Retirement Celebration For John And Jean Comaroff

An international retirement celebration was held to honor the long, widely celebrated careers of John and Jean Comaroff on July 6, 2024. Held on zoom and timed to permit participants to join from across the world, over one hundred and twenty-five took part; many who could not sent messages of appreciation and congratulation. Some forty spoke. They included former and present students, colleagues, and comrades from North and South America, Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa. Over almost four hours, they offered reminiscences spanning almost fifty years – many of them deeply moving – of the impact of the Comaroffs on their lives and their careers, stressing the ways in which they were encouraged to find their own unique voices, to stretch their intellectual ambitions and endeavors to the full, to be unafraid to take on tough challenges and unpopular positions. Words that resounded throughout were generosity, kindness, care, intellectual rigor, scholarly legacy. So did humorous references to the Comaroffs’ famed (very lengthy) letters of reference, the sheer number of their doctoral advisees, their quick responses to even the most untimely and unlikely student requests, and the mystery of when, if ever, they slept. Jean and John ended the event by expressing their gratitude not just for the sumptuous words of praise and the insightful comments about their scholarly oeuvre, but for everything that they have learned from their from students, from their colleagues and collaborators, from their children, Josh and Jane – both scholars of note in their own right – and from those with whom they built the scholarly circle around them at Chicago and Harvard. Emphasizing the difficult, destructive challenges confronting academia and the planet at large, they made a plea for opening up possibilities in the face of the impossible, for scholarship committed to the pursuit of a more human, equal and equitable world. For hope against despair.