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 Tshidi struggle to construct a viable order of signs and 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...

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...

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 market, they address a pressing question: Wherein lies the future of ethnicity?Their account begins in South Africa, with the incorporation of an ethno-business in venture capital by a group of traditional African chiefs. But their horizons are...

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.

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 transf...

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 do...

What are the fundamental issues, processes, agency and dynamics that shape the political economy of life in modern Africa? In this book, the contributors - experts in anthropology, history, political science, economics, conflict and peace studies, philosophy and language - examine the opportunities and constraints placed on living, livelihoods and sustainable life on the continent. Reflecting on why and how the political economy of life approach is essential for understanding the social pr...

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...

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 loc...

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...

The study of Canadian literature—CanLit—has undergone dramatic changes since it became an area of specialization in the 1960s and ’70s. As new global forces in the 1990s undermined its nation-based critical assumptions, its theoretical focus and research methods lost their immediacy. The contributors to Trans.Can.Lit address cultural policy, citizenship, white civility, and the celebrated status of diasporic writers, unabashedly recognizing the imperative to transfigure the discip...

This important book discusses the political economy of world order and the basic ideological and ontological grounds upon which the emergent global order is based. Starting from a Maori perspective it examines the development of international law and the world order of nation states. In engaging with these issues across macro and micro levels, the international arena, the national state and forms of regionalism are identified as sites for the reshaping of the global politico/economic order...