in the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa conducted by a consortium of four universities in Aarhus (Denmark), Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Leuven (Belgium) and Oslo (Norway). It has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 764546 and is training 16 Early Stage Researchers.
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Lecture: After Labour
Concern has been steadily mounting, across the globe, that wage work is disappearing. Why do we seem unable to think beyond a universe founded on mass employment? If mass employment has always been threatened by erasure, why does it remain so central both to popular and theoretical understandings of life under capitalism? As we fail to imagine an age after labour, we seem ever more haunted by nightmares of our own redundancy. What does this tell us about the afterlife of homo faber? Might we enrich our answers to these questions by moving beyond the Archimedean vantage of Euro-America?
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Eminent husband-and-wife anthropologist named Visiting J Y Pillay Professors
By Jiang Haolie
Eminent anthropologists Professors Jean and John Comaroff, renowned for their joint work in African Studies and anthropology as a husband-and-wife team, were recently named Visiting J Y Pillay Professors at Yale-NUS College. The Professorship is part of the J Y Pillay Global-Asia Programme, which was established to honour Professor J Y Pillay, a pioneer who made ground-breaking contributions to Singapore as a top civil servant and corporate leader.
Describing the J Y Pillay Professorship as “greatly meaningful”, both Comaroffs effusively shared that they were very honoured to be its recipients. Prof Jean also praised the Professorship’s important role in building important links across global communities of researchers and attracting academic talent to Singapore as well as to Southeast Asian research.
Commending the Comaroffs as “outstanding scholars”, Professor Joanne Roberts, Executive Vice President (Academic Affairs), expressed delight at the Comaroffs being awarded the Professorship. “It is wonderful for our students and faculty to get the opportunity to learn from them,” she said. It matches well with our goals of having visiting professorships bring in world class scholars and also, where possible, to have these visitors broaden and diversify the scope of our offerings.”
In their short time teaching and interacting with the Yale-NUS community, both professors remarked that they were profoundly impressed by the dynamism, intelligence and talent of Yale-NUS students and faculty, describing the students as approaching classes with “maturity, entrepreneurial spirit and intellectual vibrancy”. Prof John said, “Jean and I love to challenge students. Our classes are not easy. Yet, our students have dealt well with complicated ideas and joined in very thoughtful discussions.”
Both Comaroffs were also convinced that the College’s Anthropology faculty and students are well-placed to take the lead in the reinvention and renewal of anthropology as a discipline here. Prof Jean noted that Yale-NUS, while small, has access to the larger research community at the National University of Singapore, affording it an immense advantage. She added that its position in Singapore offers opportunities to reflect on modernity and postcoloniality.
“You have all the virtues of youth and experimentation! Everything is possible!” Prof Jean remarked. Prof John also pointed out how Yale-NUS’s philosophy of decentring academia might contribute to shifting the postcolonial axis of anthropological discourse “from the vertical to the horizontal” – giving increasing voice to the subaltern, thus to shift knowledge-production and its authority away from the west. Altogether, Yale-NUS, according to both Comaroffs, also contributes to the ongoing renewal of liberal arts and science education around the world.
The Comaroffs also spoke enthusiastically about the relevance that Singapore has for their own research on Africa – from the Asia-African axis to our shared postcolonial experiences. In their assessment, Yale-NUS’ youthful dynamism was also emblematic of Singapore and its place in the global order. In this regard, Singapore, according to Prof Jean, is emerging as the chosen model for other nation-states, including ones in the Global North; this because of the way in which it has managed a whole host of issues such as development, education, employment and environmental issues. “It’s like the metropole looking to a [former] colony for inspiration” – a delicious irony and reversal of relations, Prof John noted.
While they have spent decades living and researching on the African continent, the Comaroffs are no strangers to Singapore or to Yale-NUS. Their son, Joshua Comaroff, is an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Urban Studies) here at Yale-NUS and – together with his partner, Ms Ong Ker-Shing – was also involved in the landscape design of the campus. When the Comaroffs are not in the classroom, they spend their time playing with their Singaporean grandchildren or eating delectable local dishes. “You can’t be in Singapore and not be eating really well!”, quipped Prof John, who singled out laksa and otah-otah as two of their guilty favourites.
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Lecture: Interrogating the Global Dis/Order
New York – In 2018, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff spoke at The New School for Social Research about
“Crime, Sovereignty, and the State: the Metaphysics of Global Disorder.” “The Global South” has become a shorthand for the universe of non-European, postcolonial peoples; it is that half of the planet about which, conventionally, the “Global North” spins theories. Rarely is it seen as a source of explanations for world historical processes, past or present, let alone as the source of those processes. Yet, as much of the northern hemisphere experiences increasing fiscal inscrutability and rising inequality, state privatization, crime and corruption, ethnic conflict, authoritarian populism, and other “crises,” it looks as though it is evolving southward, so to speak. Is this so? Might the relation of “north” and “south” be more a matter of complementary inequity, more a construct of the dialectical imagination, than a hard-and-fast empirical reality? In this seminar, we shall reverse the usual order of things, addressing a range of familiar themes in order to theorize them anew from the “eccentric location” of the “south,” broadly conceived: among those themes, neoliberalism and its futures; the changing relations among capital, the state and governance; democracy, authoritarian populism, and new forms of political life; the fetishism of the law and the judicialization of the public sphere; the paradoxes of twenty-first century nationhood and its jurisdictions; new magical economies; the crisis of liberalism; the meaning of crime and the metaphysics of disorder; and the present and future political economy of identity. This re-imagining of the contemporary global dis/order renders key problems of our time at once strange and familiar, giving an ironic twist to the evolutionary pathways long assumed by social scientists.
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The Crisis and the Global South
Chicago – John Comaroff joined scholars Achille Mbembe, Ho-fung Hung, and Claudio Lumnitz in 2015 for a forum sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Comaroff focused on the 2008 economic crisis and its impact on the global south. Unlike the United States, which saw the stock market crash and housing foreclosures escalate, capital inflows to Africa increased by 16 percent, money invested in the Nigerian stock market earned a return of 16 percent, and west African banks witnessed an explosion of investments.
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Interview with John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
Between 1976 and 2010, Alan Macfarlane, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University, conducted a series of interviews with anthropologists from around the world. Two of those anthropologists included John and Jean Comaroff. They discussed their early lives, their work in the field, life under the Apartheid regime and anthropology, among other things.