Chercheurs

Anthropologie / COMAROFF, JOHN L.

jcomarof

Position

Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, University of Chicago, USA.

Thèmes de recherche

John Comaroff is interested in comparative systems of politics and law, with special reference to the relationship between their cultural and social dimensions; in sociological and anthropological theory; in the cross-cultural study of kinship and marriage; in ideology and historical consciousness; in colonialism and postcoloniality; and in global capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. His major area of research is Southern and Central Africa.

Recent and Current Projects :
Colonialism and Education. To be published as Volume III of Of Revelation and Revolution, this study explores the impact of mission pedagogy, in its broadest sense, on black culture and consciousness in South Africa.

Civil Society, Moral Community and the State in Africa. This collaborative project, currently being completed by faculty and students of the Africanist Circle at Chicago, is to produce a volume of essays on postcolonial politics in Africa. In particular, it interrogates a series of questions surrounding democratization, the nature of governmentality, and the quest for moral community in different parts of the continent.

The Making of the "New" South Africa. This study, based on new field and documentary research, explores a number of related themes in the construction of post-apartheid South Africa. Among other things, it examines the effort to build a modernist society under postmodern conditions--and the contradictions attendant on this national project. Among the themes to be addressed are the politics of informal justice; the rise of "corporate" Christianities; the alleged explosion of witchcraft and satanic practices; the struggle for the state; the crafting of a political culture and a language of constitutionality; the making of a postcolonial public sphere; and the role of the media in the construction of national consciousness.

Prix et récompenses

Publications

1991 Of Revelation and Revolution Vol I: Christianity, Colonialism, and
Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1992 Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder: Westview
Press.

1993 Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Africa (eds.)
University of Chicago Press.

1997 Of Revelation and Revolution Vol II: The Dialectics of Modernity on
a South African Frontier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1997 Postcolonial Politics and Discourses of Democracy in Southern Africa: An Anthropological Reflection of African Political Modernities. Journal of Anthropological Research. 53(2): 123-46.

1999 Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony. American Ethnologist. 26(3): 279-301.

1999 Alien-nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Global Capitalism. In G. Schwab, ed. Forces of Globalization. NY: Columbia University Press (in
press)

1999 Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspective, Problems, Paradoxes (eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

2000 Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture, 12(2): 291-343.

2000 Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse and the Postcolonial State. Hagar. 1(1): 7-40

2001 Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (eds.) Duke University Press.

2001 Revelations upon Revelation: After Shocks, Afterthoughts. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies [Special number on Of Revelation and Revolution Vol. 2], 3(1): 100-27.