DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2002
Esta semana, los helicópteros, sobrevolando presurosos los resplandecientes viñedos de Constantia... more Esta semana, los helicópteros, sobrevolando presurosos los resplandecientes viñedos de Constantia, se convirtieron en el "tema principal" del Cabo de las Tormentas, mientras la Península estallaba en llamas produciendo escenas que bien podían haber salido de una película de desastres épicos. Desde las playas de Muizenberg, columnas de humo se elevaban por encima de las montañas... Parecía el iracundo Vesubio enterrando a las víctimas de Pompeya que huían... Recortados contra el cielo, minúsculos helicópteros zumbaban como mosquitos, heroicos en su intención, mas sólo contribuyendo a la sensación de desamparo mientras lanzaban sus... inútiles bombas de agua tratando de frenar... el avance de las llamas enloquecidas.
Une version plus longue d'un article sur le même sujet est parue en 2006 dans Archaeological Dial... more Une version plus longue d'un article sur le même sujet est parue en 2006 dans Archaeological Dialogue, 12, 2 : 107-132 .
We should like thank our dear friends and comrades, Achille Mbembe, Juan Obario, and Charles Piot... more We should like thank our dear friends and comrades, Achille Mbembe, Juan Obario, and Charles Piot for having had the temerity to organize the "Authors Meet Critics" session at the 2011 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association (Montreal, 2011) at which these papers, and our response to them, were first presented. It is to their great credit, and to our great benefit, that they were willing to grab a rather wild, wilful text by its tail. We also owe a debt of gratitude to James Ferguson, Srinivas Aravamudan, and Ato Quayson for agreeing to engage seriously with Theory from the South. And to do so with obvious critical acuity. It is with a deep sense of loss that we note that Fernando Coronil, our long-time friend, could not take part as planned. In our shared bereavement at the tragic loss of a person of uncommon humanity and grace, of singular imagination and scholarly flair, we dedicate this symposium to his life, his work, his memory. * * * * * * * The conversation among the participants here has already spanned several years, continents, and contexts; indeed, many of their ideas have contributed directly to the arguments made in the book. Our exchanges have always been conducted in a
Religion has always been intimately connected to law. Conversely, modern secular law, born of the... more Religion has always been intimately connected to law. Conversely, modern secular law, born of the separation of lex naturae from lex dei, has always been deeply theological. However, with transformations in the construction of the nation-state and changes in the sociopolitical scaffolding of the global order, the mutual infusion of law and religion appears to be extending both in scope and in substance-notwithstanding the ever more strident assertion of secularism by some nation-states. Counter-intuitively, the law itself appears to be ever more suffused with the sacral, while, across the planet, the sacral is reconstructing constitutional jurisprudence, administrative law, and much more besides. How do we account for this, for the rise of expansive cultures of theo-legality? Where is it leading? And with what implications?
Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, Jul 25, 2011
In the wake of the economic “meltdown” of 2008, there arose considerable public debate across the... more In the wake of the economic “meltdown” of 2008, there arose considerable public debate across the planet over the fates and futures of neoliberalism. Had it reached its “natural” end? What, historically, was likely to become of “it”? How might the crisis in the Euro-American economies of the period transform the relationship between economy and the state? This article addresses these questions. It argues against treating neoliberalism as a common noun, a fully formed, self-sustaining ideological project and makes the case that its adjectival and adverbial capillaries alive, well, and, if in complicated ways, central to the unfolding history of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the article offers a reflection on the ways in which twenty-first-century states have become integral to the workings of finance capital, with important consequences for the conception of political economy.
Notwithstanding Gramsci or Foucault. there remains a tendency, in historical sociology. to explai... more Notwithstanding Gramsci or Foucault. there remains a tendency, in historical sociology. to explain processes of domination in terms of political and economic forces. In the study of state formation and imperialism. realpolitik is given precedence over ritual, material factors over the moral suasion of the sign. Yet European colonialism was also a cultural project. In Southern Africa, nonconformist missions. the vanguards of empire, conjured up new maps, new systems of relations, new notions of time, production and personhood. From their very first encounters with native communities, it is argued, they sowed the state of colonialism on which the colonial state -and a more enduring condition of dependencywas founded. * * * * * About sunset the king, attended by his brothers and a few more persons, came to our tent ... 1 said that I had brought a small present for him. as a token of friendship-while opening it he remained silent, not moving wen his head, only his eyes towards the parcel. I then took from it a gilded copper comb and put it into his hair, and tied a silver spangled band and tassel round his head, and a chain about his neck, and last of all presented him with a looking glass ... To early 19th century missionaries, the vanguards of British colonialism, the African interior presented itself as virgin ground to be broken, landscape to be invested with history (Ranger n.d.: 1). But, in the Protestant imagination, this was not only a matter of 'taking hold of the land.' It required seizing the hearts and minds of its wild inhabitants, rousing them from a state of nature that rendered them indistinguishable from their rude surroundings. It involved, indeed, the cultivation of a particular self-consciousness, through which the savage would come to recognize his true reflection, see himself as a wayward child of God, and will his own transformation. The naturalism that pervaded this discourse masked the coerciveness of colonialism and the part of Christian evangelism within it. For the European was to labor hard to displace the savage world, to clear away the 'mists' that clouded the native eye. Yet, despite his metaphors of mastery, his sense of himself as a bearer of eternal truths, the missionary was to be caught up in a reciprocal process. Bent on realizing a pious fantasy in the African wilderness. he had eventually to come to terms with the disconcerting image of himself that the wilderness gave back as the
... the bureaucratic state, adjudicating and administering according to rationally established la... more ... the bureaucratic state, adjudicating and administering according to rationally established law and regulation, is¼ ... It is not my intention to offer a systematic introduction to Foucault on power ... a postmodern `reading' of the colonial state might proceed in the South African context. ...
Our closing refl ection on the collection of articles in this issue argues that the modernist bou... more Our closing refl ection on the collection of articles in this issue argues that the modernist bourgeois fi gure of the autonomous individual, founded from the fi rst on a Promethean fi ction, has long hidden the sorts of dependencies, interdependencies, and intradependencies intrinsic to social life everywhere. Th is is all the more so in the twenty-fi rst century, under conditions in which the relations between capital and labor, patterns of sociality and social reproduction, and Euromodernity itself are undergoing wide-ranging changes, changes that are deepening the tensile coexistence of human autonomy and entanglement.
Resumo: Este artigo examina a situação do Estado-nação pós-colonial sob o prisma da catástrofe am... more Resumo: Este artigo examina a situação do Estado-nação pós-colonial sob o prisma da catástrofe ambiental: como é que "invasores" vegetais podem se tornar uma questão política iminente? O que isto poderia nos revelar sobre as relações cambiantes entre cidadania, comunidade e soberania nacional sob condições neoliberais? Examinando estas questões em relação a um caso proveniente da "nova" África do Sul, postulamos três características centrais das organizações políticas pós-coloniais numa era de laissez-faire: a reconfiguração do sujeitocidadão, a crise da soberania das fronteiras soberanas e a despolitização da política. Os estrangeiros -sejam eles plantas ou pessoas -reúnem em si, sob tais condições, as principais contradições da demarcabilidade de fronteiras e do pertencimento; e uma natureza-estrangeira fornece a linguagem que dá voz a novas formas de discriminação no seio de uma cultura de "pós-racismo" e de direitos civis.
In what ways has the movement of anthropology off the reservation, and off the island, challenged... more In what ways has the movement of anthropology off the reservation, and off the island, challenged the ethnographic practice that has historically been its raison d'être? How has the increasing historicization of the discipline, and its encounters with the variegated effects of globalization, altered its methodological orientations and strategies? How should those orientations and strategies change in proportion to transformations in the social and cultural geographies of the worlds inhabited by our 'natives'? Is it possible to 'do' ethnography on an awkward scale in multiple dimensions? What are the epistemic implications of these questions for the anthropology of the future? Taking as its point of departure current debates over (i) the relationship between evidence and explanation in the social sciences, and (ii) the relative demands of the local and the global in focusing the ethnographic gaze, this article explores the premises and promises of contemporary ethnography. It invokes recent research on the rise of an 'occult economy' in the South African postcolony to argue for a radical expansion of the horizons of ethnographic methodology, for a method simultaneously inductive and deductive, empirical and imaginative.
How are relations between generations shifting? As anthropologists, our take on intergenerational... more How are relations between generations shifting? As anthropologists, our take on intergenerational relations and the rationalities on which they are based—i.e., generationality—is historically situated. In many parts of the world, generation has become a major axis of social and political struggle, sometimes of bitter conflict. This, we argue, is a corollary of post-Cold War transformations in economy and society—and a radical rupture in processes of social reproduction. These transformations have conduced to the perception of a rising ‘generation war.’ How, then, in these circumstances, are we to think anew of intergenerational relations—and justice?
Social transformations journal of the global south, Mar 20, 2015
discuss the Comaroff's recent publication Theory from the South and its implications for rethinki... more discuss the Comaroff's recent publication Theory from the South and its implications for rethinking global relations through the praxis of critical scholarship. NOTE: The following interview, conducted by Lisandro Claudio, took place in Copenhagen in November 2015. Its content arises largely out of the recent publication of Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa, Jean and John Comaroff (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012). * LC: How do you define the Global South? JC: This is not an easy question to answer. The Global South has multiple referents, multiple meanings. In ordinary conversation, of course, its primary denotation is geographical: it signifies, hemispherically, the lower half of the planet, its underside. But this is a grotesque simplification, a realist -and often racist -conceit. The term has a far more complex fan of significata. Superficially, it describes those reaches of the planet that were formerly colonized, although not always at the same time; those parts of the world that European imperial metropoles "discovered," conquered by means of one
... II, the mistakes continue there (thuto is still given as thutho). ... in part by adopting and... more ... II, the mistakes continue there (thuto is still given as thutho). ... in part by adopting and remaking its discourse.22 In the context of the difaqane the violent effects of the rise of the Zulu kingdom and the founding of the Boer republics it was Ngwaketse, Sotho, Malete, Rolong, Korana ...
Le travail productif – ou meme la production en general – n’apparait plus desormais comme le pili... more Le travail productif – ou meme la production en general – n’apparait plus desormais comme le pilier qui fonde et definit l’organisation sociale capitaliste. On confere une qualite objective a la production, comme si le systeme capitaliste etait une machine qui avancait toute seule, sans le travail – un automate capitaliste.Michael Hardt, « L’atrophie de la societe civile »Automate, n. Chose mue par un mouvement spontane ; etre vivant percu comme de la matiere ; piece d’une machine dont la for...
A professora Jean Comaroff esteve no Brasil em 2013 a fim de proferir conferência no 37º Encontro... more A professora Jean Comaroff esteve no Brasil em 2013 a fim de proferir conferência no 37º Encontro Anual da ANPOCS (Associação Nacional de Pós-graduação em Ciências Sociais) e no Laboratório de Investigação e Crítica Audiovisual (LAICA) (ECA/USP).
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2002
Esta semana, los helicópteros, sobrevolando presurosos los resplandecientes viñedos de Constantia... more Esta semana, los helicópteros, sobrevolando presurosos los resplandecientes viñedos de Constantia, se convirtieron en el "tema principal" del Cabo de las Tormentas, mientras la Península estallaba en llamas produciendo escenas que bien podían haber salido de una película de desastres épicos. Desde las playas de Muizenberg, columnas de humo se elevaban por encima de las montañas... Parecía el iracundo Vesubio enterrando a las víctimas de Pompeya que huían... Recortados contra el cielo, minúsculos helicópteros zumbaban como mosquitos, heroicos en su intención, mas sólo contribuyendo a la sensación de desamparo mientras lanzaban sus... inútiles bombas de agua tratando de frenar... el avance de las llamas enloquecidas.
Une version plus longue d'un article sur le même sujet est parue en 2006 dans Archaeological Dial... more Une version plus longue d'un article sur le même sujet est parue en 2006 dans Archaeological Dialogue, 12, 2 : 107-132 .
We should like thank our dear friends and comrades, Achille Mbembe, Juan Obario, and Charles Piot... more We should like thank our dear friends and comrades, Achille Mbembe, Juan Obario, and Charles Piot for having had the temerity to organize the "Authors Meet Critics" session at the 2011 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association (Montreal, 2011) at which these papers, and our response to them, were first presented. It is to their great credit, and to our great benefit, that they were willing to grab a rather wild, wilful text by its tail. We also owe a debt of gratitude to James Ferguson, Srinivas Aravamudan, and Ato Quayson for agreeing to engage seriously with Theory from the South. And to do so with obvious critical acuity. It is with a deep sense of loss that we note that Fernando Coronil, our long-time friend, could not take part as planned. In our shared bereavement at the tragic loss of a person of uncommon humanity and grace, of singular imagination and scholarly flair, we dedicate this symposium to his life, his work, his memory. * * * * * * * The conversation among the participants here has already spanned several years, continents, and contexts; indeed, many of their ideas have contributed directly to the arguments made in the book. Our exchanges have always been conducted in a
Religion has always been intimately connected to law. Conversely, modern secular law, born of the... more Religion has always been intimately connected to law. Conversely, modern secular law, born of the separation of lex naturae from lex dei, has always been deeply theological. However, with transformations in the construction of the nation-state and changes in the sociopolitical scaffolding of the global order, the mutual infusion of law and religion appears to be extending both in scope and in substance-notwithstanding the ever more strident assertion of secularism by some nation-states. Counter-intuitively, the law itself appears to be ever more suffused with the sacral, while, across the planet, the sacral is reconstructing constitutional jurisprudence, administrative law, and much more besides. How do we account for this, for the rise of expansive cultures of theo-legality? Where is it leading? And with what implications?
Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, Jul 25, 2011
In the wake of the economic “meltdown” of 2008, there arose considerable public debate across the... more In the wake of the economic “meltdown” of 2008, there arose considerable public debate across the planet over the fates and futures of neoliberalism. Had it reached its “natural” end? What, historically, was likely to become of “it”? How might the crisis in the Euro-American economies of the period transform the relationship between economy and the state? This article addresses these questions. It argues against treating neoliberalism as a common noun, a fully formed, self-sustaining ideological project and makes the case that its adjectival and adverbial capillaries alive, well, and, if in complicated ways, central to the unfolding history of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the article offers a reflection on the ways in which twenty-first-century states have become integral to the workings of finance capital, with important consequences for the conception of political economy.
Notwithstanding Gramsci or Foucault. there remains a tendency, in historical sociology. to explai... more Notwithstanding Gramsci or Foucault. there remains a tendency, in historical sociology. to explain processes of domination in terms of political and economic forces. In the study of state formation and imperialism. realpolitik is given precedence over ritual, material factors over the moral suasion of the sign. Yet European colonialism was also a cultural project. In Southern Africa, nonconformist missions. the vanguards of empire, conjured up new maps, new systems of relations, new notions of time, production and personhood. From their very first encounters with native communities, it is argued, they sowed the state of colonialism on which the colonial state -and a more enduring condition of dependencywas founded. * * * * * About sunset the king, attended by his brothers and a few more persons, came to our tent ... 1 said that I had brought a small present for him. as a token of friendship-while opening it he remained silent, not moving wen his head, only his eyes towards the parcel. I then took from it a gilded copper comb and put it into his hair, and tied a silver spangled band and tassel round his head, and a chain about his neck, and last of all presented him with a looking glass ... To early 19th century missionaries, the vanguards of British colonialism, the African interior presented itself as virgin ground to be broken, landscape to be invested with history (Ranger n.d.: 1). But, in the Protestant imagination, this was not only a matter of 'taking hold of the land.' It required seizing the hearts and minds of its wild inhabitants, rousing them from a state of nature that rendered them indistinguishable from their rude surroundings. It involved, indeed, the cultivation of a particular self-consciousness, through which the savage would come to recognize his true reflection, see himself as a wayward child of God, and will his own transformation. The naturalism that pervaded this discourse masked the coerciveness of colonialism and the part of Christian evangelism within it. For the European was to labor hard to displace the savage world, to clear away the 'mists' that clouded the native eye. Yet, despite his metaphors of mastery, his sense of himself as a bearer of eternal truths, the missionary was to be caught up in a reciprocal process. Bent on realizing a pious fantasy in the African wilderness. he had eventually to come to terms with the disconcerting image of himself that the wilderness gave back as the
... the bureaucratic state, adjudicating and administering according to rationally established la... more ... the bureaucratic state, adjudicating and administering according to rationally established law and regulation, is¼ ... It is not my intention to offer a systematic introduction to Foucault on power ... a postmodern `reading' of the colonial state might proceed in the South African context. ...
Our closing refl ection on the collection of articles in this issue argues that the modernist bou... more Our closing refl ection on the collection of articles in this issue argues that the modernist bourgeois fi gure of the autonomous individual, founded from the fi rst on a Promethean fi ction, has long hidden the sorts of dependencies, interdependencies, and intradependencies intrinsic to social life everywhere. Th is is all the more so in the twenty-fi rst century, under conditions in which the relations between capital and labor, patterns of sociality and social reproduction, and Euromodernity itself are undergoing wide-ranging changes, changes that are deepening the tensile coexistence of human autonomy and entanglement.
Resumo: Este artigo examina a situação do Estado-nação pós-colonial sob o prisma da catástrofe am... more Resumo: Este artigo examina a situação do Estado-nação pós-colonial sob o prisma da catástrofe ambiental: como é que "invasores" vegetais podem se tornar uma questão política iminente? O que isto poderia nos revelar sobre as relações cambiantes entre cidadania, comunidade e soberania nacional sob condições neoliberais? Examinando estas questões em relação a um caso proveniente da "nova" África do Sul, postulamos três características centrais das organizações políticas pós-coloniais numa era de laissez-faire: a reconfiguração do sujeitocidadão, a crise da soberania das fronteiras soberanas e a despolitização da política. Os estrangeiros -sejam eles plantas ou pessoas -reúnem em si, sob tais condições, as principais contradições da demarcabilidade de fronteiras e do pertencimento; e uma natureza-estrangeira fornece a linguagem que dá voz a novas formas de discriminação no seio de uma cultura de "pós-racismo" e de direitos civis.
In what ways has the movement of anthropology off the reservation, and off the island, challenged... more In what ways has the movement of anthropology off the reservation, and off the island, challenged the ethnographic practice that has historically been its raison d'être? How has the increasing historicization of the discipline, and its encounters with the variegated effects of globalization, altered its methodological orientations and strategies? How should those orientations and strategies change in proportion to transformations in the social and cultural geographies of the worlds inhabited by our 'natives'? Is it possible to 'do' ethnography on an awkward scale in multiple dimensions? What are the epistemic implications of these questions for the anthropology of the future? Taking as its point of departure current debates over (i) the relationship between evidence and explanation in the social sciences, and (ii) the relative demands of the local and the global in focusing the ethnographic gaze, this article explores the premises and promises of contemporary ethnography. It invokes recent research on the rise of an 'occult economy' in the South African postcolony to argue for a radical expansion of the horizons of ethnographic methodology, for a method simultaneously inductive and deductive, empirical and imaginative.
How are relations between generations shifting? As anthropologists, our take on intergenerational... more How are relations between generations shifting? As anthropologists, our take on intergenerational relations and the rationalities on which they are based—i.e., generationality—is historically situated. In many parts of the world, generation has become a major axis of social and political struggle, sometimes of bitter conflict. This, we argue, is a corollary of post-Cold War transformations in economy and society—and a radical rupture in processes of social reproduction. These transformations have conduced to the perception of a rising ‘generation war.’ How, then, in these circumstances, are we to think anew of intergenerational relations—and justice?
Social transformations journal of the global south, Mar 20, 2015
discuss the Comaroff's recent publication Theory from the South and its implications for rethinki... more discuss the Comaroff's recent publication Theory from the South and its implications for rethinking global relations through the praxis of critical scholarship. NOTE: The following interview, conducted by Lisandro Claudio, took place in Copenhagen in November 2015. Its content arises largely out of the recent publication of Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa, Jean and John Comaroff (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012). * LC: How do you define the Global South? JC: This is not an easy question to answer. The Global South has multiple referents, multiple meanings. In ordinary conversation, of course, its primary denotation is geographical: it signifies, hemispherically, the lower half of the planet, its underside. But this is a grotesque simplification, a realist -and often racist -conceit. The term has a far more complex fan of significata. Superficially, it describes those reaches of the planet that were formerly colonized, although not always at the same time; those parts of the world that European imperial metropoles "discovered," conquered by means of one
... II, the mistakes continue there (thuto is still given as thutho). ... in part by adopting and... more ... II, the mistakes continue there (thuto is still given as thutho). ... in part by adopting and remaking its discourse.22 In the context of the difaqane the violent effects of the rise of the Zulu kingdom and the founding of the Boer republics it was Ngwaketse, Sotho, Malete, Rolong, Korana ...
Le travail productif – ou meme la production en general – n’apparait plus desormais comme le pili... more Le travail productif – ou meme la production en general – n’apparait plus desormais comme le pilier qui fonde et definit l’organisation sociale capitaliste. On confere une qualite objective a la production, comme si le systeme capitaliste etait une machine qui avancait toute seule, sans le travail – un automate capitaliste.Michael Hardt, « L’atrophie de la societe civile »Automate, n. Chose mue par un mouvement spontane ; etre vivant percu comme de la matiere ; piece d’une machine dont la for...
A professora Jean Comaroff esteve no Brasil em 2013 a fim de proferir conferência no 37º Encontro... more A professora Jean Comaroff esteve no Brasil em 2013 a fim de proferir conferência no 37º Encontro Anual da ANPOCS (Associação Nacional de Pós-graduação em Ciências Sociais) e no Laboratório de Investigação e Crítica Audiovisual (LAICA) (ECA/USP).
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