John L. Comaroff

(PhD, London School of Economics 1973) Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, does research in southern Africa, concentrating on the Tswana peoples. He is interested in colonialism, postcoloniality, modernity, neoliberalism, social theory, and the history of consciousness; in politics, law, and historical anthropology. (Out of Residence Winter 2009)
email: jcomarof@uchicago.edu

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Publications:

1981 Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context (with S.A. Roberts). Chicago: University of Chicago Press

1996 Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Difference in an Age of Revolution. In P. MacAllister & E. Wilmsen, eds., The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power. University of Chicago Press.

1997 Legality, Modernity, and Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa: An Excursion in the Historical Anthropology of Law. In R. Rawlings, ed., Law, Society and Economy: Centenary Essays for the London School of Economics and Political Science 1895-1995. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

1998 Reflections on the Colonial State, in South Africa and Elsewhere: fragments, factions, facts and fictions. Social Identities. 4(3):321-361

2002 Governmentality, Materiality, Legality, Modernity: On the Colonial State in Africa. In J-G Deutsch, P. Probst & H. Schmidt, eds., Perspectives on African Modernities. London: James Currey.

2009  Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology: Law and Religion in the 21st Century. In B. Kapferer, ed., Vital Matters: Religious Movements, Emergent Socialities and the Post-Nation (in press).

Joint Publications (with Jean 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(3):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 Ethnographyer 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).