Jean Comaroff Book order

Exploring the changing relationship between culture and the market, this book addresses the question: Wherein lies the future of ethnicity? It offers an account of the ways in which ethnic populations are remaking themselves in the image of the corporation - while corporations coopt ethnic practices to open up new markets of consumption.

Jean and John Comaroff investigate why it is that crime statistics have become a pervasive public passion in the South African postcolony. They explore what exactly those crime statistics make real, how they take on public life, by what means they convert the abstract into the intimate and tertiary knowledge into primary experience. Why is it that they have become deeply inscribed in narratives of personal being, so vital to the construction of moral publics, so integral to debates about the meaning of democracy, freedom and security? Conventionally framed as value-free information, these numbers appear to be taking on ever more political weight as the modernist state deregulates the functions of governance, as sovereignty is parsed and privatized, as control over the means of violence is rendered ambiguous, as a culture of 'popular punitiveness' gains credence, as race is criminalized and crime racialized. As they do, modes of producing and deploying crime statistics themselves proliferate. This sets in train processes whose effects are deeply implicated in remaking the nation-state, its governance, and citizenship within it.

"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