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 legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the post–Cold War era—changes in which they are themselves deeply implicated.

This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises—from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers–but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that “traditional” authority enjoys in the late modern world.

Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa’s history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the twenty-first century.

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 ethnography and culture remain vital.

Over the years John and Jean Comaroff have broadened the study of culture and society with their reflections on power and meaning. In their work on Africa and colonialism they have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) effaced, empowered and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated? How does the social imagination take shape in novel yet collectively meaningful ways? Addressing these questions, the essays in this volume-several never before published-work toward an "imaginative sociology," demonstrating the techniques by which social science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction, the authors offer their most complete statement to date on the nature of historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade.

The Global South has become shorthand for the world of non-European, postcolonial peoples. Synonymous with uncertain development, unorthodox economies, failed states, and nations fraught with corruption, poverty, incivility, and strife, it is that half of the world about which the Global North spins theories. Rarely the Global South is seen as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events. Yet, as many nation-states of the Northern Hemisphere experience increasing fiscal meltdown, state privatization, corruption, ethnic conflict, and other crises, it seems as though they are evolving southward, so to speak, in both positive and problematic ways. Is this so? How? In what measure? Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff take on these questions, reversing the usual order of things. Drawing on their long experience of living in Africa and teaching in Europe and the U.S., they address a range of familiar themes democracy, law, national borders, labor and capital, religion and the occult, liberalism and multiculturalism with the imagination and agile prose for which they are well known. They ask how we might understand these things anew with theory developed in the South. Their ethnographic eye stresses the salience of the local without losing sight of the large-scale processes in everyday lives that are everywhere enmeshed. This view from the South renders key problems of our time at once strange and familiar, giving an ironic twist to the evolutionary pathways long assumed by social scientists."

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 Jean and John Comaroff draw on their long experience of living in Africa to address a range of familiar themes - democracy, national borders, labour and capital and multiculturalism. They consider how we might understand these issues by using theory developed in the Global South. Challenging our ideas about 'developed' and 'developing' nations, Theory from the South provides new insights into key problems of our time.

In the economics of everyday life, even ethnicity has become a potential resource to be tapped, generating new sources of profit and power, new ways of being social, and new visions of the future. Throughout Africa, ethnic corporations have been repurposed to do business in mining or tourism; in the USA, Native American groupings have expanded their involvement in gaming, design, and other industries; and all over the world, the commodification of culture has sown itself deeply into the domains of everything from medicine to fashion. Ethnic groups increasingly seek empowerment by formally incorporating themselves, by deploying their sovereign status for material ends, and by copyrighting their cultural practices as intellectual property. Building on ethnographic case studies from Kenya, Nepal, Peru, Russia, and many other countries, this collection poses the question: Does the turn to the incorporation and commodification of ethnicity really herald a new historical moment in the global politics of identity?

In the economics of everyday life, even ethnicity has become a potential resource to be tapped, generating new sources of profit and power, new ways of being social, and new visions of the future. Throughout Africa, ethnic corporations have been repurposed to do business in mining or tourism; in the USA, Native American groupings have expanded their involvement in gaming, design, and other industries; and all over the world, the commodification of culture has sown itself deeply into the domains of everything from medicine to fashion. Ethnic groups increasingly seek empowerment by formally incorporating themselves, by deploying their sovereign status for material ends, and by copyrighting their cultural practices as intellectual property. Building on ethnographic case studies from Kenya, Nepal, Peru, Russia, and many other countries, this collection poses the question: Does the turn to the incorporation and commodification of ethnicity really herald a new historical moment in the global politics of identity?

In Ethnicity, Inc., John L. and Jean Comaroff explore a range of intriguing, disturbing, even absurd phenomena to analyse a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. Ethno-theme parks; Native American casinos; Scotland the brand; a world religion declared to be intellectual property; San 'Bushmen' with patent rights potentially worth millions of dollars; nations acting as commercial enterprises; and the growth of marketing firms that target specific ethnic populations are just some of the diverse examples that fall under the Comaroffs' incisive scrutiny. Through these examples they trace the contradictory effects of neoliberalism as it transforms identities and social being across the globe. Intellectually rigorous, but leavened with wit, Ethnicity, Inc. is a powerful, highly original portrayal of a new world being born in a tectonic collision of culture, capitalism and identity.

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 an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions to the collateral damage of war they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world. Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen. To do so, the Comaroffs draw on their vast knowledge of South Africa, especially, and its struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of law out of the wreckage of long years of violence and oppression. There they explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion, drawing illuminating comparisons to the United States and United Kingdom. Going beyond South Africa, they offer a global criminal anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral panics voiced, and populations ruled. The result is a disturbing but necessary portrait of the modern era, one that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, how we think about morality, and how we are going to proceed as a global society.

This collection highlights the work of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Urgent Anthropology Fellowships fund, which supports research into communities whose culture and social life are under immediate threat. Created by George Appell in response to the distress he experienced working with a traumatized community of swidden cultivators in Borneo, who were struggling to survive after relocation in what Appell describes as a ‘cultural concentration camp’, the fund was established to identify ways of supporting and strengthening such communities through ethnographic work. Since 1995, Urgent Anthropology Fellows have worked with many displaced communities, whether found in refugee camps, resettled in kindred communities across national borders or in environments hostile to their traditional way of life; or whether suffering from the aftermath of civil war or the intrusion of foreigners in search of minerals. Despite the diversity of circumstances in these case studies, this book shows some of the common strategies that emerge in helping displaced communities regain some control over their own destinies. These include membership of social networks, access to natural resources, land ownership and self sufficiency, autonomy in local judicial procedures and economic activities as well as the celebration of traditional rituals, all of which lessen the potential powerlessness of displaced communities. Any anthropologist or NGO worker, and indeed anyone who works with, or cares about, vulnerable communities and the rights of indigenous peoples, will gain much from the accumulation of experience and insights offered herein.

Of Revelation and Revolution is at once a highly imaginative, richly detailed history of colonialism, Christianity, and consciousness in South Africa, and a theoretically challenging consideration of the most difficult questions posed by the nature of social experience.

Although primarily concerned with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Of Revelation and Revolution also looks forward to the age of apartheid and beyond.

In this first of two volumes, Jean and John Comaroff explore the early phases of the encounter between British missionaries and the Southern Tswana peoples of the South African frontier. Tracing the social and cultural backgrounds of both parties, they pay particular attention to the rise of European modernity and the colonial impulse, to contemporary British images of the "savage," and to the complex world of the precolonial African interior.

They show how the evangelists' attempts to change the signs and practices of the Southern Tswana produced new forms of consciousness in both colonizer and colonized. The Comaroffs grapple in exciting new ways with issues of power and resistance, agency and intention, that have long vexed historians and anthropologists. They reveal how structures of inequality in the colonial encounter were often fashioned in the absence of conventional, coercive tools of domination, and they address the puzzling question of why some cultural forms were incorporated into the everyday world of the colonized while others were contested or rejected.

In reflecting on "the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonization" in South Africa, the Comaroffs provide fresh insight into the dialectics of culture and power that shape all historical processes.

In this sophisticated study of power and resistance, Jean Comaroff analyzes the changing predicament of the Barolog boo Ratshidi, a people on the margins of the South African state. Like others on the fringes of the modern world system, the Tshidi struggle to construct a viable order of signs and practices through which they act upon the forces the engulf them. Their practices through which they act upon the forces that engulf them. Their dissenting Churches of Zion have provided an effective medium for reconstructing a sense of history and identity, one that protests the terms of colonial and post-colonial society and culture.

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 neoliberalism that appears to accompany it, taking on simultaneously local and translocal forms? To what extent does it make sense to describe the present juncture in world history as an "age of revolution," one not unlike 1789-1848 in its transformative potential?
In exploring the material and cultural dimensions of the Age of Millennial Capitalism, the contributors interrogate the so-called crisis of the nation-state, how the triumph of the free market obscures rising tides of violence and cultures of exclusion, and the growth of new forms of identity politics. The collection also investigates the tendency of neoliberal capitalism to produce a world of increasing differences in wealth, environmental catastrophes, heightened flows of people and value across space and time, moral panics and social impossibilities, bitter generational antagonisms and gender conflicts, invisible class distinction, and "pariah" forms of economic activity. In the process, the volume opens up an empirically grounded, conceptual discussion about the world-at-large at a particularly momentous historical time--when the social sciences and humanities are in danger of ceding intellectual initiative to the masters of the market and the media.
In addition to its crossdisciplinary essays, "Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism--"originally the third installment of the journal "Public Culture"'s "Millennial Quartet"--features several photographic essays. The book will interest anthropologists, political geographers, economists, sociologists, and political theorists.

"Contributors. "Scott Bradwell, Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Fernando Coronil, Peter Geschiere, David Harvey, Luiz Paulo Lima, Caitrin Lynch, Rosalind C. Morris, David G. Nicholls, Francis Nyamnjoh, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Paul Ryer, Allan Sekula, Irene Stengs, Michael Storper, Seamus Walsh, Robert P. Weller, Hylton White, Melissa W. Wright, Jeffrey A. Zimmerman

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 predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth--an order that tends to criminalize poverty and race, entraps the "south" in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the courts. As these essays make plain, however, there is another side to postcoloniality: while many postcolonies show signs of endemic disorder, they also fetishize the law, its ways and its means. How are we to explain the coincidence of disorder with a fixation on legalities? "Law and Disorder in the Postcolony" addresses this question, entering into critical dialogue with such theorists as Jean-Francois Bayart, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben. In the process, it also demonstrates how postcolonies have become crucial sites for the production of contemporary theory, not least because they are harbingers of a global future under construction.

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 the essays in "Modernity and Its Malcontents"
address familiar anthropological issues--like witchcraft,
myth, and the politics of reproduction--but treat them in
fresh ways, situating them amidst the polyphonies of
contemporary Africa. Others explore distinctly
nontraditional subjects--among them the Nigerian popular
press and soul-eating in Niger--in such a way as to
confront the conceptual limits of Western social science.
Together they demonstrate how ritual may be powerfuly
mobilized in the making of history, present, and future.
Addressing challenges posed by contemporary African
realities, the authors subject such concepts as modernity,
ritual, power, and history to renewed critical scrutiny.
Writing about a variety of phenomena, they are united by a
wish to preserve the diversity and historical specificity of
local signs and practices, voices and perspectives. Their
work makes a substantial and original contribution toward the
historical anthropology of Africa.
The contributors, all from the Africanist circle at the
University of Chicago, are Adeline Masquelier, Deborah
Kaspin, J. Lorand Matory, Ralph A. Austen, Andrew Apter,
Misty L. Bastian, Mark Auslander, and Pamela G. Schmoll.

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 legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the post-Cold War era--changes in which they are themselves deeply implicated. This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises--from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers-but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that "traditional" authority enjoys in the late modern world. Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa's history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the twenty-first century.

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 legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the post-Cold War era--changes in which they are themselves deeply implicated. This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises--from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers-but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that "traditional" authority enjoys in the late modern world. Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa's history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the twenty-first century.

"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 the British imagination and of Tswana minds. They are themselves imagining the imagination of others, and they do the job with characteristic aplomb....The first volume creates an appetite for the second."--Sally Falk Moore, "American Anthropologist"

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 predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth--an order that tends to criminalize poverty and race, entraps the "south" in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the courts. As these essays make plain, however, there is another side to postcoloniality: while many postcolonies show signs of endemic disorder, they also fetishize the law, its ways and its means. How are we to explain the coincidence of disorder with a fixation on legalities? "Law and Disorder in the Postcolony" addresses this question, entering into critical dialogue with such theorists as Jean-Francois Bayart, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben. In the process, it also demonstrates how postcolonies have become crucial sites for the production of contemporary theory, not least because they are harbingers of a global future under construction.

This volume presents for the first time the selected photographs of the 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 136 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 anthropologist who worked there.

The essays in this important new 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 a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept--and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's work, they examine the impact of colonial ideology, postcoloniality, and development practice on discourses of civility, the workings of everyday politics, the construction of new modes of selfhood, and the pursuit of moral community.
Incisive and original, the book shows how struggles over civil society in Africa reveal much about larger historical forces in the post-Cold War era. It also makes a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology to contemporary discourses on the rise of a "new world order."

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 the essays in "Modernity and Its Malcontents"
address familiar anthropological issues--like witchcraft,
myth, and the politics of reproduction--but treat them in
fresh ways, situating them amidst the polyphonies of
contemporary Africa. Others explore distinctly
nontraditional subjects--among them the Nigerian popular
press and soul-eating in Niger--in such a way as to
confront the conceptual limits of Western social science.
Together they demonstrate how ritual may be powerfuly
mobilized in the making of history, present, and future.
Addressing challenges posed by contemporary African
realities, the authors subject such concepts as modernity,
ritual, power, and history to renewed critical scrutiny.
Writing about a variety of phenomena, they are united by a
wish to preserve the diversity and historical specificity of
local signs and practices, voices and perspectives. Their
work makes a substantial and original contribution toward the
historical anthropology of Africa.
The contributors, all from the Africanist circle at the
University of Chicago, are Adeline Masquelier, Deborah
Kaspin, J. Lorand Matory, Ralph A. Austen, Andrew Apter,
Misty L. Bastian, Mark Auslander, and Pamela G. Schmoll.

In the second of a proposed three-volume study, John and Jean 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 and the Southern Tswana peoples, "Of Revelation and Revolution," Volume II, explores the complex transactions--both epic and ordinary--among the various "dramatis personae" along this colonial frontier.
The Comaroffs trace many of the major themes of twentieth-century South African history back to these formative encounters. The relationship between the British evangelists and the Southern Tswana engendered complex exchanges of goods, signs, and cultural markers that shaped not only African existence but also bourgeois modernity "back home" in England. We see, in this volume, how the colonial attempt to "civilize" Africa set in motion a dialectical process that refashioned the everyday lives of all those drawn into its purview, creating hybrid cultural forms and potent global forces which persist in the postcolonial age.
This fascinating study shows how the initiatives of the colonial missions collided with local traditions, giving rise to new cultural practices, new patterns of production and consumption, new senses of style and beauty, and new forms of class distinction and ethnicity. As noted by reviewers of the first volume, the Comaroffs have succeeded in providing a model for the study of colonial encounters. By insisting on its dialectical nature, they demonstrate that colonialism can no longer be seen as a one-sided relationship between the conquering and the conquered. It is, rather, a complex system of reciprocaldeterminations, one whose legacy is very much with us today.