Ethnography And The Historical Imagination
This book focuses on 'imaginative sociology,' demonstrating the techniques by which social science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. It argues for the continuing value of a historical anthropology in which ethnograp...
Law and Disorder in the Postcolony
Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than other nation-states? The usual answer is yes. In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Jean and John Comaroff and a group of respected theorists show that the question is misplaced: that the pr...
Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa
The essays in this collection explore the diverse, unexpected and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In the introduction, anthropologists Jean and ...
Ethnicity, Inc.
In "Ethnicity, Inc." anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff analyze a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. Through a wide-ranging exploration of the changing relationship between culture and the ma...
Politics of Custom
How are we to explain the resurgence of customary chiefs in contemporary Africa? Rather than disappearing with the tide of modernity, as many expected, indigenous sovereigns are instead a rising force, often wielding substantial power and legitima...
Modernity and Its Malcontents
What role does ritual play in the everyday lives of modern Africans? How are so-called "traditional" cultural forms deployed by people seeking empowerment in a world where "modernity" has failed to deliver on its promises? Some...
Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2
In the second of a proposed three-volume study, Jean and John Comaroff continue their exploration of colonial evangelism and modernity in South Africa. Moving beyond the opening moments of the encounter between the British Nonconformist missions a...
Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1
"Defining their enterprise as more in the direction of poetics than of prosaics, the Comaroffs free themselves to analyze a vivid series of images and events as objects of analysis. These they mine for clues to the 19th-century contents of th...
Truth about Crime
In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves it is by our crimes. Surveying...
Theory from the South
As nation-states in the Northern Hemisphere experience economic crisis, political corruption and racial tension, it seems as though they might be 'evolving' into the kind of societies normally associated with the 'Global South'. Anthropologists Je...
Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism
The essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism pose a series of related questions: How are we to understand capitalism at the millennium? Is it a singular or polythetic creature? What are we to make of the culture of neoliber...
Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance
In this sophisticated study of power and resistance, Jean Comaroff analyzes the changing predicament of the Barolong boo Ratshidi, a people on the margins of the South African state. Like others on the fringes of the modern world system, the Tshid...
Picturing a Colonial Past
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), ...
