In their writings on Africa and colonialism, John and Jean Comaroff have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated?These essays work toward an "imaginative sociology," demonstrating the techniques by which social (...) science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction the authors offer their most complete statement to date on historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade. (shrink)

How are relations between generations shifting? As anthropologists, our take on intergenerational relations and the rationalities on which they are based—i.e., generationality—is historically situated. In many parts of the world, generation has become a major axis of social and political struggle, sometimes of bitter conflict. This, we argue, is a corollary of post-Cold War transformations in economy and society—and a radical rupture in processes of social reproduction. These transformations have conduced to the perception of a rising ‘generation war.’ How, then, (...) in these circumstances, are we to think anew of intergenerational relations—and justice? (shrink)

This essay offers a critical reading of Drucilla Cornell’s writings on the concept of ubuntu in South Africa, a country with which she had a deeply committed, complicated, ambivalent relationship. It explores her arguments for the contemporary relevance of this deeply rooted cultural concept—despite its appropriation and commodification at the hands of global market forces—not merely to the everyday life of Black South Africans but also for a transformative constitutionalism; a progressive jurisprudence, that is, addressed to the accomplishment of a (...) more equal and ethical post-apartheid society. In so doing, it analyzes how Cornell, a playwright and philosopher committed to estranging the familiar, turned the skepticism of ubuntu redolent among white South African scholars and public intellectuals back on itself by rooting her argument for its continued significance in a combination of ethnographic discovery and the legal history of the present. (shrink)