Jean Comaroff

(PhD, London School of Economics 1974) Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, and in the Clinical Scholars Program, has conduced fieldwork in southern Africa and Great Britain and is interested in colonialism, modernity, ritual, power, and consciousness. Her specific foci of study have included the religion of the Southern Tswana peoples (past and present); colonialism and Christian evangelism and liberation struggles in southern Africa; healing and bodily practice, and the making of local worlds in the wake of global "modernity" and commodification. Her current research concerns problems of public order, state sovereignty and policing in postcolonial contexts, and the challenging relation of legitimacy to force. (Out of Residence Winter 2009)
email: jcomaro@uchicago.edu

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Publications:

1985 Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1996 The Empire's Old Clothes: Refashioning the Colonial Subject. In D. Howes (ed.), Commodities and Cultural Borders. Rutledge.

1997 Consuming Passions: Nightmares of the Global Village. Culture. 17(1-2):7-19

1998 Reading, Rioting and Arithmetic: The Impact of Mission Education on Black Consciousness in South Africa. Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. 82:19-63

2005 The End of History, Again: Pursuing the Past in the Postcolony. In S. Kaul, et al., (eds.), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham: Duke University Press.

2006  Ethnography: Colonizing Gaze or Humanizing Art?  In M.C. Horowitz, ed., New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

2007  Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order. Public Culture, 19(1): 197-219.

Joint Publications (with John Comaroff)

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. Codesria Bulletin, 3/4:17-28.

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

2001 Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse and the Postcolonial State. Journal of Southern African Studies. 27(3): 627-51.

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.

2001 On Personhood: An Anthropological Perspective from Africa. Social Identities. 7(2): 267-83.

2002 Second Comings: Neo-Protestant Ethics and Millennial Capitalism in South Africa, and Elsewhere. In P. Gifford, ed., 2000 Years and Beyond: Faith, Identity and the Common Era. London: Routledge.

2003 Reflections on Liberalism, Policulturalism, and ID-ology: Citizenship and Difference in South Africa. Social Identities. 9(3): 445-74.

2003 Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction. Ethnography. 4(2):291-324.

2004 Policing Culture, Cultural Policing: Law and Social Order in Postcolonial South Africa. Law and Social Inquiry. 29(1):513-546.

2004 Criminal Justice, Cultural Justice: The Limits of Liberalism and the Pragmatics of Difference in the New South Africa. American Ethnologist. 31(2):188-204.

2004 Criminal Obsessions, After Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing and the Metaphysics of Disorder. Critical Inquiry. 30(4):800-824.

2005  Reflections on Youth, From the Past to the Postcolony.  In A. Honwana and P. De Boek, eds., Makers and Breakers, Made and Broken: Children and Youth as Emerging Categories in Postcolonial Africa. Oxford: James Currey.  Also in G. Downey and M.S. Fisher, eds., Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy. Duke University Press (in press).

2006  Figuring Crime: Quantifacts and the Production of the Un/real. Public Culture. 18(1):207-44.

2006  Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (eds.). University of Chicago Press.

2006  The Portraits of an Ethnographer as a Young Man: The Photography of Isaac Schapera in "Old Botswana."  Anthropology Today. 22(1):10-17.

2006  Colonizing Currencies: Beasts, Banknotes and the Color of Money in South Africa. In P. Geschiere & W. van Binsbergben, eds., Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities: The Social Life of Things Revisited. Munster, Germany: LIT.

2007 (eds. w/ D.A. James) Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera. University of Chicago Press.

2009  Reflections on the Anthropology of Law, Governance, and Sovereignty in a Brave Neo World. In Eckert & von Benda, eds., Rules of Law and Laws of Ruling.

2009  Ethnicity, Inc.  University of Chicago Press

n.d.  Theory from the South: or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers (in press).