Jean Comaroff
Jean Comaroff is 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.[1] She is an expert on the effects of colonialism on people in Southern Africa.[2]
She received her B.A. in 1966 from the University of Cape Town and her Ph.D. in 1974 from the London School of Economics. She has been a University faculty member since 1978.
In collaboration with her husband John Comaroff, as well as on her own, Comaroff has written extensively on colonialism, healing, liberation struggles, and the problems of modernity, 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.
Personal life
Jean Comaroff comes from a Jewish family that had fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe and had emigrated to South Africa. In late 1960s, she and her husband, anthropologist John Comaroff moved to Great Britain to pursue a PHD in anthropology.[3] Both Jean and John Comaroff have been faculty members at the University of Chicago since 1979.[4]
Personal Quotes
"The fascinating thing is that anthropology is anti-hegemonic in many of the questions it asks, and is threatened in many places. But the ideas produced within anthropology are still generative far beyond the discipline." Nov. 2008
Publications
- 1985 Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- 2007 Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order. Public Culture, 19(1): 197-219.
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.
- 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 9788496859562 (En coedición con el Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona)
- 2011 Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (The Radical Imagination). [Paradigm Publishers].
References
External links
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