Reviews

Work of this quality will likely exercise a wide influence among cultural historians.

This captivatingly provocative book falls firmly into the current genre of critical ethnographic and methodological literature in anthropology. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination is a tour de force of the ethnographic enterprise and attempts to locate ethnography squarely within the boundaries of the broader historical contexts which have shaped the discipline of anthropology in all […]

Back cover of volume Just over a decade after the publication of Ethnicity, Inc., the heady cocktail of commoditization, culture, and corporation originally modelled there has only further entangled itself in global social processes. This stunning new collection traces myriad extensions and analogs of ethnocommodities within contemporary late capitalism, while courageously exploring the limits of […]

While offering new insights into the resurgence of chiefs (indigenous sovereigns) in contemporary Africa, the Politics of Custom also presents an illuminating complex counterpoint of the interplay of tradition and modernity, showcasing that chiefship is neither wholly of the state nor of the customary, but is always interlinked. As the editors point out in their […]

The Politics of Custom is an incisive and original investigation of the stubbornly persistent role played by traditional authorities in modern Africa. Featuring a stellar cast of contributors and a superb synthetic introduction by the editors, this book is a major contribution that will appeal to a broad audience.

The publication of Jean and John Comaroff’s monumental two-volume study of colonialism and religion in South Africa, Of Revelation and Revolution, was a signal event in historical anthropology in the 1990s. Pathbreaking in substance as well as method, the books analyze the colonial encounter in South Africa and explain its contemporary consequences. The two anthropologists […]

This second volume is a tour de force. As in volume 1, the Comaroffs explore the ways in which consciousness is ‘made and unmade,’ and the relationship between culture, consciousness, and ideology. The argument is a brilliant and sustained demonstration of the complexities and unanticipated outcomes of the colonial encounter for both sides. It is […]

Defining their enterprise as more in the direction of poetics than of prosaics, the Comaroffs free themselves to analyze a vivid series of images and events as objects of analysis. These they mine for clues to the 19th-century contents of the British imagination and of Tswana minds. They are themselves imagining the imagination of others, […]

The two volumes of Jean and John Comaroff’s Of Revelation and Revolution (RR) are a tour de force, and raise major questions about the nature of consciousness and the impact of modernity over the past two centuries…I read both volumes of RR with a rare sense of exhilaration. The scope and span are extraordinary, as […]

This sophisticated study should ideally prevent colonialism from ever again being reduced to a simplistic paradigm of domination and resistance…[T]he Comaroffs have succeeded in writing a richly creative book that no student of the colonial encounter anywhere in the world can afford to ignore.