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...
"Rules and Processes" is at once a compelling essay in social theory and a pathbreaking ethnography of dispute in an African society. On the basis of a sensitive study of the Tswana of southern Africa, John Comaroff and Simon Roberts challenge most of the orthodoxies of legal anthropology. They argue that the social world, and the dispute processes that occur within it, are given form and meaning by a dialectical relationship between sociocultural structures and individual experience. The authors explore in a novel way the relations between culture and ideology, system and practice, social...
"Rules and Processes" is at once a compelling essay in social theory and a pathbreaking ethnography of dispute in an African society. On the basis of ...
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...
When the author first went to Botswana in the early 1980s to study the impact a major land reform had on rural life in this impoverished African country, social theory and ethnographic practice seemed solid and convincing. A decade later, and again in 1999, she returned to Bostwana and to the Tswapong people whose lives she had shared, and she encountered not only a rapidly shifting social reality, but she also began to ask questions that stemmed from and were shaped by theoretical frames quite different from those she had employed in her earlier work. At the center of the narrative that runs...
When the author first went to Botswana in the early 1980s to study the impact a major land reform had on rural life in this impoverished African count...
