Jean Comaroff

21203/33600. Intensive Study of a Culture: The Tswana, Past and Present (=AfAfAm 205). This course describes and analyzes the sociocultural order of an African people during the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods.

24300/40300. Medicine and Culture (=HiPSS 273). Class limited to fifty undergraduates, 15 graduate students. Diverse systems of thought and practice concerning health, illness, and the management of the body and person in everyday and ritual contexts are examined. This course seeks to develop a framework for studying the cultural and historical constitution of healing practices, especially the evolution of Western biomedicine.

40400. Colonialism, Postcoloniality and the Dialectics of Modernity. PQ: Graduate Students Only. Limit 30. This course – part lecture and part seminar, part conceptual and part ethnographic – will explore the nature of colonialism and modernity, and the dialectical relationship between them. It will also interrogate recent writings on postcoloniality and postmodernity – and their impact on historical anthropology, sui generis. (with John Comaroff)

45100. Anthropology of the Body (=Gender Studies xxx). This course explores a range of texts, both classic and more recent, that treat the body as the subject and object of social processes. Introductory lectures are followed by student presentations, the general aim being to ground theoretical inquiry in ethnographic and historical materials.

52600. AdvRdgs: Africanist Anthropology. (with John Comaroff

53700. The 21st Century. A course sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. (Limit: 25 graduate students, no auditors. Preference for students from doctoral departments) This seminar is concerned with current theoretical reflections on the nature of the state, social order, violence and citizenship. Jean & John Comaroff. Autumn 2004

53701.  The 21st Century: Law and Disorder in the Postcolony.  A course sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. (Limit: 25 graduate students, no auditors. Preference for students from doctoral departments) Postcolonial and post-totalitarian polities across the world appear to be caught in a pervasive paradox. On one hand, they manifest a pronounced faith in the law, in the capacity of the constitution and litigation, to produce social order amidst radical economic, political, and ideological change. Indeed, it might be argued that political processes are increasingly being displaced into the legal arena. On the other hand, postocolonial polities are haunted by a metaphysics of disorder: by the collapse of the Weberian ideal of the state in the face of apparently uncontrollable violence and unpoliceable crime and by the sheer difficulty of imagining a politics adequate to the present global moment. How might we understand the co-presence of these two things, the fetishism of the law and the metaphysics of disorder? And why has the growth of democratic institutions across the world been accompanied by a dramatic expansion of more-or-less organized, increasingly violent crime? What general theoretical issues do these questions raise for an understanding of the Twenty-first Century?  (with John Comaroff)

53705. Conversations in Contemporary Theory. A course sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. (Limit 15, graduate students only, consent of instructor required.) This workshop focuses on the current research of members of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. It will involve readings and discussion with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lisa Wedeen, Moishe Postone, Bill Sewell, Bill Brown, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, on topics ranging from sovereignty and disorder to the changing nature of work and politics.