John L. Comaroff

John L. Comaroff, Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology, and Oppenheimer Research Scholar at Harvard University, has spent five decades researching, lecturing, and writing about African societies and cultures, colonial and postcolonial political economy, crime and policing, and authoritarian states in Africa and elsewhere – both past and present. Along with his wife and colleague, Jean Comaroff, with whom he also often teaches highly popular undergraduate and graduate courses, he has written and edited fifteen or more books, many of them recognized as path breaking.

Their prize-winning two-volume Of Revelation and Revolution, a study of the role of Christianity in African colonization, is read across the world and across the discipline. So is their Ethnicity, Inc., a study of the way in which more and more ethnic populations commodify their cultures and organize themselves as market-savvy corporations. Similarly, their Theory from the South; Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa has sparked active debate across the world about the unfolding history of globalization. Their prize-winning two-volume Of Revelation and Revolution, a study of the role of Christianity in African colonization, is read across the world and across the discipline.

These are not the only fields in the social sciences and humanities on which John Comaroff, in collaboration with Jean Comaroff, has had a lasting impact. Their Ethnography and the Historical Imagination has had a major impact on methodology and is taught in many university courses; Modernity and its Malcontents is a widely cited study of the creative forms of modernity that have arisen outside of Europe and America; Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism is a highly original, critical look at why and how capitalism, in its neoliberal moment, has come to be so widely treated as the solution to all human problems; Zombies et Frontières A l'Ere Néolibérale, a collection in French of their essays on “occult economies,” explores the rising preoccupation with zombies and the occult at a moment in history when magical thinking was supposed to disappear, but, if anything, may be on the increase; Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, now a canonical text, and The Truth about Crime ask why so many societies have become obsessed with violent criminality when statistics show little reason for it. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony also develops an anthropological approach to the concept of “lawfare,” one radically different from that deployed by the US military, to explain when, why, and how the potential violence of the law is deployed for political ends. Many of these books have been translated into several languages, among them, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Mandarin.

Having also published well over a hundred essays, many of them also widely influential, John Comaroff continues to focus on the growing trend among political leaders across the world to weaponize the law and media for their political purposes – including the subversion of democracy--.

He earned his BA from University of Cape Town in South Africa – which he left in 1967, refusing to live under its apartheid regime -- and his Ph.D from the London School of Economics at the University of London. Many of its alumni, like their predecessors, remember their experience in that program as “life-changing,” a highly intensive, original form of pedagogy they never experienced anywhere else, before or after.