Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's original essay ""Can the Subaltern Speak?"" transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism's ""worlding"" of the world. Spivak's essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, to be able to access the state
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To read and reread Jean Comaroff's Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance today, more than two decades after its publication, is to be reminded of what historical anthropology can be, and to confront what it seems no longer capable of being. In this essay, I return to Comaroff's explicit analysis of the conjuncture of blood and money, and the less theorized figures of the car as the sign of foreign economic power in order to think again about the relationship between apartheid's economic history and postapartheid social forms. Exploring automobility as the condition of possibility for the peasant proletariat, I examine the doubled structure of fear and desire that has come to inhere in the figure of the car and the value of speed with which it is always associated—a value that functions both as the index of sovereignty and as the engine of its encompassment by global capitalism. South Africa's posthistorical predicament, like that which preceded it, remains deeply racialized. Today, however, the interpellation of subjects often takes place through private institutions, which operate in the space between accident and contingency, through the management of fear and the calculation of risk. These forces were shrewdly intuited in Comaroff's perspicacious analysis, long before speed acquired its autonomy and actuaralization had assumed its place as the dominant science of the new govenmentality.
This article considers the legacies of Jacques Derrida in and for Anglo-American sociocultural anthropology. It begins with a survey of Derrida's own engagement with themes that have historically been foundational to the field: (a) the critique of sign theory and, with it, the questions of language and law in Lévi-Straussian structuralism; (b) the question of the unconscious; (c) the critique of the performative and its consequences for the idea of ritual; (d) the rereading of Marcel Mauss's concept of the gift, and of economy more generally; and (e) the analysis of the metaphysical basis of law, in both religious and ostensibly secular formations. It then considers the state of the field at the time when it was being infused with different forms of poststructuralism and explores the competing claims made by these discourses in relation to deconstruction. Finally, after tracing the convergences and divergences between Derridean deconstruction and theory in sociocultural anthropology, it treats two main examples of works produced against and under the influence of Derrida's thought, respectively.
This paper considers the art of South African artist, Clive van den Berg. Van den Berg has long been engaged in a careful exploration of landscapes and their capacity to bear traces of what is no longer known, often in ways that question the archive fever of contemporary historians and cultural activists. In a variety of media – from fire‐installations to oil pastel, from light and wood to acrylic, in video and in mono‐print – he has probed the history of eros and its relationship to the violences of apartheid, simultaneously citing the aesthetic traditions of the Italian Renaissance and Southern Africa. The paper both describes and explicates the aesthetico‐political ambition of the artist's work as it has developed over the last decade, in the aftermath of apartheid's dismantling.
rosalind c. morris is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. She is also Associate Editor for the journal, connect: art,politics, culture, theory. Her most recent book, In the Place of Origins: Modernity and its Mediums in Northern Thailand was published by Duke University Press in 2000.
Rituals of National Loyalty: An Anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand. Katherine A. Bowie. New York: Columbia University‐ Press, 1997.
