The American Historical Review Array

The American Historical Review Array

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 issued a challenge to both anthropologists and historians to rethink their understanding of the construction of modernity…[T]hese critical works of scholarship and imagination have an importance far beyond their immediate subject matter.