John Comaroff

Essays

  • Theory from the South

    or, Reading the Global Order from the Antipodes

    There appears to be a growing echo, slowly reverberating around the world, that, for good, ill, or both, Africa is the future, a harbinger of Europe’s history-to-come. Experts may debate the reasons for this: among them, a significant population bulge heavily skewed toward youth; an urban “revolution” unique in the current era; burgeoning consumer markets,…

  • Theory from the South

    How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa

    There appears to be a growing echo, slowly reverberating around the world, that, for good, ill, or both, Africa is the future, a harbinger of Europe’s history-to-come. Experts may debate the reasons for this: among them, a significant population bulge heavily skewed toward youth; an urban “revolution” unique in the current era; burgeoning consumer markets,…

  • The End of Neoliberalism

    What is Left of the Left?

    Two Marks, neither of them Marxist or even Marxoid, set the coordinates of my remarks today. The one, Mark Twain, notwithstanding his towering literary legacy, has become an American cliche for his famous one-liner about untimely obituaries and deaths-prematurely-pronounced – in particular, the deaths of people who evince distinctly more vigor than mortis. The other…

  • The End of Anthropology, Again

    On the Future of an In/discipline

    The “End of Anthropology” has been predicted many times, and for many different reasons – among them, its disappearing object study, its political imbrication in colonialism, the loss of its distinctive concepts, and the effects of globalization in diffusing its received subject matter. And yet, both institutionally and discursively, the discipline is very much alive,…

  • Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology

    Law and Religion in the 21st Century

    Abstract: Religion has always been intimately connected to law. Con- versely, modern secular law, born of the separation of lex naturae from lex dei, has always been deeply theological. However, with transforma- tions in the construction of the nation-state and changes in the socio- political scaffolding of the global order, the mutual infusion of law…

  • Ethnicity, Inc.

    On Indignity and its Interpellations

    PROLOGUE: toward the ethnologist-future 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.…

  • Reflections on the Anthropology of Law, Governance and Sovereignty

    I. PROLEGOMENON Just over a quarter century ago, Simon Roberts and John Comaroff opened Rules and Processes, their study of African jurisprudence, with a statement that did not win them many friends among their colleagues at the time. “It is doubtful,” they wrote (1981:3), “whether [legal anthropology] should exist at all.” Their point was not…

  • Nations With/out Borders:

    Neoliberalism and the Problem of Belonging in Africa, and Beyond

    Anthropologists are fond of stories and riddles. The stranger, the more puzzling, the better. So let us first pose a riddle, then tell a story. The riddle: What might the Nuer, a remote Nilotic people in the southern Sudan, have to do with Carl Schmitt, the noted German philosopher, notorious apologist for Nazism, and, of…

  • Popular Justice in the New South Africa

    Policing the Boundaries of Freedom

    For all the hope stirred by the end of apartheid, the transition to democracy in South Africa, beginning in 1994, opened up a social and moral vacuum—not to mention a huge wealth-gap—in which violence and disorder, real and imagined, became commonplace. By the late 1990s, a police service regarded as incompetent, toothless, and overzealously committed…

  • Figuring Crime

    Quantifacts and the Production of the Unreal

    Nothing rings with more authority to South African ears than a crime statistic. It is the music of our spheres: what the sound of an accordion is to a Marseilles sailor, or the jaunty plinkety-plunk of the banjo to a Louisiana woodsman, so is the rhythmic, measured refrain of a crime statistic to a South…

  • Beasts, Banknotes, and the Color of Money in Colonial South Africa

    Encounters between different regimes of value – regimes divided by cultural space and time – presume mediation, translation and communication, and, therefore, currencies, at once verbal and material, that objectify them. This in turn, depends on one thing above all else: on mechanisms of commensuration, mechanisms that render negotiable otherwise inimical, apparently intransitive, orders of signs…

  • Reflections on Youth, From the Past to the Postcolony

    PROLEGOMENON …philosophy does not concern itself with children. It leaves  them  to pedagogy, where they’re not in very good hands. Philosophy has forgotten about children. Bernhard Schlink, The Reader, p.141 There has long been a tendency in the public discourse of the West to speak of youth as a transhistorical, transcultural category. As if it…

  • Notes on Anthropological Method, Mainly in the Key of E

    “There is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method – and that is impossible,”  Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard. Prolegomenon It is exceptionally difficult to address questions of method for anthropology at large unless one reduces the field to a caricature of itself. To wit, the discipline – if anything so obviously polytheistic, anything so…

  • Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa

    Critical Perspectives

    This essay explores the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. It offers a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it across the continent. Drawing on the comparative literature in…

  • Policing Culture, Cultural Policing

    Law and Social Order in Postcolonial South Africa

    This study transgresses the received distinction between two genres: the scholarly essay and the grant proposal. An extended reflection on a research endeavor still in progress, it interrogates the methodological and conceptual questions raised, ab initio, by the effort to explore and explain an unusually perplexing phenomenon: the dramatic rise, in post-apartheid South Africa, of…

  • Criminal Obsessions, After Foucault:

    Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder

    “Perhaps it is because our lives are so chaotic, so filled with unsol- ved mysteries, incomplete stories, uncaught murderers that crime fiction is so popular. I believe that is why South Africans are so hooked on American TV crime series…because somewhere, some- how, someone is solving crimes. At least in fiction justice is served”….Michael Williams, The…

  • Criminal Justice, Cultural Justice:

    The Limits of Liberalism and the Pragmatics of Difference in the New South Africa

    What are the limits of liberalism in accommodating the growing demands of difference? Can a Euromodernist nation-state, founded on “One Law,” infuse itself with another, an African jurisprudence? And how is it to deal with cultural practices deemed “dangerous” by the canons of enlightenment reason? These questions are especially urgent in postcolonies like South Africa,…

  • Reflections on Liberalism, Policulturalism, and ID-ology

    Citizenship and Difference in South Africa

    How do the nation-states of the twenty-first century – nation-states increasingly forced to come to terms with the ethnic heterogeneity of their citizens – deal with the problem of cultural difference? How, in particular, does the Constitution of post-apartheid South Africa – widely believed to be the most enlightened in the contemporary world, the most…

  • Transparent Fictions, or the Conspiracies of a Liberal Imagination

    An Afterward

    “Only connect.” E.M. Forster, Howard’s End Ours, it appears, is an Age of Obsessions. It is an age in which people almost everywhere seem preoccupied, simultaneously, with transparency and conspiracy. With the lightness and darkness of being. So much is this so that, in 2001, a year that has long signified the cinematic surreal, an…

  • Ethnography on an Awkward Scale

    Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction

    In what ways has the movement of anthropology off the reservation, and off the island, challenged the ethnographic practice that has historically been its raison d’être? How has the increasing historicization of the discipline, and its encounters with the variegated effects of globalization, altered its methodological orientations and strategies? How should those orientations and strategies…