Suchergebnisse

ch 1. Theory from the south -- ch 2. On personhood : a perspective from Africa -- ch 3. Liberalism, policulturalism, and ID-ology : thoughts on citizenship and difference -- ch 4. Nations with/out borders : the politics of being and the problem of belonging -- ch 5. Figuring democracy : an anthropological take on African political modernities -- ch 6. History on trial : memory, evidence, and the forensic production of the past -- ch 7. Alien-nation : zombies, immigrants, and millennial capitalism -- ch 8. Beyond bare life : AIDS, (bio)politics, and the neo world order.

In the second of a proposed three-volume study, John and Jean Comaroff continue their exploration of colonial evangelism and modernity in South Africa. Moving beyond the opening moments of the encounter between the British Nonconformist missions and the Southern Tswana peoples, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume II, explores the complex transactions-both epic and ordinary-among the various dramatis personae along this colonial frontier.The Comaroffs trace many of the major themes of twentieth-century South African history back to these formative encounters. The relationship between the Briti

Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than other nation-states? The usual answer is yes. In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Jean and John Comaroff and a group of respected theorists show that the question is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth-an order that criminalizes poverty and race, entraps the "south" in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the courts. As these essays make

"Defining their enterprise as more in the direction of poetics than of prosaics, the Comaroffs free themselves to analyze a vivid series of images and events as objects of analysis. These they mine for clues to the 19th-century contents of the British imagination and of Tswana minds. They are themselves imagining the imagination of others, and they do the job with characteristic aplomb....The first volume creates an appetite for the second."-Sally Falk Moore, American Anthropologist

ABSTRACT  The three articles published here grew out of talks originally delivered in Frankfurt as part of the Jensen Memorial Lecture series of 2008, which took "The End of Anthropology?" as their topic. The title of this In Focus has been amended to make plain that none of the authors believe that the discipline is about to die, at least not in the foreseeable future as was once believed possible by such luminaries as Margaret Mead and Claude Lévi‐Strauss. Each, rather, offers a provocative reading of the present and future of anthropology: of its raison d'être, of the sorts of substantive problems it might address in times to come, of the discursive strategies and the epistemic practices that it might develop in the early years of the 21st century.

Este ensayo examina la situación del estado-nación postcolonial a través del prisma de la catástrofe medio ambiental: cómo las plantas «invasoras» pueden llegar a ser un apremiante problema político y lo que esto puede revelar acerca de las cambiantes relaciones entre ciudadanos, comunidad y soberanía nacional bajo condiciones neo-liberales. Siguiendo estas cuestiones en relación al caso de la «nueva» Sudáfrica, planteamos tres características claves de las políticas postcoloniales en una era del laissez-faire: la refiguración del sujeto-ciudadano, la crisis de las fronteras de soberanía y la despolitización de la política. Bajo tales condiciones los «invasores» -tanto plantas como personas- terminan encarnando básicas contradicciones de frontera y pertenencia; la naturaleza extraña (alien-natura) proporciona un lenguage para proclamar nuevas formas de discriminación en plena cultura del «post-racismo» y los derechos civiles. ; This paper examines the predicament of the postcolonial nation-state through the prism of environmental catastrophe: how is it that plant "invaders" can become an urgent political issue, and what might this reveal of the shifting relations among citizenship, community, and national sovereignty under neo-liberal conditions? Pursuing these questions in relation to a case from the "new" South Africa, we posit three key features of postcolonial polities in an era of laissez-faire: the refiguration of the subject-citizen, the crisis of sovereign borders, and the depoliticization of politics. Under such conditions, aliens ˆ both plants and people ˆ come to embody core contradictions of boundedness and belonging; and alien-nature provides a language for voicing new forms of discrimination amidst a culture of "post-racism" and civil rights.