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Jean Comaroff (born 22 July 1946) is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. She is an expert on the effects of colonialism on people in Southern Africa.^[1] Until 2012, Jean was the Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.^[2]

Education

She received her B.A. in 1966 from the University of Cape Town and her Ph.D. in 1974 from London School of Economics. She has been a University faculty member since 1978.^[3]

In collaboration with her husband John Comaroff, as well as on her own, Comaroff has written extensively on colonialism, and hegemony based on fieldwork conducted in southern Africa and Great Britain.

Comaroff also serves as a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal Public Culture. An important recent book that she wrote with John Comaroff is Theory from the South, which among other things covers "how Euro-America is evolving towards Africa."^[4]

Personal life

Jean Comaroff was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, shortly after World War II. Her father, a Jewish South African doctor, joined the British Army Medical Corps while studying abroad to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. Her mother was a convert to Judaism, born to a Lutheran German family that had emigrated to South Africa in the late nineteenth century. Dr. Comaroff's parents returned to South Africa when she was ten months old, settling in the highly segregated industrial town of Port Elizabeth. While the family supported local political unrest, her father kept a low-profile due to his role running a local clinic. Her mother was involved in community work, including running soup kitchens and night-school, and working with the elderly Jewish community.

In late 1960s, she and her husband, anthropologist John Comaroff moved to Great Britain to pursue a PhD in anthropology.^[5] Both Jean and John Comaroff were faculty members at the University of Chicago between 1979 and 2012.^[6]

Publications

• 1985 Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. This was a ground-breaking book when it first came out in 1985. An early experiment in historical ethnography, it sought to synthesize symbolic anthropological and materialist analysis, and it “helped catapult Jean Comaroff into the realms of anthropological stardom. Her analysis of the structural violence of life in South Africa, as experienced at the level of the social body and the individual body was (is) lucid and compelling. Her descriptions of everyday forms of resistance – domestics and their nail polish, the neo- church of Zion, for example – helped an entire generation of anthropologists understand that the body was (is) an important theoretical object of study, and that one could move beyond the very important work of Mary Douglas. Comaroff’s work, paralleled with Alan Young’s earlier work on Zar possession cults, offers important insights into the ways in which history, gender, the state, racism, religion and resilience collide with heart- wrenching and yet inspiring impacts” (Goodreads).
• 2007 Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order. Public Culture, 19(1): 197–219.

Prizes

• Gordon Laing Prize, best book by a faculty member published by the University of Chicago Press [with John L. Comaroff]
• Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize for advancement of research in law and society.
• Anders Retzius Gold Medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.
• Best Special Issue award, Council of Editors of Learned Journals for “Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism.” (Public Culture 12[2]).  The essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism explore how we are to understand capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century. In exploring the material and cultural dimensions of the Age of Millennial Capitalism – carefully laid out in a wide-ranging theoretical introduction by John and Jean Comaroff – the contributors interrogate the so-called ‘crisis’ of the nation-state, the triumph of the free market and its more or less hidden effects, rising tides of violence and cultures of exclusion, and the growth of intensified forms of identity politics. The collection also investigates the tendency of neoliberal capitalism to produce a world of increasing inequality, environmental degradation, heightened flows of people and value across the planet, moral panics and social impossibilities, bitter generational antagonisms and gender conflicts, yawning class distinctions, and the flourishing of what were once “pariah” forms of predatory economic activity. In the process, it opens up an empirically grounded, conceptual discussion about the world-at-large at a particularly momentous historical time when the social sciences and humanities are in danger of ceding intellectual initiative to the masters of the market and the media. Edited by Jean and John Comaroff, the essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism pose questions about how to understand capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet empire, in what seemed to be a post-totalitarian moment, marked by the ascent of capitalism in its most unabashedly salvific form. In exploring the material and cultural dimensions of the Age of Millennial Capitalism – laid out in a wide-ranging theoretical introduction by John and Jean Comaroff – the contributors interrogate the so-called ‘crisis’ of the nation-state, the triumph of the free market and its more or less hidden effects, rising tides of violence and cultures of exclusion, and the growth of novel forms of identity politics. The collection also investigates the tendency of neoliberal capitalism to produce a world of increasing inequality, environmental degradation, heightened but uneven flows of people and value across the planet, moral panics and social impossibilities, and bitter generational antagonisms and gender conflict – all this as the social sciences and humanities are in danger of ceding intellectual initiative to the masters of the market and the media.

Joint publications (with John 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.
• 1997 Of Revelation and Revolution Vol II: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The two volumes of Jean and John Comaroff's Of Revelation and Revolution (RR) are a tour de force, and raise major questions about the nature of consciousness and the impact of modernity over the past two centuries. Despite their apparently narrow focus on missionaries among the southern Tswana, these are perhaps the most important issues to confront historians of the modern world” (Shula Marks, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2011). The study explores the long interplay between Nonconformist evangelists – the foot soldiers of colonization, but also bearers of the idea of liberation -- and the indigenous peoples of the Southern African interior.
• 2000 Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture, 12(2): 291–343.
• 2006 Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (eds.) University of Chicago Press.
• 2006 The Portraits of an Ethnographer as a Young Man: The Photography of Isaac Schapera in "Old Botswana." Anthropology Today. 22(1):10-17.
• 2007 Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera. (eds. w/ D.A. James) University of Chicago Press.
• 2009 Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning), University of Chicago Press (July 15, 2009)
• 2009 Dixit: Violencia y ley en la poscolonia: una reflexión sobre las complicidades Norte-Sur, Buenos Aires y Madrid, Katz Barpal Editores, ISBN 978-84-96859-56-2 (En coedición con el Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona)
• 2011 "Twenty Years after Of Revelation and Revolution: An Interview with Jean Comaroff", Social Sciences and Missions (Leiden: Brill), vol.24(2-3), pp. 148–170
• 2012 Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (The Radical Imagination). [Paradigm Publishers]. Set within the wider discussion on contemporary intellectual production in the South, this book by Jean and John Comaroff revisits the Enlightenment conceit that modern Europe set the terms original truth and progress for the rest of humankind to follow. But it “does not rehearse this argument in the usual simplistic, reactive or resistant manner. It provides a new twist to it, such that the South is not analyzed as the mere receiving end of colonial subjection or modernization’s designs but rather emerges as a space of experimentation that prefigures the near future of the West. Whereas the colonies might have always been the first laboratory of modernity, there is allegedly something new in the political, economic, and cultural ways in which the South anticipates the contours of the Euro-American future” (Editor’s Forum, Society for Cultural Anthropology).

References

External links

• University of Chicago Faculty Bio
• Harvard University Faculty bio
• Author's page