Jean Comaroff Research Articles

Рец. на кн.: James Ferguson. Presence and Social Obligation: An Essay of Share. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2021. 85 p.

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.

“Awakening the Sleeping Tiger”

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.

African Renaissance, Afrotopia, Afropolitanism, and Afrofuturism: Comparing Conceptual Properties of Four African Futures

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

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.

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

Notes on Contributors

A timely encounter and a loss

A timely encounter and a loss

Translating E.P. Thompson’s Marxian critique: contesting “context” in South African studies

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 US$85 – 978 0 226 42488 0; pb US$27.50 – 978 0 226 42491 0). 2016, xix + 347 pp.

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.

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.

Millennial capitalism’s vampires: The South African graphic novel Rebirth

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.

The Truth about Crime: sovereignty, knowledge and social order by Jean Comaroff, John L Comaroff

The Truth about Crime: sovereignty, knowledge and social order by Jean Comaroff, John L Comaroff

O dilema do multiculturalismo

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.

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. …

Looking forward, looking back: animating magic, modernity and the African city-future in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

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.

Negative Cosmopolitanism: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization ed. by Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky

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

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...

Mann der Tat, Enterprise Culture and Ethno-preneurs: Discussing the Scope of Affirmative, Critical and Pragmatic Approaches to Entrepreneurship in Spain

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...

Contemporary orientations in African Cultural Studies

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.

Who owns paradise? Afro-Brazilians and ethnic tourism in Brazil’s quilombos

ABSTRACTIn 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.