Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2

Abstract

Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. JOHN L. COMAROFF and JEAN COMAROFF. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997; 588 pp. This is a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, sequel to much-discussed Of revelation and revolution, Volume one: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. While Volume One dealt primarily with initial encounter between British evangelists and Southern Tswana of South Africa, Volume Two moves story along, both chronologically and thematically, to how, over course of a century, encounter reshaped both Southern Tswana and British. In process Comaroffs move beyond realm of the long conversation to examine changes in material realities and notions of production, value, dress, architecture, medicine, and rights, and hybrid form: which resulted. But overarching theme of Volume One runs through Volume Two as well: that colonialism is best conceptualized as a cultural process rendered through everyday and mundane, and that this process is exemplified in civilizing project of missionaries. As with their first volume, this one is packed with original, occasionally brilliant, insights. While a sense of chronology occasionally falls victim to authors' determination not to write a history of events - something as apocalyptic (p. 210) as rinderpest is mentioned only sporadically, in Chapters 3 and 4 - authors deal to a greater extent than before with economic and political processes of colonialism. The material realities of production, labor migration, and people's health are discussed in almost as much depth as creation of modernist subjects and flow and counterflow of signs and objects (p. 5). The study ranges widely across historical and temporal landscape. We are treated to imaginative analyses of ways in which value systems grounded in cattle and cash became linked, conservatism of Southern Tswana women's clothing, European appropriations of African healing, and ways in which African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party are each heir to a particular strand of colonial discourses on rights. Yet - also as with Volume One - authors ultimately offer a better sense of European world than Southern Tswana world. The thematic chapters usually begin with a thoughful examination of British context, then move reader to terrain on which Tswana and British meet, with no comparable sense of what pre-existed arrival of British missionaries in region. This imbalance, which was widely criticized by Africanists after publication of Volume One, is less pronounced here, perhaps because documentary record is vastly richer for this later period. But problematic implications for Volume One lurk in this volume as well. For example, authors argue that three classes of Tswana emerging as a result of their encounter with evangelists and colonial economies upper, middle, and lower peasantries -- generally paralleled differences in people's domestication of European commodities, healing, notions of production and rights, and Gospel. …