This was a ground-breaking book when it first came out. It helped catapult Jean Comaroff into the realms of anthropological stardom. Her analysis of the structural violence of life in South Africa, as experienced at the level of the social body and the individual body was (is) lucid and compelling. Her descriptions of everyday forms of resistance – domestics and their nail polish, the neo-church of Zion, for example – helped an entire generation of anthropologists understand that the body was (is) an important theoretical object of study, and that one could move beyond the very important work of Mary Douglas. Comaroff’s work, paralleled with Alan Young’s earlier work on Zar possession cults, offers important insights into the ways in which history, gender, the state, racism, religion and resilience collide with heart-wrenching and yet inspiring impacts. HyL, Goodreads
Retailer: University of Chicago Press
-
Picturing a Colonial Past
This volume presents for the first time the selected photographs of the renowned British anthropologist Isaac Schapera (1905–2003). Taken between 1929 and 1934, largely during his earliest work among the Kgatla peoples of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), the 136 images in this selection reveal an emotional engagement and aesthetic impulse that Schapera seldom expressed in his writings. Covering a broad spectrum of daily activities, they include depictions of everything from pot making, thatching, and cattle herding to village architecture, vernacular medicine, and rainmaking ceremonies. Visually fascinating and of exceptional quality, these images capture the uniqueness of an African people in a particular time and place. They are contexualized and their significance explained in Jean and John Comaroff’s insightful introduction, while Adam Kuper’s illuminating biographical sketch of Schapera provides new insight into the life of the photographer. Picturing a Colonial Past reveals not only a rare side of old Botswana, but also of one of the most famous anthropologist who worked there.
-
Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa
Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa sets out to show that civil society is an inherently protean phenomenon: that it is, simultaneously, one thing and many, absolute and refractory, actual and chimerical, a big Idea and an ill-defined popular aspiration. Therein, the Comaroffs argue, has lain its potency, past and present, as both a call-to-arms and an analytic construct; its very plasticity allows an ostensibly universal term, European in origin, to take on distinctive forms at quite different times in quite different places. And to become the subject of distinctly local struggles–especially at moments of existential, epistemic, political crisis. The essays in this volume attest, in vividly rich detail, to the diverse and unexpected deployment of the concept in, and in respect of, Africa. Their concerns range from the impact of colonial ideology and development practice on discourses of civility, through populist movements for reform of the public sphere and the substance of politics, to everyday attempts to conjure up new modes of selfhood and moral community. Together, they compose an incisive interrogation of the paradoxes and problems, the possibilities and impossibilities, raised by the invocation of the term in its many and various guises both here and elsewhere. As it turns out, the circulation of the Idea of Civil Society across Africa in recent times reveals a great deal about larger historical forces; in particular, about the radical reconfiguration of economy and society, and of the nation-state, in the post-cold war epoch. These essays also make a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology, boldly and broadly conceived, to transdisciplinary discourses on the making of the so-called “new” world order.
-
Modernity and its Malcontents
What role does ritual play in the everyday lives of modern Africans? How are so-called “traditional” cultural forms deployed by people seeking empowerment in a world where “modernity” has failed to deliver on its promises? Several of the essays in Modernity and Its Malcontents address familiar anthropological issues—among them, witchcraft, myth, and the politics of reproduction—but treat them in fresh ways, situating them amidst the realities and polyphonies of life in Africa today. Others explore distinctly nontraditional subjects—like the Nigerian popular press and soul-eating in Niger—in such a way as to confront the conceptual limits of Eurocentric social science. Together they demonstrate how ritual may be powerfully mobilized in the making of history, present, and future, subjecting such concepts as modernity, ritual, power, and history to renewed critical scrutiny. Writing about a variety of phenomena, the authors are united in the effort to pay respect to the diversity and historical specificity of local signs and practices, voices and perspectives. Their work makes a substantial and original contribution toward the historical anthropology of Africa.
-
The Politics of Custom
How are we to explain the resurgence of customary chiefs in contemporary Africa? Rather than disappearing with the tide of modernity, as many expected, indigenous sovereigns are instead a rising force, often wielding substantial power and legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the post–Cold War era—changes in which they are themselves deeply implicated.
This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises—from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers–but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that “traditional” authority enjoys in the late modern world. Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa’s history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the twenty-first century.
-
Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 1
Of Revelation and Revolution is at once a highly imaginative, richly detailed history of colonialism, Christianity, and consciousness in South Africa, and a theoretically challenging consideration of the most difficult questions posed by the nature of social experience. In this first of two volumes, Jean and John Comaroff explore the early phases of the encounter between British missionaries and the Tswana peoples of the South African Frontier. Tracing the cultural backgrounds of both parties, they pay particular attention to the rise of European modernity and its colonizing impulse, to the contemporary images of Africans embedded in that impulse, and to the complex worlds of precolonial Africa. They show how the efforts of evangelists to change the social and material practices of the Tswana produced new forms of consciousness in both colonizer and colonized – and subtle forms of agency, appropriation, and resistance on the part of the latter. The Comaroffs grapple in exciting new ways with issues of power and resistance, agency and intention, ideology and hegemony, culture and materiality that have long vexed social scientists and humanists They reveal how structures of inequality in the colonial encounter were often fashioned as much by quiet means of domination as by naked violence. In reflecting on “the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonization,” the Comaroffs provide fresh insight into the dialectics of culture and power that shape all historical processes.
-
Law and Disorder in the Postcolony
From Keynote Roundtable, Law and Society Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: Celebrating Ten Years in Print and Practice,” 2016.
Are postcolonies in Africa and elsewhere haunted more by unregulated violence, un/civil warfare, and disorder than are other twenty-first century nation-states? The reflex answer to this question, from critical scholars, conservative intellectuals, and the popular media, is yes. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony argues that the question itself is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their situation in a contemporary global order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth – an order that tends to criminalize poverty, race, and social marginality, entraps the global “south” in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the law. But, as these essays show, there is another side to the story. While many postcolonies evince signs of endemic disorder, they also fetishize the law, its ways and means. Even where they are mocked and mimicked, those ways and means are often central to the politics of everyday engagement, to practies of authority and citizenship, to the interaction of states and subjects. New constitutions are repeatedly written, appeals to rights repeatedly made, claims of material and moral inequity repeatedly litigated. How is this to be explained, this coincidence of disorder with a fixation on law? And, more generally, what does it tell us of more general significance about the unfolding history of the nation-state? Law and Disorder in the Postcolony addresses these questions, entering into dialogue with such theorists as Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Carl Schmitt. It also demonstrates how postcolonies have become especially critical sites for the production of social theory, not least because they are harbingers of a global future under construction. -
Ethnicity, Inc.
The politics of cultural identity, far from receding with the modernity, appears to have taken on new force in the wake of the cold war — especially with the triumphal rise of neoliberal capitalism on a global scale. This has yielded many efforts to explain the continued salience of ethnicity in a “new” world order that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was widely predicted to dissolve difference in the face of global flows of people, objects, currencies, signs, styles, desires. Less attention, however, has been paid to a subtle shift in the nature of ethnicity: its commodification. This lecture is devoted to showing that, increasingly, ethnic groups across the planet are beginning to act like corporations that own a “natural” copyright to their “culture” and “cultural products” — framed in terms, also, of heritage and indigenous knowledge — which they protect, often by recourse to the law, and on which they capitalize in much the same way as do incorporated businesses in the private sector. Why is this occurring? What are its political, economic, social, and ethical consequences? How is it transforming the nature of ethnicity and citizenship in the nation-state? And what are its theoretical implications for understanding such foundational social science concepts as culture and identity? It is these questions, finally, that Ethnicity, Inc. is addressed. In Ethnicity, Inc. anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff analyze a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. Through a wide-ranging exploration of the changing relationship between culture and the market, they address a pressing question: Wherein lies the future of ethnicity? Their account begins in South Africa, with the incorporation of an ethno-business in venture capital by a group of traditional African chiefs. But their horizons are global: Native American casinos; Scotland’s efforts to brand itself; a Zulu ethno-theme park named Shakaland; a world religion declared to be intellectual property; a chiefdom made into a global business by means of its platinum holdings; San “Bushmen” with patent rights potentially worth millions of dollars; nations acting as commercial enterprises; and the rapid growth of marketing firms that target specific ethnic populations are just some of the diverse examples that fall under the Comaroffs’ incisive scrutiny. These phenomena range from the disturbing through the intriguing to the absurd. Through them, the Comaroffs trace the contradictory effects of neoliberalism as it transforms identities and social being across the globe. Ethnicity, Inc. is a penetrating account of the ways in which ethnic populations are remaking themselves in the image of the corporation—while corporations coopt ethnic practices to open up new markets and regimes of consumption. Intellectually rigorous but leavened with wit, this is a powerful, highly original portrayal of a new world being born in a tectonic collision of culture, capitalism, and identity.