John Comaroff

Essays

  • Bourgeois Biography and Colonial Historiography

    A Review Essay Dedicated to the late Michael Crowder

    Based on an account of the flogging of a white man, Phinehas McIntosh, at the behest of an African ruler in colonial Bechuanaland, and on the edited diary of a British ruler in the same colony, this review essay offers a critique of received liberal approaches to imperial history, one that treats biography and event…

  • Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience

    Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa

    This chapter explores the models of colonial domination in South Africa. It examines the making of the nonconformist missionaries to the Griqua and Tswana as agents of empire, and discusses the works of the evangelists of the London Missionary Society and Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) in South Africa. The chapter traces the missions back…

  • Through the Looking-Glass

    Colonial Encounters of the First Kind

    Notwithstanding Gramsci or Foucault. there remains a tendency, in historical sociology. to explain processes of domination in terms of political and economic forces. In the study of state formation and imperialism. realpolitik is given precedence over ritual, material factors over the moral suasion of the sign. Yet European colonialism was also a cultural project. In…

  • Of Totemism and Ethnicity:

    Consciousness, Practice and the Signs of Inequality

    Is Ethnicity an object of analysis, something to be explained? Or is it an explanatory principle capable of accounting for significant aspects of human existence? Because it has been treated in both ways, sometimes simultaneously, there is disagreement over even the most fundamental issues: What is ethnicity, one thing or many? Does it have the…

  • The Madman and the Migrant

    Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People

    At its broadest, this essay explores the nature of historical consciousness among a South African Tswana people. On the basis of the imagery of two Tswana men – a “madman” institutionalized by the apartheid regime and a former migrant laborer – it examines the content of Tswana historical consciousness as expressed in vernacular cultural practices,…

  • Sui Genderis

    Feminism, Kinship Theory, and Structural Domains

    This essay explores the ways in which gender relations in colonial African societies have conventionally been portrayed in classical anthropological studies – and how, in turn, those descriptive analyses, largely male-centric and normative, have been subjected to critique from various feminist perspectives. Based on ethnographic and historical work among Tswana peoples in Southern Africa, an…

  • Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa

    Christian evangelists were intimately involved in the colonial process in southern Africa. This essay distinguishes two dimensions of their historical role, each associated with a different form of power. In the domain of formal political processes, of the concrete exercise of power, the effect of the nonconformist mission to the Tswana, as elsewhere in Africa,…

  • The Closed Society and its Critics

    Historical Transformations in the Theory and Practice of African Ethnography

    How most persuasively to conceptualize and theorize indigenous African societies, past and present? This essay begins by interrogating the confrontation in the 1980’s – a time of paradigmatic shift in both anthropology and African Studies – between “classical” (structural functionalist) and “critical” (Marxist) approaches, noting the strengths and weaknesses of both. Reviewing four important books…

  • Dialectical Systems, History and Anthropology

    Units of Study and Questions of Theory

    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…

  • 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,…

  • Rules and Rulers

    Political Processes in a Tswana Chiefdom

    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…

  • Talking Politics

    Oratory and Authority in a Tswana Chiefdom

    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…