Developing an idea of his previous book Give a Man a Fish (2015), the new publication by James Ferguson deepens the theoretical basis for such a distributive policy as universal basic income. The author considers it necessary to review the prevailing grounds for the distribution of resources, namely labor and citizenship. Referring to materials from southern Africa and scholarly works about huntergatherer societies, Ferguson introduces yet another ground for distribution — presence. A rather open-ended “Being here, among us” in a literal sense of the word can be enough to guarantee the rightful share. Providing anthropological arguments Ferguson not only explains the necessity and possibility of a new global distributive policy, but also declares that the analytical potential of the presence concept should be developed. In the review this approach is associated with the theory from the south by John and Jean Comaroff. Besides, from the reviewer’s point of view, in Presence and Social Obligation Ferguson creates one possible theoretical ground for anarchism. Therefore it is noted that the book under review could be a starting point for rethinking the place and the role of anthropology in political projects.

This article discusses the centrality of 1 Kings 2:15 for the interpretation of the entire text of 1 Kings 2 and its function in constructing an imaginative picture of a friendly communication style as part of the ruler’s policy in running his government. To achieve this goal, I use Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of phenomenology, which is sharpened by John Comaroff’s and Jean Comaroff’s hermeneutics of suspicion. I will use this perspective as a framework for Oliver Glanz’s shifting participant theory as a basis for analysis of 1 Kings 2:15. The result is a friendly and generous communication style in a balanced and proportional way.

Since the turn of the millennium, the African continent has been extremely active in producing African futures. These are part of the multiple non-western modernities existing simultaneously; modernities of revolution, reform, or restitution. This contribution adds to the debate by analysing four recent concepts along four axes: the representation of time and space, the initiators behind those four concepts, and the concepts’ social inclusiveness. The paper first discusses the idea of the “African Renaissance,” which has been proposed as official government policy in South Africa and has given shape to Pan-African political bodies. Second, “Afrotopia” is a term coined by the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr that emphasises identity politics. Third, “Afropolitanism” proposes an “African-style” modernity as seen in the works of Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall and is also likened to John and Jean Comaroff's writings on “Afromodernity.” Finally, “Afrofuturism” emerged in relation to science fiction literature and digital visual arts and uses the virtual sphere to address an international audience.

Commentaire/Commentary: Monstrous Desires and Moral Disquiet: Reflections on Jean Comaroff’s "Consuming Passions: Child Abuse, Fetishism, and ’The New World Order’". An article from journal Culture (Volume 17, Number 1-2, 1997, pp. 5-139), on Érudit.

John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, eds. The Politics of Custom――Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa――. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 2018 viii+361 p.

Notes on Contributors

Previous articleNext article FreeIn MemoriamA timely encounter and a lossMariane C. FermeMariane C. FermeUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author University of California, BerkeleyPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Memoriam, Nancy Munn (April 13, 1931–January 20, 2020).We take the unprecedented step of publishing a review by Nancy Munn alongside Jens Kjaerulff’s article, for which it was written. We recognize the remarkable timing of a particular conjuncture of events—Nancy’s passing some three months after submitting her review—and want to share with our readers a model of respectful and enabling intellectual engagement between reviewer and author.On January 20, 2020, while Jens Kjaerulff’s article was in production, Nancy Munn died in a Chicago hospital. I had asked her to review Kjaerulff’s article, “Situating Time: New Technologies at Work, a Perspective from Alfred Gell’s Oeuvre,” a few months back. She agreed to do so, despite the pressure she felt to complete her own book. What arrived via email in late October 2019—accompanied by a request to have her “name as the source of this report made available to the author,” if that was possible—were six dense, single-spaced pages of analysis that made the Hau editorial collective unanimously express the desire to publish her review along with the article. I emailed Nancy for permission to do so, but she was already ill and in hospital and could not respond. I am grateful to Anne Chien, Jean Comaroff, Judith Farquhar, Jennifer Cole, and Nancy’s friends and colleagues for caring and accompanying her, and for permission to publish her piece, one of the last things she wrote.Having entered an intellectual dialogue with an anonymous author through the double-blind peer review process, Nancy Munn, this exemplary scholar’s scholar, delved deeply not only into the author’s analysis of ethnographic case material and theoretical sources—reprising in particular Gell’s work down to verse, chapter, and page—but also into the sources of Kjaerulff’s sources (Husserl, in particular), which were also key interlocutors for her own work on the anthropology of time. Her gentle parentheticals suggested revisions to strengthen further what she deemed “an exceptional paper.” She encouraged the author to make his claims bolder, and to structure content and conclusions to highlight what she thought was an original and deep analysis of the ways in which Gell’s thought could encompass temporalities of labor in the Danish IT economy.In her review, Munn engages deeply with the theoretical analysis, but is also always attentive to its fit with the evidentiary details (this is another category of parenthetical queries to the author in the text that follows: requests for clarification of ethnographic details, such as whether IT worker “Edward” works at home or in an office, and under what circumstances, for instance). There is another twist in the timeline of this story, which emerged after I informed Kjaerulff of Nancy’s passing. His response referred to the “inner dialogues” he had had over the years with her work on questions of time and value, particularly surrounding this piece. Kjaerulff wrote that he found that Gell’s book on time had been “misunderstood, misrepresented, and … neglected,” and this was a key reason for working through its main arguments in analyzing his Danish ethnographic setting. Gell—whose untimely death deprived him of the opportunity to build upon his two signal books—and Munn shared scholarly interests in time and aesthetics, as well as ethnographic research in overlapping parts of the world. They were important interlocutors for each other’s work. In a strange twist of fate, until finding a sympathetic reviewer in Munn, Kjaerulff’s article itself almost risked the fate of Gell’s work, due to delays in editorial decisions and reviewer mismatches at other publications. “It felt like a vindication, not only of my manuscript, but in effect also of Gell’s book on time”—he wrote—that Munn was the reviewer to finally see the value in his article. A timely encounter of writer and reader, indeed.Central to Nancy’s life work was the notion that space and time are always necessarily commingled. She worked through her foundational ideas about this relationship in The fame of Gawa (1986), originally delivered as the Henry Lewis Morgan lectures at the University of Rochester. In the book, she adopted C. S. Peirce’s concept of “qualisigns”—namely, “certain embodied qualities that are components of a given intersubjective spacetime … whose positive or negative value they signify” (Munn 1986: 17)—to analyze Kula prestige objects, foods, canoes, elements, and people, as well as of processes such as consumption and exchange. Intersubjective and spatiotemporal elements informed the qualities of water (light) in contrast with earth (heavy), and the bundled qualisigns associated with these elements informed the properties of canoes and navigation in an aqueous domain on the one hand, in contrast with yams and their farming on land on the other hand.The seasons of trips to visit trading partners on other islands on Gawan canoes, the durability of particular substances and ephemerality of others, the scope of circulation of a particular named Kula valuable are integral to the production of something as intangible and yet material and consequential as fame. Her insight that fame, or reputation, and the relations produced or endangered by its qualities were really the driving force of the expansive Kula circuit was the most original contribution to the study of this Melanesian phenomenon since the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski 1922). As a student in several of her seminars at the University of Chicago during the years leading up to the publication of The fame of Gawa, my thinking was profoundly shaped by Munn’s elaboration of the spatiotemporal dimensions of material substances and places in the making of meaning.Nancy Munn also wrote important articles on the subject of time, including “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay” (Annual Review of Anthropology, 1992). More recently, “The ‘Becoming-Past’ of Places: Spacetime and Memory in Nineteenth-Century, Pre-Civil War New York,” published in this journal’s pages in 2013, anchored these thoughts in her ethnographic preoccupation with the historical sites of New York City, her hometown. At a time of rapid change in which New York was turning from a sprawling urban-country hybrid space into a planned city on a grid, its inhabitants often wrote in the media and other venues about how spaces in which classic buildings were about to be torn down to make way for streets and avenues would conjure their memories in the future. Unable to keep pace with change, they imagined the buildings they could still see as already gone. Munn evoked in imaginative prose the accelerated spatiotemporal experiences of New Yorkers in the midst of industrialization.William F. Hanks, a former colleague of hers at the University of Chicago, wrote the following upon hearing of her death:Nancy and I grew close through teaching together and sharing our work. She played a formative role in shaping my thinking—just at the time when I was rethinking and expanding outward in anthropology. As I came to know practice theory and [Pierre] Bourdieu, I learned that he really respected her also, and she remains for me a complete master of ethnology and of scholarly passion. I think of her rocking chair with the portable work-surface she would put on the armrests like a tray, on which to work. And all the Post-its with notes that bristled from whatever books she was reading. It brings to mind Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm”:The house was quiet and the world was calm.The reader became the book; and summer nightWas like the conscious being of the book.The house was quiet and the world was calm.The words were spoken as if there was no book,Except that the reader leaned above the page, …There is something in the space projected in this poem that is so quiet and concentrated, so patient and methodical, and such a good fit to Nancy—leaning over a book on a summer evening in the front room of her apartment.Books (and student papers) “bristling” with Post-its, the patient, focused concentration, the seriousness of purpose of Nancy’s intellectual engagements made her a formidable—and sometimes frightening—interlocutor in the memory of this former graduate student. But any fear of her critical eye on one’s own work was tempered by the demands she placed on her own, and by her whimsical side—the collector of Victorian children’s books, outlandish toys, and the cheerful flotsam and jetsam of Melanesian fish traps and seafaring objects in her apartment’s front room.Nancy Munn will be remembered with affection by many whose lives and thinking she touched. She was a model of ethical and thoughtful engagement with intellectuals, regardless of institutional position, perhaps precisely because she was attentive to the ways in which fame builds and destroys social reputations.Figure 1. Nancy Munn, Peninsula Hotel, Chicago, 2015. Photo credit: Jennifer Cole.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointReferencesMalinowski, Bronisław. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMunn, Nancy. 1986. The fame of Gawa: A symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 1992. “The cultural anthropology of time: A critical essay.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21:93–123.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 2013. “The ‘becoming-past’ of places: Spacetime and memory in nineteenth-century, pre-Civil War New York.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (2): 359–80.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarStevens, Wallace. 1990. “The house was quiet and the world was calm.” In The collected poems, 358. New York: Vintage Books.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 10, Number 1Spring 2020 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709199 © 2020 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

ABSTRACT This paper revisits some of the writing of E.P. Thompson, a British historian held to have been influential in the development of social history in South Africa. Differently to debates that seek to establish the extent of his direct influence, the paper is concerned with the concepts Thompson used, and seeks to understand his theory and method for approaching historical transformation. The paper suggests that Thompson’s reception in South African studies has generally ignored his materialism and used his concepts empirically without reckoning with some of their broad theoretical arguments. The paper then shows how Thompson’s Marxian critique resonates with the historical anthropology of Jean and John Comaroff. Yet, the paper shows, this historical anthropology has been the object of attack by social history for its alleged failure to contextualise. The paper argues that what is at stake in this Africanist debate are two understandings of context that turn on the character of the empirical in research and the place of capitalism in contemporary studies of South Africa.

Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, The Truth about Crime: sovereignty, knowledge, social order. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press (hb US27.50 – 978 0 226 42491 0). 2016, xix + 347 pp. - Volume 89 Issue 4

John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, editors. The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. viii + 361 pp. Figures. Index. $105. Cloth. ISBN: 978-0-226-51076-7. - Volume 62 Issue 4

ABSTRACT In the postcolonial South African graphic novel Rebirth, the workings of capital are established in the figure of the vampire. But the comic is not derivative; it does not simply offer another instantiation of the monstrous lord draining his victimized serfs of their life source – or, in the case of the postcolonial narrative, the colonial patriarch parasitically feasting off of the colonizers’ land and culture. Rebirth does effectively and importantly employ the vampire figure to draw a line from the violently exploitative commercial interests of seventeenth-century charter companies to that of current-day corporate power, which dominates through consumer culture. Intriguingly, though, the graphic novel also features a class of vampires that has only recently begun to be explored, vampires that are victimized and endangered – made mortal through an immune deficiency virus – even as they remain inherently predatory and dangerous. We argue that a distribution of vampires across class, race and gender types illustrates ‘millennial capitalism’ as it has been defined by Jean and John Comaroff – an entangling variation that may only be confronted from a place of complicity. The comic style draws the reader into that complicity as much as the comic's characters exhibit it.

Reviewed by: The Truth about Crime: sovereignty, knowledge and social order by Jean Comaroff, John L Comaroff Lizette Lancaster (bio) Jean Comaroff and John L Comaroff (2017) The Truth about Crime: sovereignty, knowledge and social order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Johannesburg: Wits University Press Most South Africans deeply believe that South African crime and violence levels are ‘out of control’. Equally profound is the fear, moral panic and outrage associated with these perceived levels of crime. For many, crime stands distinct from, although not unrelated to, growing inequality, persistent poverty and unemployment, sustained structural violence, entrenched corruption and continued failure of governance systems to deliver services guaranteed under the Constitution. Furthermore, it seems nothing is working to reduce these sustained levels of crime and violence. Nationally and internationally, crime has become an obsession that redefined our arts, our politics, our markets, our science and technology. This global preoccupation with crime and punishment is evidenced by the proliferation of crime dramas. In stark contrast to the lived reality, in these crime stories, the mystery is solved, perpetrators caught and brought to justice, thus restoring the social order. Prominent South African-born anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John L Comaroff provide hard-hitting commentary on the stark realities of a post-apartheid democratic South Africa and its struggle to deal with crime. Through the lens of anthropology, The Truth about Crime provides a fascinating academic contribution not only to the field of anthropology but also criminology. The authors use their substantial knowledge of South Africa, the United States of America and other global settings to [End Page 139] draw parallels. Their unique and fresh insights have tremendous relevance to the public discourse in South Africa. What is offered makes us think differently about what we think we know about crime. This book brilliantly contextualises the modern dilemma faced by our society. It draws on the ideological roots of modern-day law enforcement and incarceration. The authors rightfully illustrate how South Africa and many modern societies define themselves against crime in the pursuit of the illusive social order and the belief in the sovereignty of the state. Comaroff and Comaroff argue that insights about crime contribute to an improved understanding of the relationship between capital, governance, and the state. At its heart, the question posed is what exactly lies beneath this crime fixation? The answers proposed require a complete reconsideration of the construct of crime. What is the meaning of crime, who are the perpetrators, who are the guardians and what does this say about criminal justice in the present? While these ‘big questions’ posed in the book remain largely rhetorical, it provides complex commentary on how perceptions of crime impact on or are impacted on by class, race, gender, generation, law and violence itself. A fundamental feature of the book is the relationship between crime and policing. The authors show convincingly how the police are unable to deal with their ‘impossible’ mandate, which has been flawed since its conception. The line between law-making, law-breaking and law enforcement has become excessively blurred by harsh authoritarian militarised policing, juxtaposed with liberalist managerial approaches to law enforcement and the outsourcing of physical security. This outsourcing takes place not only through privatisation to the commercial sector but also through its dereliction of duty to, and struggle to be accepted by, ‘communities’ leading ultimately to entrenched community self-protection practices. What is patently clear is that policing and all the tools of the trade such as statistics and the technology employed cannot bring about social order effectively, let alone facilitate the prevention of crime or minimise persistent levels of anxiety. Yet the point is made very successfully that fear of crime is often disproportionate to risk. In reality, fear is rooted in increasing distrust and deep suspicion of established authority. Rising global and local perceptions of insecurity and cynicism speak of a rapidly changing world, crushed expectations of a ‘good life’ and the search for identity, given that the democratic [End Page 140] transition has not brought about equality, economic growth or social justice for many. Rather, disenchantment with the state is growing, and the state is outsourcing its responsibility to the private sector and...

Partindo da noção de multiculturalismo como um fenômeno relacionado a ideias e políticas estatais que promovem a interação e comunicação entre os grupos étnicos de uma mesma sociedade (BAUMANN, 1996), este ensaio examina dois livros de interesse. Em primeiro lugar, Ranger Gressgård, Multicultural Dialogue. Dilemnas, Pardoxes, Conflicts (2010), que analiza a questão do multiculturalismo europeu desde a coexistência das diferenças (culturais) num mesmo espaço político nacional; em segundo lugar, o livro de John e Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc (2009), uma controversa proposta que nos ajuda a entender e a conceitualizar a noção de etnicidade, que se distancia daquela concepção essencialista, ontológica, da cultura, aprofundando-se mais na capacidade dos grupos humanos para mercantizá-la como produto de consumo.

The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order. By Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.In their most recent book, anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff consider how and policing have transformed modern societies around world and colonized our imaginations. The Truth about Crime offers a powerful account about crime, policing, and modern state. The book is a anthropology that guides reader towards understanding what precisely is different or new about and punishment in modern societies. Recognizing how and policing have become constitutive of our everyday lives, Jean and John L. Comaroff trace how crime-in particular policing as a core function of criminal justice system-are constitutive of contemporary life. With special attention on United States and South Africa, book is theoretically sharp and expansive, and consolidates their previous work on law, disorder, governance, citizenship, and postcolonial state. It is an important contribution that offers scholars across fields of law, criminology, anthropology, political science, sociology, and human rights a clear understanding about social production and increasing fear of lawlessness and criminality in societies.While book focuses on contemporary political events, authors offer a rich unorthodox historical angle and classic texts of crime, policing, violence, and power to examine how human societies in modern era became preoccupied with crime. Focusing on nature of policing, book traces relation between sovereignty (read authoritative order) and criminality, and addresses how became an integral part of societies. Stressing importance of connecting crime, policing, and criminal justice system with existing social compositions of class, race, gender, and (in case of South Africa) ethnicity, authors offer significant insight about shifting relations and triangulation of capital, state, and governance.The book is divided into two parts. Part One is titled Crime, Capital, and Metaphysics of Disorder: An Overview, in Three Movements and undertakes to offer big picture. Delving into historical processes in era of capitalism, authors trace shift in foundational elements of our social, economic, political juridical, ethical, and cultural universe with an aim to trace shift in functions of crime, policing, and, governance. The three subsections 1.1-1.3 weave in contemporary experiences of and policing in United States and South Africa. Focusing on privatization of correctional institutions that render telecommunication and financial services to generate profit and businesses for corporations, authors argue that these developments in era of high capitalism indicate the rise of penal state (45), with a turn toward managerial model of enforcing authority and order. Taking South Africa as an example to understand how structures of contemporary and policing is a global experience, authors explain public fixation on crime (49) and how this has become discursive medium (52) to speak about limits and excesses of government. …

Lagos has recently become the focus of much scholarly interest, with a strong emphasis placed on the city as crucible of global innovation. Rem Koolhaas, in his well-known formulation of Lagos has, for example, memorably theorised the city as an African megalopolis “at the forefront of globalising modernity.” Contemporary African artists have similarly begun, in recent years, to place Africa at the vanguard of planetary discourse, producing a new wave of cultural output that signals the continent as a site from which to imagine the emergence of future worlds. Salient to this growing body of work are the writings of Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, who writes in the register of “African science fiction.” This article takes Lagos as its focus by considering its futuristic representation in Okorafor’s novel Lagoon (2014). Drawing on John and Jean Comaroff’s theories of the city “as future lab to be learned from,” I suggest that it is from Okorafor’s account of Lagos, infused with a series of connections between magic and modern, city and sea, global and local, human and nonhuman, that the novel imagines the potential birthing of a new world order. Given the vital presence of nonhuman interlocutors in Okorafor’s text, this article concludes by arguing that Lagoon merits consideration within the growing field of Anthropocenic studies.

Reviewed by: Negative Cosmopolitanism: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization ed. by Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky Jesse Arseneault Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky, eds. Negative Cosmopolitanism: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization. McGill-Queen's up, 2017. viii + 408 pp. $39.95. Craig Calhoun's 2002 assessment of scholarship on cosmopolitanism cast a skeptical eye toward its more hopeful iterations that emerged in the 1990s, calling them "overoptimistic, perhaps, more attentive to certain prominent dimensions of globalization than to equally important others" (870). His critique, put forward in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, insisted that "the cosmopolitan ideals articulated during the 1990s seem all the more attractive but their realization much less immanent" (870). Although offered nearly two decades ago, that statement arguably resonates with the divisive politics of the present moment. With the increased security discourse of the Western city in a post–isis world, xenophobes inflamed by explicitly racist national leaderships, the ongoing urgency of multiple global refugee crises, and attention to climate change that brings with it the spectre of imperialism's extractive and exploitative histories, notions of global citizenship and, especially, hospitality are as fragile as they ever have been. In this moment the aspirations of such a cantankerous category as cosmopolitanism might seem a naive intellectual fantasy. Enter Negative Cosmopolitanism, an impressive collection that imbues the concept with renewed perspective and, especially, a critical weight not always found in the work of its major proponents. The book is the culmination of a 2012 conference whose theme was likewise "negative cosmopolitanism," and it contains a rich array of essays—fourteen in total—whose analyses span multiple locations across the globe. The book and its editors' efforts to draw on a wide variety of scholarly work in rethinking the oft-celebrated notion of cosmopolitanism, especially in many of its essays' departure from the concept's frequently Euro-American zones of critique, is a welcome contribution to studies of globalization. In its efforts to push beyond the elite enclaves of the global citizenship implied by the term, the collection fits well with efforts, as voiced by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff's Theory From the South, to orientate global criticism around "cosmopolitanisms forged in the spaces between promise and privation, between inclusion and erasure, there to assert their own contemporaneity, their own … modernity" (6). If the book is orientated toward the inbetween, that ethos extends to its interdisciplinarity as well, gathering as it does multiple voices from the humanities and social sciences. Many of these are from literary studies, but the collection also includes those from [End Page 171] history, geography, film studies, and cultural studies, encompassing conversations influenced by political economy, critical race studies, feminism, queer studies, and postcolonialism, to mention only a few. This book's deceptively simple title, which might be read as merely indicating an opposing perspective to ostensibly "positive" modes of cosmopolitical scholarship, instead introduces wide-ranging and complex critiques of the concept's orientations toward universality and inclusion. The book troubles what Peter Nyers refers to in his afterword as the "happy universalism celebrated by advocates of world citizenship and global democratic governments," instead showing "how cosmopolitanism gets enacted as a practice in support of the dividing logics of nationalism, capitalism, and heterosexism" (283). Beginning with a concise but nuanced account of cosmopolitanism's genealogy informed by some of its influential commentators—for example, Immanuel Kant's "Perpetual Peace" and its more recent hopeful iterations such as those by Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah—the text's editors take seriously the potential of the concept while not letting off the hook the suspect universality of the global citizenship it promises. If Appiah's cosmopolitanism is premised on "universal truth"—especially that expressed in his contention that "every human being has obligations to every other. Everybody matters: that is our central idea" (144)—Negative Cosmopolitanism is attentive to those who, under current instantiations of global power, do not appear to matter from within the global communities implied by such obligations. Some of the analyses within the book also index those peoples in various states of disenfranchisement who cultivate their own worlds and modes...

Introduction:The Dark Logic of Invasive Others Ann Laura Stoler (bio) one fundamental dimension of political repression works through assessing measures of who and what counts, and who and what does not. The nature of governance in part depends on the tools and standards of assessment considered reliable to make that accounting and to be deserving of public trust. Within this dark logic, some kinds of beings, things, and practices are made to matter, qualified as worthy of inclusion in the catchment of attention and urgencies; some are disqualified as exceeding countability or knowability within the rubrics of how we imagine knowing the world. But there are other means of asserting priorities that are as forceful in conveying assessments of worth, if more elusive as identifiable measures. It is precisely these visual and verbal practices that are configured for us, and make it "easy to think" that some analogies, comparisons, associations, and relationships are more plausible, more relevant, and more truth-bearing than others. Here are three papers that powerfully examine how the conceptual and concrete apparatuses to constrain and contain the movement of people conjoin with and borrow from those strategies deployed for the animal and botanical orders of the world. But while this issue, and the conference on which it is based, opened with this first group of papers on "People," we quickly realize that there is no staying there. Political repression is about psychic and material practices lodged in verbal and visual vocabularies with powerful effects that nurture and feed off anticipatory logics of extermination and extinction. [End Page 3] In what Jean Comaroff, in the discussion that followed presentation of these papers at the conference, called "the metastasization of metaphors," the connections made between the "invasion" of immigrants/refugees, or the generically "undesired" foreigner, and "invasive" species that take over "natural" habitats, starve out "native" plants, and overrun the delicate balances of "the wild" are not the excessive fluff of governance but one of its constituent elements. The ties that bind alien species, native authenticities to be protected, and invasive others to be expelled are not benign, as each of these papers underscores. These associations invoke—without naming directly—those human and non-human beings, as Juanita Sundberg put it in her remarks at the conference,1 deemed worthy or "unworthy of ethical and political consideration." These are the violent elements of dark, imaginative logics put to work and to the test. It is easy to place the onus on the contemporary media for feeding on these associations, but that is not where these images and practices have gained their enduring traction. Imperial formations and colonial governance honed them and in turn fortified what I have called "the managed mobility" enforced by imperial states (Stoler 2016). As Bridget Anderson underscored in discussion, the issue of time, timing, and temporality—when certain terms get used, and what they are used for—is key; e.g., "natural rootedness" when invoked as a political claim by those dispossessed, or as an ecological truth claim about why certain populations deserve "protection" from invasive Others. What is striking in the recursive founding of these imaginaries, and the sensibilities they foster, is not only wooden Manichean categories—purity and impurity, cleanliness and dirt, democracy and its others—but also a contorted notion that "conservation," "wilderness," and environmental balance depend on barring immigrants from entry and getting rid of those who are already here. As Sundberg aptly noted, the "intimate connections" between anti-immigration and nature conservation policies comprise not a new history, nor have all the parameters and sites of pressure and politics [End Page 4] and the nature of the intimacies changed: people, plants, and animals have long been part of discursive invasions and contaminations. But even more striking to those of us who have imagined that wildlife refuges, national parks, and national monuments bear unsullied histories, we might look again—as Sundberg notes with reference to Alexandra Stern's work—at the relationship between eugenicist concerns and the protected "heritage" that "nature" is mobilized to represent for the nation and race. The story is one of occlusions from the start: as in Israel, where national parks have covered over and...

Abstract This contribution suggests a classification of different anthropological contributions to entrepreneurship research. Critical approaches to entrepreneurship focus on the ideological bias of the term. As the work of Mary Douglas, they critique the methodological individualism and the utilitarian self-concept underlying the entrepreneur. Affirmative approaches, in the tradition of Joseph Schumpeter or Frederik Barth, are concerned with the definition, understanding and transformative outcomes of entrepreneurship. Pragmatic approaches use tactically the social eminence of the term by expanding it to a wide range of apparently distant topics, such as the ‘ethno-preneur’ coined by John and Jean Comaroff. To illustrate the analytical scope of each of these approaches, I discuss some of my empirical material from Spain, such as the discourse on entrepreneurship in the 2015 parliamentary elections, the case of a media entrepreneur in rural Andalusia and the politics of heritage entrepreneurship and the M...

This paper offers a glimpse of work generated by the 2014 John Douglas Taylor conference on ‘Contemporary Orientations in African Cultural Studies’. The conference generated a number of inquiries into the time and place of contemporary African cultural work, many of which theorised beyond the frameworks that postcolonial and globalisation studies frequently offer. Within the shifting paradigms of Cultural Studies, the work of this conference (as well as the current project) moves away from reading the African everyday as exclusively a construction out of a series of colonial histories and relationalities, or global cultural flows. In line with Jean and John Comaroff’s Theory from the South (2011), this issue is instead dedicated to relocating the global centres from which Cultural Studies emanates and to positing African work’s challenge to normative zones of cultural critique. ‘Contemporary orientations’ attempts to relocate the time and space of critique in African studies, but it resists the gesture to posit a stable trajectory through which time moves. Rather, the terms of the contemporary and the orientation depend on how they are read in relation to a multitude of other temporalities, orientations, and objects.

ABSTRACT In twenty-first century Brazil, Afro-Brazilians have embraced various cultural markers of their ethno-racial identity to improve their economic survival and well-being. Although these markers may take many forms across Brazil, this essay examines the growing enterprise of ethnic tourism in quilombos or communities of African descent. The work of John L. and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc., is introduced as a point of departure to explore the two different manifestations of the ethnic commodity economy: the commodification of culture and the incorporation of identity. I argue that the ethno-commodity phenomenon is not a scalable or equitable model of development for Brazil’s quilombos. Case studies show that quilombolas or residents of these communities have adopted ethnic tourism primarily because of the loss of wage employment alternatives and environmental policies that threaten their livelihoods. The examples also illustrate that quilombolas continue to sell their labor, even as they are forced to insert themselves into the global economy by commodifying their culture.