Showing papers by "Jean Comaroff published in 2007"

Beyond Bare Life: AIDS, (Bio)Politics, and the Neoliberal Order

Abstract: It is impossible to contemplate the shape of late modern history — in Africa or elsewhere — without the polymorphous presence of HIV/ AIDS, the signal pandemic of the global here and now. In retrospect, the timing of its onset was uncanny: the disease appeared like a memento mori in a world high on the hype of Reaganomics, deregulation, and the end of the Cold War. In its wake, even careful observers made medieval associations: “AIDS,” wrote Susan Sontag (1989: 122), “reinstates something like a premodern experience of illness,” a throwback to an era when sickness was, by its nature, immutable, mysterious, and fatal. Such reactions make plain how the genesis of the pandemic affected our very sense of history, imposing a chronotope of its own, a distinctly unmodern sense of fate unfolding, of implacable destiny. By unsettling scientific certainties, AIDS also prefigured an ironic, postmodern future. As Sontag intuited, it marked an epochal shift, not merely in the almost omnipotent status of medical knowledge and its sanitized language of suffering, nor even in the relationship with death, so long banished from the concerns of those preoccupied with life and their seemingly limitless capacity to control it. AIDS also casts a premodern pall over the emancipated pleasures, the amoral, free-wheeling desires that animated advanced consumer societies. And, as is often the case when Western self-images of reasoned control face homegrown disruption, the disease was deflected onto Africa as primal other, Africa as an icon of dangerous desire, Africa as the projection of a self never fully tamable.

Picturing a colonial past : the African photographs of Isaac Schapera

Abstract: This volume presents for the first time the selected photographs of 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 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 fascinating and of exceptional quality, these images capture the uniqueness of an African people in a particular time and place. They are contexualized and their significance explained in Jean and John Comaroff's insightful introduction, while Adam Kuper's illuminating biographical sketch of Schapera provides new insight into the life of the photographer. "Picturing a Colonial Past" reveals not only a rare side of old Botswana, but also of one of the most famous anthropologists to ever work there.