Jean Comaroff

Bio: Jean Comaroff is an academic researcher from University of Chicago. The author has contributed to research in topics: Modernity & Politics. The author has an hindex of 31, co-authored 72 publications receiving 7317 citations. Previous affiliations of Jean Comaroff include University of Cape Town & University of Manchester.

Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming

Abstract: he global triumph of capitalism at the millennium, its Second Coming, raises a number of conundrums for our understanding of history at the end of the century. Some of its corollaries—“plagues of the ‘new world order,’” Jacques Derrida (1994: 91) calls them, unable to resist apocalyptic imagery—have been the subject of clamorous debate. Others receive less mention. Thus, for example, populist polemics have dwelt on the planetary conjuncture, for good or ill, of “homogenization and difference” (e.g., Barber 1992); on the simultaneous, synergistic spiraling of wealth and poverty; on the rise of a “new feudalism,” a phoenix disfigured, of worldwide proportions (cf. Connelly and Kennedy 1994).1 For its part, scholarly debate has focused on the confounding effects of rampant

Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony

Abstract: Postcolonial South Africa, like other postrevolutionary societies, appears to have witnessed a dramatic rise in occult economies: in the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends. These embrace a wide range of phenomena, from "ritual murder," the sale of body parts, and the putative production of zombies to pyramid schemes and other financial scams. And they have led, in many places, to violent reactions against people accused of illicit accumulation. In the struggles that have ensued, the major lines of opposition have been not race or class but generation—mediated by gender. Why is all this occurring with such intensity, right now? An answer to the question, and to the more general problem of making sense of the enchantments of modernity, is sought in the encounter of rural South Africa with the contradictory effects of millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. This encounter, goes the argument, brings "the global" and "the local"— treated here as analytic constructs rather than explanatory terms or empirical realities—into a dialectical interplay. It also has implications for the practice of anthropology, challenging us to do ethnography on an "awkward" scale, on planes that transect the here and now, then and there,

Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier

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 the much-discussed Of revelation and revolution, Volume one: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. While Volume One dealt primarily with the initial encounter between British evangelists and the Southern Tswana of South Africa, Volume Two moves the story along, both chronologically and thematically, to how, over the course of a century, the encounter reshaped both the Southern Tswana and the British. In the process the Comaroffs move beyond the realm of "the long conversation" to examine changes in the material realities and notions of production, value, dress, architecture, medicine, and rights, and the hybrid form: which resulted. But the overarching theme of Volume One runs through Volume Two as well: that colonialism is best conceptualized as a cultural process rendered through the everyday and the mundane, and that this process is exemplified in the civilizing project of the missionaries. As with their first volume, this one is packed with original, occasionally brilliant, insights. While a sense of chronology occasionally falls victim to the 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 - the authors deal to a greater extent than before with the 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 the creation of modernist subjects and the "flow and counterflow of signs and objects" (p. 5). The study ranges widely across the historical and temporal landscape. We are treated to imaginative analyses of the ways in which value systems grounded in cattle and cash became linked, the conservatism of Southern Tswana women's clothing, European appropriations of African healing, and the ways in which the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party are each heir to a particular strand of colonial discourses on "rights." Yet - also as with Volume One - the authors ultimately offer a better sense of the European world than the Southern Tswana world. The thematic chapters usually begin with a thoughful examination of the British context, then move the reader to the terrain on which Tswana and British meet, with no comparable sense of what pre-existed the arrival of British missionaries in the region. This imbalance, which was widely criticized by Africanists after the publication of Volume One, is less pronounced here, perhaps because the documentary record is vastly richer for this later period. But the problematic implications for Volume One lurk in this volume as well. For example, the authors argue that the 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 the Gospel. …

Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

Abstract: Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming / John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff Millennial Transitions / Irene Stengs, Hylton White, Caitrin Lynch, and Jeffrey A. Zimmermann Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism's Nature / Fernando Coronil Lived Effects of the Contemporary Economy: Globalization, Inequality, and Consumer Society / Michael Storper The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and Maquiladoreas / Melissa W. Wright Freeway to China (Version 2, for Liverpool) / Allan Sekula Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging / Peter Geschiere and Francis Myamnjoh Millennial Coal Face / Luiz Paulo Lima, Scott Bradwell, and Seamus Walsh Modernity's Media and the End of Mediumship? On the Aesthetic Economy of Transparency in Thailand / Rosalind C. Morris Living at the Edge: Religion, Capitalism, and the End of the Nation-State in Taiwan / Robert P. Weller Millenniums Past, Cuba's Future? / Paul Ryer Consuming Geist: Popontology and the Spirit of Capital in Indigenous Australia / Elizabeth A. Povinelli Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils / David Harvey Contributors Index

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

Abstract: Introduction 1 Freedom's Just Another Word 2 The Construction of Consent 3 The Neoliberal State 4 Uneven Geographical Developments 5 Neoliberalism with 'Chinese Characteristics' 6 Neoliberalism on Trial 7 Freedom's Prospect Notes Bibliography Index

Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography

Abstract: This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...

Chronic illness as biographical disruption

Abstract: The paper is based on semi-structured interviews with a series of rheumatoid arthritis patients. Chronic illness is conceptualised as a particular type of disruptive event. This disruption highlights the resources (cognitive and material) available to individuals, modes of explanation for pain and suffering, continuities and discontinuities between professional and lay thought, and sources of variation in experience.

On the political

Abstract: Since September 11th, we frequently hear that political differences should be put aside: the real struggle is between good and evil. What does this mean for political and social life? Is there a 'Third Way' beyond left and right, and if so, should we fear or welcome it? This thought-provoking book by Chantal Mouffe, a globally recognized political author, presents a timely account of the current state of democracy, affording readers the most relevant and up-to-date information. Arguing that liberal 'third way thinking' ignores fundamental, conflicting aspects of human nature, Mouffe states that, far from expanding democracy, globalization is undermining the combative and radical heart of democratic life. Going back first to Aristotle, she identifies the historical origins of the political and reflects on the Enlightenment, and the social contract, arguing that in spite of its good intentions, it levelled the radical core of political life. Contemporary examples, including the Iraq war, racism and the rise of the far right, are used to illustrate and support her theory that far from combating extremism, the quest for consensus politics undermines the ability to challenge it. These case studies are also highly effective points of reference for student revision. On the Political is a stimulating argument about the future of politics and addresses the most fundamental aspects of democracy that will aid further study.