2011] AFTERWORD 1041 influence of "law and" in their resort to synchronic analyses of relational ... more 2011] AFTERWORD 1041 influence of "law and" in their resort to synchronic analyses of relational conjunction and disjunction, to which they add diachrony in order to reveal the effect of law, or to explain its reality, by assessing change in its relation to other phenomena over time. Unsurprisingly, the animating hypotheses of twentiethcentury legal history embrace the same broad relational problematics that have preoccupied twentieth century "law and" theory: instrumentalism, relative autonomy, mutual constitutiveness, legal construction, autopoiesis, and indeterminacy. 10 The shift to "law as. . ." suggests something else, something distinctive. Concretely, it suggests that explanations of law are not to be found, either necessarily or sufficiently, in its relations to other things. As Shai Lavi notes, with justification, the shift affords an opportunity to think beyond long-familiar Weberian categories and trajectories. 11 It is not determinedly programmatic, a route to the next big concept, but open-ended (hence the ellipsis). Yet it would be idle to pretend that "law as. . ." takes no position, that it is not historically situated. Blithely unaware of it at the outset, the conveners of the conference where the essays here were first presented have discovered that we are on a path that others are also following. We find ourselves riding a wave, one reverberating in both legal 12 and historical 13 scholarship. The wave owes its existence to developments in both history and law. As to the latter, it has never been more of a "hypostatized construct" than at present. 14 We return to this observation below. 15 But what of the former? It, too, hypostatizes itself, though in a more limited sense, being a professional practice with less instrumental reach. Still, as a professional practice, contemporary history, like law, is full of talk of itself. History's talk is of what history has to offer the present. 16 One offering is the narrative history that has become something of a staple of literary nonfiction. Narrative history represents history as edifying stories of the past. As Gordon 10.
International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1993
Los datos sobre estas operaciones provienen de una serie de informes escritos a comienzos del sig... more Los datos sobre estas operaciones provienen de una serie de informes escritos a comienzos del siglo XX, complementados con datos provenientes de revisiones documentales administrativas, de búsquedas en diarios locales y de conversaciones con personas que conocieron el oficio de primera mano. La integración de estos datos permite escribir un relato plausible sobre la caza de ballenas en el centro sur de Chile en los comienzos del siglo XX, considerando que se trata de "un evento del pasado".
The madman and the migrant This essay explores the nature of historical consciousness, and its re... more The madman and the migrant This essay explores the nature of historical consciousness, and its relation to culture, among the Tshidi-Barolong, a South African Tswana people. On the basis of the imagery of two informats -a "madman" and a former migrant laborer- it examines not merely the content of Tshidi consciousness, but also its expressive forms. These differ from the narrative modes of representation associated with "history" in Western contexts, and build on various poetic devices - most strikingly, on the rhetoric of contrast. Thus the opposed concepts of work and labor, one associated with setswana (Tswana ways) and the other with sekgoa (European ways), are major tropes through which Tshidi construct their past and present. Such rhetorical forms appear, on examination, to occur widely in situations of rapid change. As a resuit, this excursion into the poetics of history illuminates very generai questions concerning the connection between consciousness, culture, and representation.
ABSTRACT The authors examine - following Max Weber - the new religious spirit that seems to accom... more ABSTRACT The authors examine - following Max Weber - the new religious spirit that seems to accompany the rise of global capitalism. The paradox of simultaneous homogenization and difference, the increase in both wealth and poverty, and the rise of new forms of chauvinism and exclusion amidst a discourse of laissez faire are some widely remarked features of this "new world order". Less often noted is the exuberant spread, at a time of hyper-rationalization, of prosperity-gospels and fee-for-service religions, of occult practices and pyramid schemes; i.e. of the enchantments of a distinctly neoliberal economy, whose increasingly inscrutable speculations seem to conjure novel specters in their wake. The authors seek to interrogate the reasons and new aspects of these events. With specific reference to examples from postcolonial Africa, the authors explore the characteristic ways in which neoprotestant movements try to encourage an age-old messianic spirit with the singular signs and values of neoliberal enterprise.
University of California Press eBooks, Feb 6, 1997
ABSTRACT The image of colonialism as a coherent, monolithic process can no longer be sustained: i... more ABSTRACT The image of colonialism as a coherent, monolithic process can no longer be sustained: indeed, the very nature of colonial rule was, and is, often the subject of struggle among colonizers—as well as between ruler and ruled. This study examines 19th-century South Africa, where settlers, administrators, and evangelists contested the terms of European domination. It does so through the “gaze” of Protestant missionaries. Being the moral consciences of empire and the “dominated fraction of the dominant class,” their perspective—shaped in the age of revolution in Britain—gives unusual insight into the tensions and contradictions of colonialism; contradictions that sometimes had the effect of revealing, to the colonized, the hidden structures of command.[South Africa, colonialism, consciousness, missionaries, representation, “imaginative sociology”]
and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study pu... more and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Ever since the publication of Maitland's famed dictum that anthropology must become history o... more Ever since the publication of Maitland's famed dictum that anthropology must become history or be nothing2 a gradually burgeoning literature has called for convergence between the two disciplines.3 The general point has been laboured ad nauseam: given their shared epistemological foundations and complementary objectives, each would benefit from the insights and analytical perspectives of the other. But such apologetics typically beg the fundamental question, 'Which anthropology, what history?' As a result, the point is often lost that any substantive relationship between disciplines is determined not by the intrinsic nature of those disciplines if any such thing exists but by prior theoretical considerations. It would seem obvious, for example, that historical analysis assumes different significance for structural functionalism than it does for either Marxist or structuralist approaches.4
Is the idea of 'the autonomous person' a European invention? This conundrum, posed to us by colle... more Is the idea of 'the autonomous person' a European invention? This conundrum, posed to us by colleagues in philosophy and anthropology at the University of Heidelberg in June 1997, seems straightforward enough. Even ingenuous. But hiding beneath its surface is another, altogether less innocent question, one which carries within it a silent claim: to the extent that 'the autonomous person' is a European invention, does its absence elsewhere imply a de cit, a failure, a measure of incivility on the part of non-Europeans? And what of the corollary: is this gure, this 'person', the end point in a world-historical telos, something to which non-occidentals are inexorably drawn as they cast off their primordial differences? Is it, in other words, a universal feature of modernity-in-the-making, a Construct in the Upper Case? Or is it merely a lower case, local euroconstruct? 1 We begin our excursion into African conceptions of personhood in a decentring, relativising voice, the voice often assumed by anthropologists to discomfort cross-disciplinary, transcultural, suprahistorical discourses about Western categories, their provenance and putative universality. From our disciplinary perspective, 'the autonomous person', that familiar trope of European bourgeois modernity (Taylor, 1989), is a Eurocentric idea. And a profoundly parochial, particularistic one at that. 2 To be sure, the very notion that this generic person might constitute a universal is itself integral to its Eurocultural construction, a part of its ideological apparatus. What is more, 'the autonomous person'-the de nite, singular article-describes an imaginaire, an ensemble of signs and values, a hegemonic formation: neither in Europe, nor any place else to which it has been exported, does it exist as an unmediated sociological reality (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, 60f). Neither, of course, does the classical contrast between (I) the self-made, self-conscious, right-bearing individual of 'modern Western society', that hyphenated Cartesian gure epitomised in the Promethean hero of Universal History (Carlyle, 1842, p. 1), and (ii) the relational, ascriptive, communalistic, inert self attributed to premodern others. As we shall see, African notions of personhood are in nitely more complicated than this tired theoretical antinomy allows (
Among the 19th‐century Tswana, we argue, cattle were like commodities; they linked processes of p... more Among the 19th‐century Tswana, we argue, cattle were like commodities; they linked processes of production and exchange, embodied an order of meanings and relations, and had the capacity to reproduce a total social world. They were, in sum, prime media for the creation and representation of value in a material economy of persons and a social economy of things. But they also had particular historical salience. As the Tswana were colonized, the encounter between periphery and center, local and global economies, was played out—materially and ideologically—in the contest between beasts and money, a contest which has given rise, also, to such token currencies as “cattle without legs.” The double character of cattle—as icons of a “traditional” order and as weapons in the struggle to assert control over modern life—has significant implications for our understanding of commodities in noncapitalist, non‐European contexts, [cattle, commodities, money, colonialism, South Africa]
Although the literature on missions in Africa is very large, many have commented on the relative ... more Although the literature on missions in Africa is very large, many have commented on the relative lack of systematic analyses of the evangelical encounter; analyses that go beyond de-tailed, if often sensitive, chronicles of events and actions (Heise 1967; Beidelman 1982:2ff.; ...
This captivatingly provocative book falls firmly into the current genre of criti cal ethnographic... more This captivatingly provocative book falls firmly into the current genre of criti cal ethnographic and methodological literature in anthropology. Ethnography and the Historical Im agination is a tour de force of the ethnographic enterprise and attempts to locate ethnography squarely within the boundaries of the broader historical contexts which have shaped the discipli ne of anthropology in all its manifestations. It evokes not only the intellectual cli mate that spawned ethnographic interest in "native cultures," but also raises some fundamental que stions of epistemology in the construction and presentation of the so - called "savage soc ieties" to Western readers.The authors depict the current state of anthropology as one riddled with am bivalence towards its enterprise and its "mode of inquiry that appears, by turns, uniquely revelat ory and irredeemably ethnocentric" (p. 7). They concur with the pointed observation of Aijimer (1988:424) that ethnography "always has been ... linked with epistemological pro blems" (and, one might add, of both conceptualization of research problems and of ethnographi c practice). The authors raise tantalizing questions about the methodology and interpretation of ethnographic research. They draw attention to the sometimes apparent contradictory perspecti ves of its major proponents, that is, whether anthropology is part of "natural science," as Radcl iffe - Brown (1957) would have it, or part of history as advocated by Evans - Pritchard (1961 , 1963).The Comaroffs conclude that "Ethnography ... is a historically situated mod e of understanding situated contexts, ... each with its own ... radically different . .. objects and objectives" (pp. 9 - 10). They fortify this conclusion by recourse to the evide nce of cultural historians which, the authors claim, validate our endeavor as ethnographers" (p. 18). They further assert that "cultural history has been adept at revealing that all socia l fields are domains of contests," particularly in the area of "culture" (p. 18). This postulate is then applied to an analytical re - evaluation of some standard ethnographies, principally Leach (19 54), to show that failure to take into account the historical perspective subverts even the most p erceptive ethnographic analysis.In one sense, the book is a methodological excursus in that it re - evaluat es the epistemological basis of the ethnographic enterprise and, in another, it is a cr itique of the hermeneutics of cultural translation of non - Western social systems. The autho rs find strong support for their argument regarding the affinity between ethnography and histor y in the dictum of Levi - Strauss that "Both history and ethnography are concerned with societie s other than the one in which we live .... [I]n both cases we are dealing with systems of re presentations which differ ... from the representations of the investigator" (1963:16 - 17). However, the authors are concerned with a broader conception of "historical anthropology" whi ch goes beyond what they call the parochial idea of Western universal historiography which, non etheless, ignores other histories outside of the "orthodox practices of periodization in European history" (pp. …
2011] AFTERWORD 1041 influence of "law and" in their resort to synchronic analyses of relational ... more 2011] AFTERWORD 1041 influence of "law and" in their resort to synchronic analyses of relational conjunction and disjunction, to which they add diachrony in order to reveal the effect of law, or to explain its reality, by assessing change in its relation to other phenomena over time. Unsurprisingly, the animating hypotheses of twentiethcentury legal history embrace the same broad relational problematics that have preoccupied twentieth century "law and" theory: instrumentalism, relative autonomy, mutual constitutiveness, legal construction, autopoiesis, and indeterminacy. 10 The shift to "law as. . ." suggests something else, something distinctive. Concretely, it suggests that explanations of law are not to be found, either necessarily or sufficiently, in its relations to other things. As Shai Lavi notes, with justification, the shift affords an opportunity to think beyond long-familiar Weberian categories and trajectories. 11 It is not determinedly programmatic, a route to the next big concept, but open-ended (hence the ellipsis). Yet it would be idle to pretend that "law as. . ." takes no position, that it is not historically situated. Blithely unaware of it at the outset, the conveners of the conference where the essays here were first presented have discovered that we are on a path that others are also following. We find ourselves riding a wave, one reverberating in both legal 12 and historical 13 scholarship. The wave owes its existence to developments in both history and law. As to the latter, it has never been more of a "hypostatized construct" than at present. 14 We return to this observation below. 15 But what of the former? It, too, hypostatizes itself, though in a more limited sense, being a professional practice with less instrumental reach. Still, as a professional practice, contemporary history, like law, is full of talk of itself. History's talk is of what history has to offer the present. 16 One offering is the narrative history that has become something of a staple of literary nonfiction. Narrative history represents history as edifying stories of the past. As Gordon 10.
International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1993
Los datos sobre estas operaciones provienen de una serie de informes escritos a comienzos del sig... more Los datos sobre estas operaciones provienen de una serie de informes escritos a comienzos del siglo XX, complementados con datos provenientes de revisiones documentales administrativas, de búsquedas en diarios locales y de conversaciones con personas que conocieron el oficio de primera mano. La integración de estos datos permite escribir un relato plausible sobre la caza de ballenas en el centro sur de Chile en los comienzos del siglo XX, considerando que se trata de "un evento del pasado".
The madman and the migrant This essay explores the nature of historical consciousness, and its re... more The madman and the migrant This essay explores the nature of historical consciousness, and its relation to culture, among the Tshidi-Barolong, a South African Tswana people. On the basis of the imagery of two informats -a "madman" and a former migrant laborer- it examines not merely the content of Tshidi consciousness, but also its expressive forms. These differ from the narrative modes of representation associated with "history" in Western contexts, and build on various poetic devices - most strikingly, on the rhetoric of contrast. Thus the opposed concepts of work and labor, one associated with setswana (Tswana ways) and the other with sekgoa (European ways), are major tropes through which Tshidi construct their past and present. Such rhetorical forms appear, on examination, to occur widely in situations of rapid change. As a resuit, this excursion into the poetics of history illuminates very generai questions concerning the connection between consciousness, culture, and representation.
ABSTRACT The authors examine - following Max Weber - the new religious spirit that seems to accom... more ABSTRACT The authors examine - following Max Weber - the new religious spirit that seems to accompany the rise of global capitalism. The paradox of simultaneous homogenization and difference, the increase in both wealth and poverty, and the rise of new forms of chauvinism and exclusion amidst a discourse of laissez faire are some widely remarked features of this "new world order". Less often noted is the exuberant spread, at a time of hyper-rationalization, of prosperity-gospels and fee-for-service religions, of occult practices and pyramid schemes; i.e. of the enchantments of a distinctly neoliberal economy, whose increasingly inscrutable speculations seem to conjure novel specters in their wake. The authors seek to interrogate the reasons and new aspects of these events. With specific reference to examples from postcolonial Africa, the authors explore the characteristic ways in which neoprotestant movements try to encourage an age-old messianic spirit with the singular signs and values of neoliberal enterprise.
University of California Press eBooks, Feb 6, 1997
ABSTRACT The image of colonialism as a coherent, monolithic process can no longer be sustained: i... more ABSTRACT The image of colonialism as a coherent, monolithic process can no longer be sustained: indeed, the very nature of colonial rule was, and is, often the subject of struggle among colonizers—as well as between ruler and ruled. This study examines 19th-century South Africa, where settlers, administrators, and evangelists contested the terms of European domination. It does so through the “gaze” of Protestant missionaries. Being the moral consciences of empire and the “dominated fraction of the dominant class,” their perspective—shaped in the age of revolution in Britain—gives unusual insight into the tensions and contradictions of colonialism; contradictions that sometimes had the effect of revealing, to the colonized, the hidden structures of command.[South Africa, colonialism, consciousness, missionaries, representation, “imaginative sociology”]
and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study pu... more and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Ever since the publication of Maitland's famed dictum that anthropology must become history o... more Ever since the publication of Maitland's famed dictum that anthropology must become history or be nothing2 a gradually burgeoning literature has called for convergence between the two disciplines.3 The general point has been laboured ad nauseam: given their shared epistemological foundations and complementary objectives, each would benefit from the insights and analytical perspectives of the other. But such apologetics typically beg the fundamental question, 'Which anthropology, what history?' As a result, the point is often lost that any substantive relationship between disciplines is determined not by the intrinsic nature of those disciplines if any such thing exists but by prior theoretical considerations. It would seem obvious, for example, that historical analysis assumes different significance for structural functionalism than it does for either Marxist or structuralist approaches.4
Is the idea of 'the autonomous person' a European invention? This conundrum, posed to us by colle... more Is the idea of 'the autonomous person' a European invention? This conundrum, posed to us by colleagues in philosophy and anthropology at the University of Heidelberg in June 1997, seems straightforward enough. Even ingenuous. But hiding beneath its surface is another, altogether less innocent question, one which carries within it a silent claim: to the extent that 'the autonomous person' is a European invention, does its absence elsewhere imply a de cit, a failure, a measure of incivility on the part of non-Europeans? And what of the corollary: is this gure, this 'person', the end point in a world-historical telos, something to which non-occidentals are inexorably drawn as they cast off their primordial differences? Is it, in other words, a universal feature of modernity-in-the-making, a Construct in the Upper Case? Or is it merely a lower case, local euroconstruct? 1 We begin our excursion into African conceptions of personhood in a decentring, relativising voice, the voice often assumed by anthropologists to discomfort cross-disciplinary, transcultural, suprahistorical discourses about Western categories, their provenance and putative universality. From our disciplinary perspective, 'the autonomous person', that familiar trope of European bourgeois modernity (Taylor, 1989), is a Eurocentric idea. And a profoundly parochial, particularistic one at that. 2 To be sure, the very notion that this generic person might constitute a universal is itself integral to its Eurocultural construction, a part of its ideological apparatus. What is more, 'the autonomous person'-the de nite, singular article-describes an imaginaire, an ensemble of signs and values, a hegemonic formation: neither in Europe, nor any place else to which it has been exported, does it exist as an unmediated sociological reality (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, 60f). Neither, of course, does the classical contrast between (I) the self-made, self-conscious, right-bearing individual of 'modern Western society', that hyphenated Cartesian gure epitomised in the Promethean hero of Universal History (Carlyle, 1842, p. 1), and (ii) the relational, ascriptive, communalistic, inert self attributed to premodern others. As we shall see, African notions of personhood are in nitely more complicated than this tired theoretical antinomy allows (
Among the 19th‐century Tswana, we argue, cattle were like commodities; they linked processes of p... more Among the 19th‐century Tswana, we argue, cattle were like commodities; they linked processes of production and exchange, embodied an order of meanings and relations, and had the capacity to reproduce a total social world. They were, in sum, prime media for the creation and representation of value in a material economy of persons and a social economy of things. But they also had particular historical salience. As the Tswana were colonized, the encounter between periphery and center, local and global economies, was played out—materially and ideologically—in the contest between beasts and money, a contest which has given rise, also, to such token currencies as “cattle without legs.” The double character of cattle—as icons of a “traditional” order and as weapons in the struggle to assert control over modern life—has significant implications for our understanding of commodities in noncapitalist, non‐European contexts, [cattle, commodities, money, colonialism, South Africa]
Although the literature on missions in Africa is very large, many have commented on the relative ... more Although the literature on missions in Africa is very large, many have commented on the relative lack of systematic analyses of the evangelical encounter; analyses that go beyond de-tailed, if often sensitive, chronicles of events and actions (Heise 1967; Beidelman 1982:2ff.; ...
This captivatingly provocative book falls firmly into the current genre of criti cal ethnographic... more This captivatingly provocative book falls firmly into the current genre of criti cal ethnographic and methodological literature in anthropology. Ethnography and the Historical Im agination is a tour de force of the ethnographic enterprise and attempts to locate ethnography squarely within the boundaries of the broader historical contexts which have shaped the discipli ne of anthropology in all its manifestations. It evokes not only the intellectual cli mate that spawned ethnographic interest in "native cultures," but also raises some fundamental que stions of epistemology in the construction and presentation of the so - called "savage soc ieties" to Western readers.The authors depict the current state of anthropology as one riddled with am bivalence towards its enterprise and its "mode of inquiry that appears, by turns, uniquely revelat ory and irredeemably ethnocentric" (p. 7). They concur with the pointed observation of Aijimer (1988:424) that ethnography "always has been ... linked with epistemological pro blems" (and, one might add, of both conceptualization of research problems and of ethnographi c practice). The authors raise tantalizing questions about the methodology and interpretation of ethnographic research. They draw attention to the sometimes apparent contradictory perspecti ves of its major proponents, that is, whether anthropology is part of "natural science," as Radcl iffe - Brown (1957) would have it, or part of history as advocated by Evans - Pritchard (1961 , 1963).The Comaroffs conclude that "Ethnography ... is a historically situated mod e of understanding situated contexts, ... each with its own ... radically different . .. objects and objectives" (pp. 9 - 10). They fortify this conclusion by recourse to the evide nce of cultural historians which, the authors claim, validate our endeavor as ethnographers" (p. 18). They further assert that "cultural history has been adept at revealing that all socia l fields are domains of contests," particularly in the area of "culture" (p. 18). This postulate is then applied to an analytical re - evaluation of some standard ethnographies, principally Leach (19 54), to show that failure to take into account the historical perspective subverts even the most p erceptive ethnographic analysis.In one sense, the book is a methodological excursus in that it re - evaluat es the epistemological basis of the ethnographic enterprise and, in another, it is a cr itique of the hermeneutics of cultural translation of non - Western social systems. The autho rs find strong support for their argument regarding the affinity between ethnography and histor y in the dictum of Levi - Strauss that "Both history and ethnography are concerned with societie s other than the one in which we live .... [I]n both cases we are dealing with systems of re presentations which differ ... from the representations of the investigator" (1963:16 - 17). However, the authors are concerned with a broader conception of "historical anthropology" whi ch goes beyond what they call the parochial idea of Western universal historiography which, non etheless, ignores other histories outside of the "orthodox practices of periodization in European history" (pp. …
Uploads
Papers by John Comaroff