Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than other nation-states? The usual answer is yes. In "Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, " Jean and John Comaroff and a group of respected theorists show that the question is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth-an order that criminalizes poverty and race, entraps the "south" in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the courts. As these...
Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than other nation-states? The usual answer is yes. In "Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, " Jea...
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...
This volume presents for the first time the selected photographs of the renowned British anthropologist Isaac Schapera (1905 2003). Taken between 1929...
The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept-and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's...
The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently en...
In this sophisticated study of power and resistance, Jean Comaroff analyzes the changing predicament of the Barolong boo Ratshidi, a people on the margins of the South African state. Like others on the fringes of the modern world system, the Tshidi struggle to construct a viable order of signs and practices through which they act upon the forces that engulf them. Their dissenting Churches of Zion have provided an effective medium for reconstructing a sense of history and identity, one that protests the terms of colonial and post-colonial society and culture.
In this sophisticated study of power and resistance, Jean Comaroff analyzes the changing predicament of the Barolong boo Ratshidi, a people on the mar...
What role does ritual play in the everyday lives of modernAfricans? How are so-called "traditional" culturalforms deployed by people seeking empowerment in a world where"modernity" has failed to deliver on its promises? Some of the essays in "Modernity and Its Malcontents" address familiar anthropological issues like witchcraft, myth, and the politics of reproduction but treat them in fresh ways, situating them amidst the polyphonies of contemporary Africa. Others explore distinctly nontraditional subjects among them the Nigerian popular press and soul-eating in Niger in such a way as to...
What role does ritual play in the everyday lives of modernAfricans? How are so-called "traditional" culturalforms deployed by people seeking empowerme...
"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, and they do the job with characteristic aplomb....The first volume creates an appetite for the second."--Sally Falk Moore, American Anthropologist
"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...
In the second of a proposed three-volume study, John and Jean Comaroff continue their exploration of colonial evangelism and modernity in South Africa. Moving beyond the opening moments of the encounter between the British Nonconformist missions and the Southern Tswana peoples, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume II, explores the complex transactions--both epic and ordinary--among the various dramatis personae along this colonial frontier. The Comaroffs trace many of the major themes of twentieth-century South African history back to these formative encounters. The...
In the second of a proposed three-volume study, John and Jean Comaroff continue their exploration of colonial evangelism and modernity in South Africa...
The essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism pose a series of related questions: How are we to understand capitalism at the millennium? Is it a singular or polythetic creature? What are we to make of the culture of neoliberalism that appears to accompany it, taking on simultaneously local and translocal forms? To what extent does it make sense to describe the present juncture in world history as an age of revolution, one not unlike 1789 1848 in its transformative potential? In exploring the material and cultural dimensions of the Age of Millennial Capitalism,...
The essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism pose a series of related questions: How are we to understand capitalism at...
The essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism pose a series of related questions: How are we to understand capitalism at the millennium? Is it a singular or polythetic creature? What are we to make of the culture of neoliberalism that appears to accompany it, taking on simultaneously local and translocal forms? To what extent does it make sense to describe the present juncture in world history as an age of revolution, one not unlike 1789 1848 in its transformative potential? In exploring the material and cultural dimensions of the Age of Millennial Capitalism,...
The essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism pose a series of related questions: How are we to understand capitalism at...
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...
In "Ethnicity, Inc." anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff analyze a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. ...
