Jean and John Comaroff interviewed by Kalman Applbaum 15th November 2008

0:09:07 Jean: born in Edinburgh, Scotland, just after the end of World War II; father had been born in South Africa and did his first medical degree at the University of Cape Town; he wanted to specialize for which he had to go abroad; as he was a Jewish South African his options were limited; he went first to Ireland and then Edinburgh; war broke out and he joined the British Army; parents had hoped to stay on in Britain after the war but colonial servicemen were repatriated; when I was ten months old, we went to Port Elizabeth, an industrial town – the Detroit of South Africa – that served a large farming hinterland, where my father found work; it was provincial and highly segregated, but close to historic regions of black rural activism and a center of urban unrest, during the time I was growing up; my father was a local doctor and inhabited a relatively sheltered world; the centre of gravity for teenage culture in the late 50's was America, but it was also a world of apartheid violence and segregation, and shaped what we became; our parents were the generation that lived through a war, experienced racism in Europe, and were terrified of being politically visible as Jews in South Africa; for young people with political sensibility it was not easy.

3:24:00 John: born in Cape Town in 1945; mother's family were Jews from Lithuania, like many anthropologists from South Africa; father's father was from the Ukraine and emigrated to England; during the recession of the 1890's he went first to Rhodesia and then later on to Cape Town; parents grew to maturity during the depression of the early 1930's and the War; were aware of the Holocaust and afraid; the first Nationalist Government came to power in 1948 under Prime Minister, D.F. Malan, who was quoted as saying that, had the Axis powers won the war, the final solution would have been applied in South Africa; parents lived in fear of anti-Semitism, in a closed, Zionistic community; I grew up in Cape Town during the dark years of apartheid, in a very violent society; I was radicalized, as were many of our generation, by the Zionist socialist movements, which were more socialist than Zionist at that time, and in which many  South African scholars got their training in leftist social theory.

5:39:10 Jean: there was an interesting aspect to this – a real gender disparity in the way in which white middle classes responded; both of our mothers were much more radical than our fathers. The fathers had to be breadwinners, they didn't like the political circumstances in which they lived. My father used to run free clinics at an African hospital, and would fulminate against Afrikaner politics, but didn't want to draw attention to their protest. My mother was born a Lutheran and converted to Judaism, but because she came from a German family she had an aptitude for learning Yiddish and spoke it with a wonderful sense of the idiomatic use of the language; when we went to Port Elizabeth she became involved, working with the elderly Jewish community, many of them German refugees, who spoke Yiddish. More significantly, unlike John's mother who was a Zionist socialist, my mother believed that you started political work at home; went into the townships and ran soup kitchens and night schools. Many of these women got into political trouble; there was constant friction between the fathers who didn't want trouble. I would come home from school sometimes to find there was no lunch as my mother would have given it to a hungry person who had come to the door; there was a sense that women were much more engaged with the immediacy of the lived circumstances of apartheid; its effects on families. Nadine Gordimer's story 'A Chip of Glass Ruby' about an Indian community on the Witwatersrand where there was a similar sense, among the men, that they had to work within the system, while the mothers unable to bear the injustices which they often saw in the lives of their own domestic workers, or among women begging on the streets.

8:17:10 John: This community produced quite a lot of anthropologists. My father was in the furniture trade. Two blocks away Meyer Fortes' brother also sold furniture. Isaac Schapera, who later became our teacher, grew up in the same [rural] area as Jean's family. After moving to [school in] Cape Town he spent his weekend with Jean's [urban] kin; until he died he constantly asked after her uncle, who lived three blocks away in London – where they never interacted. There was a strong connection between the South Africans, mostly Jewish, who went into British social anthropology; every time we saw Meyer Fortes his first question was about the furniture trade in Cape Town!

9:13:00 Jean: Even into the next generation, David Lan (author of Guns and Rain) comes from a similar kind of family. It was a case of being the dominated fraction of the dominant class, which is what anthropologists often were, and on the colonial fringe. When I went to university, I had no idea what I wanted to do; so started with 'A', and did courses in Afrikaans, archaeology and anthropology; in the anthropology classroom with Monica Wilson, I had an epiphany. This was the only context on that campus where there was some recognition  that we were living in Africa, and that African society and culture had something to teach the world; it was an extraordinary experience. In English literature courses, at the time, you read only metropolitan literature. Again, Monica Wilson was a woman in a predominantly male faculty, a missionary’s daughter, and a woman whose husband, Godfrey Wilson, committed suicide under difficult circumstances in Zambia as a conscientious objector during the WW2. Her whole relationship to South Africa, on the one hand, and ethnography on the other, was very much formed by her experience in this place and time.  She gave us that these unusual circumstances could be the source of knowledge and insight of very general value.

10:45:16 John: There is now an industry in South Africa devoted to writing Monica Wilson's biography; she turns out to have been a very interesting character. Godfrey was a radical way before his time: in the 30's he was writing about African proletarians in a way that was to anticipate world systems' theory. Reading his work now, it is almost spooky to see the extent that he anticipated a lot of Marxist theory and the economic anthropology of the left. What was interesting about the School of African Studies [at the University of Cape Town] in those days, where anthropology was situated along with archaeology and African languages, was that it was the only place on the campus which was licensed to have black and white faculty together. 1964 to 1966 – the period of the sabotage trials, the rise of 'Umkhonto we Sizwe', Poqo, etc. – was a strange moment, very repressive. It is hard to explain to our students what it was like growing up in a fascist education system. Under South African law anybody who had had any connection with the Communist Party could lose their jobs. This happened to a lot of our teachers: Jack Simons – who  wrote a brilliant book, Caste and Colour in South Africa, and who trained many important South Africans (like Albie Sachs) – was summarily banned during our second year. We were out of the classroom as much as possible, protesting. Of course, many of the books that we teach now and take for granted, were banned. There wasn't a single text by Marx; even Peter Worsley and Ronald Frankenberg were banned – [as was] anything that had any hint of socialism, communism. Tto get access to books you had to go and sit in a cage on the fifth floor of the library with a security person watching what you did. However, anthropology in that world seemed to have a resonance with contemporary South Africa like nothing else did. It wasn't a radical discipline, but it created a base from which one could think radical thoughts, and from which one could ask questions about the nature of South African society, which was almost impossible anywhere else.

13:43:00 Jean: Already in 1951, Monica Wilson had written the paper called 'Witch Beliefs and Social Structure' which was published in the American Journal of Sociology. It was classic structural-functionalism in many ways, yet insightful beyond the limits of its paradigm, comparing two different African societies in respect of their distinct idioms of witch belief. At the end, it made reference to McCarthyism in America, raising the question  whether witchcraft was solely an African phenomenon; it was way ahead of its time. She was also writing books with titles like 'Reaction to Conquest', seeing anthropology inseparably enmeshed in an colonial encounter; this sort of work was inter-disciplinary, refusing the separate anthropology from history; also tracking the empirical effects of Apartheid. For instance, she was involved in the Keiskammahoek Survey, which documented extreme poverty in the  Eastern Cape, and linked it to the impact of racial segregation on ordinary people in he rural areas. Her research and teaching were unprecedented, one of the few contexts in which Africans spoke as collaborators in the production of knowledge. In the world of university education at the time, African voices were absent; there was a lot of protest but it was always mouthed by white theorists and activists.

15:14:03 John: Jean and I met in anthropology where Monica Wilson took us under her wing. She and her husband had been an anthropological couple; she had done a kind of historical anthropology and was co-editor of The Oxford History of South Africa. We went on to write historical anthropology and Jean worked on ritual, so there was a very strong genealogical link with her. People often say to us that we are products of the Manchester School. We weren't: we worked in Manchester in Gluckman's last years when he was no longer head of department, but Nuffield Research Professor and happened to fit into that world by virtue of the things we were doing; Jean, more with Peter Worsley and Clyde Mitchell in Sociology.

16:25:00 Jean: There were nepotism clauses in force in British Universities at that stage; husbands and wives could not be in the same department. I worked in the Medical School and in Medical Sociology.

16:34:11 John: Peter Worsley was a close friend and wonderful pedagogue to us then; Terence Ranger was there too. Manchester in those days was an extraordinary place, really vibrant, frankly orientated against the South, in opposition to Oxford, Cambridge and London – which was fun if you were there. Gluckman's own image of the world and his department was [derived from] the FA soccer league and Manchester United.

17:07:21 Jean: Of course, prior to our time in  Manchester,  we went to the London School of Economics – on the suggestion of Monica Wilson. That was formative because we were there in 1967-68, which was a time of unparalleled social activism.  If you came from outside the British system you didn't move directly into a graduate programme and had to do a remedial year. Our peers in that class were largely draft dodgers from the US; there was a very particular kind of political environment there. When we first arrived at the LSE Mick Jagger had only quite recently ceased being  a student there, and was still holding concerts on campus to support the ferment of youth culture at that time - Grosvenor Square and the anti-Vietnam protests. Jagger and his band were just beginning to really make waves in Britain and he used to raise money for the Socialist Society at the LSE.

18:57:08 John: It was happening throughout Europe.The LSE was closed for most of our first year there and the anthropology department decamped to the Royal Anthropological Institute in Bedford Square. We spent most of our time in protests, like the Grosvenor Square march....

19:17:07 Jean: That was before the LSE was purged and was still quite a radical place. When I first arrived at the entrance on Dover Street - it is now no longer an open street - big black cabs would come round very quickly; I was just walking across the street and was nearly knocked down by one and the driver who shouted at me: “If you want to be red, you’ve got to be quick!”

19:49:17 John: Those were the moments also when anthropology was for the first time developing arguments about colonialism. Asad's book on colonial encounters was to come out in 1973, but a Marxist anthropology was already beginning to identify itself; as former colonials, as the dominated fragment of the dominant class, [we were]  not British or black African, [and hence] caught in a strange middle ground...

20:26:02 Jean: When we were at the LSE, Firth would teach “Methods” from his original collection of field notebooks, and Malinowski's Kula valuables were in a glass case in the seminar room on the fifth floor. We would be sitting there when there weren't seminars with people like Joel Kahn and Jonathan Friedman, founder members of Marxist anthropology, and we would go out and hear someone like Tariq Ali giving a rousing talk about the nature of the Vietnam War. Then you would come back into this hallowed environment, and sit around the table talking about fieldwork with people like Lucy Mair, who still believed that facts and values had to be kept rigidly separated

21:13:00 John: There were of also a lot of South African ex-anti-apartheid figures who had left the country..

21:22:14 Jean: Robin Blackburn was one of the young faculty leaders...

21:32:00 John: At the same time the new New Left was beginning to form around Economy and Society, so these were very interesting days – and had a major impact on how we were going to think about the world. 

21:40:08 Jean: The late Alfred Gell, an inventive and brilliant anthropologist, was part of this group; he came from quite an intellectually aristocratic background. But the LSE was this place of ferment, and it drew people like him. In many ways, you  have to be in a big city to feel this...

22:06:13 John: The student body was interesting. We were all going to experimental theatre and talking about it. There was a real sense of the empire beginning to strike back: African theatre, South Asian movies, etc. Anthropology tended to be quite insular in many of the places where we have taught over the years. But our engagement with London at the LSE  was certainly going to affect what we later did.

22:58:06 Jean: By the time we went to Manchester we had already done fieldwork in South Africa; again it was Monica Wilson who advised us to work near a border as it was almost impossible to do field research under Apartheid conditions, and were likely to be thrown out eventually; working among people who straddle a border we could then continue our research on the other side. Which could be interesting, as one would be able to observe the same cultural legacy under two different kinds of state formations and sets of conditions. Monica was prescient; that is exactly what happened.

23:30:14 John: That is what we did. She told us to ask Schapera, who had become my supervisor, [for help]. He managed to get us a research permit, which was basically impossible; there was a Permanent Secretary in London who had been a student of his and we got our permit through him. Monica had the prescience to say then that even a research permit didn't guarantee that we would finish fieldwork. 

24:13:00 Jean: We did actually, but barely, and when we went back to follow up we went to the other side of the border...

24:18:20 John: After nineteen months when we left we were pretty sure that we were being investigated and that if we didn't move we would be moved. 

24:37:24 Jean: There was also the danger of putting people that you spoke to at risk, and it was incredibly difficult to establish any kind of trust across the color bar; the hazardous conditions brought one very close to the people one got to know well; we are still in touch with friends whom we worked with at the time, folks who are our own age - Batswana teachers, intellectuals, people once in underground politics - whom we still see, and whose children are now in touch with our children. It has been a long-standing set of connections, but they were very difficult to sustain in the repressive years.

25:04:07 John: We were lucky in one respect. We had two or three members of the white community – one a former Sharpeville detainee who ran the local paper, Joe Podbury, whose sister had been forced into exile, and Bruce Little, who ran the local pharmacy – who told us what the police were asking about us. Also, Simon Roberts, who was at the LSE and with whom I subsequently wrote, was in the Attorney General's office just after independence in Botswana, and had ways of moving material. We gave him our field notes and he looked after them; we were always afraid that they would be taken. Simon became a lifelong friend.

26:06:00 Jean: We also had lots of friends in the black community, particularly people in the churches which were always a refuge for politics there. I was working on churches; I left the LSE assuming that I would study “traditional religion,” because African Christianity was what scholars of comparative religion did at the time. When I got there, Christianity was a major idiom of local life, forms of Christianity made under local conditions, an integrated aspect of Tswana history and life. Several of the leaders of the various local denominations were extraordinary leaders, involved in everything from feeding the hungry to giving asylum to those on the run; one close friend had actually been the priest for Robert Sobukwe, and he took us to be ritually treated by a local healer to protect us against the security police. The most significant thing about all this was that the kind of structural-functionalist methods that we had learned at the LSE  were just totally inadequate when we got to this world, where you couldn't separate religion from politics, “local” ethnography from the structure of the whole colonial, Apartheid state. There was no way that you could see these things as anything but a product of a very large history, the borders of our “field” were, in a sense, there and not ther. This forced us into a kind of anthropology that was difficult to write when we got back to the LSE; some of that material was put on hold until we started writing our books and had independent jobs. But South Africa at the time was an amazing forcing ground; it also, very early, got us working with other scholars who were developing a new, generic kind of social science in southern Africa. That was the saving grace, for even in places where anthropology wasn't inter-disciplinary, as it wasn't in Manchester in the early 1970's, there were South African comrades who worked together and read each others material, and pulled one into other modes of thinking. In South Africa itself, there was a period of complete paralysis in the sense that it was impossible to know how to do anthropology. The discipline had been hi-jacked, in some quarters, to legitimate a politics of difference. And you couldn't really do fieldwork; we couldn't have done it if we had not come from a British university; we would never have got the necessary permission from a South African university, or had the confidence to even think it was possible. It was at this period that those who felt that anthropology had to somehow make itself relevant to this world began to read social history, and began to do a sort of political economy, Marxist social history - inspired by  E.P. Thompson and the History Workshop Journal.

29:09:10 John: Anthropology in the later Apartheid years was eclipsed by social history and even we were drawn into the social history world. We taught the African history and anthropology seminar with Terence Ranger in Manchester [and] historians like Colin Bundy and William Beinart became our interlocutors. We worked for the anti-apartheid movement – Jean and I, Colin Bundy and Zola Zembe, a unionist, formed Anti-Apartheid in Manchester – and got very involved with the British labour movement and the boycott. Political work also bound us to that group [of historians]. It wasn't fashionable to do historical anthropology then in England. And American historical anthropology was a different creature entirely; it was much more cultural, whereas we were socio-cultural anthropologists. We were probably too cultural for British anthropology, too social for American, and too historical for both. Because of these interconnections, Manchester was a comfortable home in which to have uncomfortable arguments. That decade was deeply formative for both of us.

30:59:00 Jean: There were also differences with historians. There was a kind of fixed set of Marxian expectations as to how you interpreted colonialism and its determinations at the local level; there was a concern for “consciousness” of a particular kind, for instance; we were already working with models that did not assume that everything that people thought and that motivated their worlds was explicitly formulated in their consciousness. I started to read Foucault at this point because I was working on medicine and religion, and I got very interested in forms of embodiment and subjectification. We argued with some historians about the degree to which ethnography could uncover (often implicit) truths about local world, beliefs and motives, that were symbolically encoded, and sometimes not simply the consequence of colonialism unfolding. We were also very interested in what was particular about  the South African scene and the local “reaction to conquest; about very particular engagements with proletarianization, about what these large politico-economic process meant for local kinship practices, ritual practices, and those kinds of things

32:03:33 John: I remember having a monumental argument with some of our very close friends on just this. They said that kinship was all superstructure, and all that anthropologists “do.” We asked how they actually thought they understood relations of production in Africa that weren't in some sense articulated through the medium of kinship; to talk about matriliny or patriliny is not to talk simply about terms, but also about a material set of relations. If you want to apprehend African "modes of production,” let alone processes of articulation, you [have to grasp this. Otherwise you are left with bland abstractions]. Of course life in colonies is about abstraction, and abstraction is violence, [but in a different sense of the term]. We would have these kinds of arguments all the time.

32:45:16 Jean: It came to a head particularly around the work I did around my PhD which was about African Independent Churches and resistance. It turned round the whole question of what constituted legitimate politics, resistance, agency. I was very concerned with the fact that the world that we found, particularly on the ground in the north-west where we did our fieldwork, was one where people were living in tension with the Apartheid regime, but also in some form of collaboration, which is where the Gramscian model came in. I was very aware of the fact that there were ways in which they were creating spaces for themselves, creating senses of autonomous worlds of meaning, of significance, of action, independence, that were not “political” in the sense they were paid-up members of any one of the formal movements. But yet they were creating forms of life, practices that clearly were iconoclastic in significant ways; re- working Christian signs and practices to reform the world as they lived it, for instance; in these ways they exited the apartheid world without leaving it. I got into these arguments about to what degree this form of action was “resistance;” to what degree was this something which was political, and how did we have to rethink the margins between the religious and the political around the symbolic vis-a-vis the consciously ideological; these sorts of questions were very much at the fore at that period

34:08:12 John: Jean has a wonderful line which is absolutely true. Social anthropology was deeply gendered when we were at the LSE, so she “got” religion and I “got” politics; the LSE didn't entertain any possibility of us doing a PhD together. The model of the individual author really did apply; it was no different here [in the USA]. Basically, we started to write together as a way of arguing with that tradition. My doctoral work looked at the nature of African political life in the colonial and then apartheid period. I wanted to retheorize the nature of vernacular politics; Schapera, my teacher, had written of African government and politics in such a way as to render them sterile; they were about administration and order, and had nothing to do with power – which struck me as fundamentally wrong. I worked on the historical records of Tswana chiefdoms before going into the field. It struck me that they operated on very different terms from those that had become the orthodoxy in anthropology. I went to the field wanting to take a radically different look at power in pre-colonial systems. Like Jean, I found that I was working in the world of apartheid; the leader of the opposition faction in the chiefdom in which I was working happened to be the Treasurer of the African National Congress. The question became: how did these things [vernacular and national politics] interpenetrate? [I wanted to show that] these African worlds, which anthropologists since the 1940's – since African Political Systems – had treated entirely as discrete islands, were built upon contradictions, not on principles of order; that they were riven with struggles over power and legitimacy in which the oratorical construction of competitive realities played a significant part; that they were dialectically entailed in the world beyond them. These things became [the core of] my work. Also, by coincidence, I became involved in law. One of the things we see nowadays throughout global politics is their judicialization; this was always the case amongst Tswana, and indeed in many African polities, where what we take to be political forms of contestation occur through and in the language of legalities. I got interested in this and landed up, again through the intervention of Schapera, writing up papers with Simon Roberts which led to a book, and a secondary life in the study of law. Schapera read every word we wrote; he was an amazing interlocutor. He had an encyclopedic grasp of Africa and seemed to know everything. The last thing he read of our writing, other than a book of photographs, was Of Revelation and Revolution. He read through those two volumes with a fine toothcomb and made amazingly precise comments on our footnotes...

39:04:11 Jean: Our families had been interconnected in the old days in South Africa, and we would always visit him when we went to London. He had lived in the same room since 1948 in an hotel; they moved him to the corridor below just before he died. The hotel had been a place for gentleman scholars which changed over time into a glitzy West-End joint, but there was one corridor where these elderly people lived. His world became more and more contracted but he kept in contact through various networks that spanned the entire Southern African anthropological world; everybody who was anybody went on pilgrimage to see him. We always went with a bottle in hand: he drank whisky throughout the day and night. He would relay the gossip of what was going on in the Diaspora and then you would tell him about what you and your students were doing. He was an almost militant theoretical empiricist (to quote Leach on Malinowski) but he was also a very interesting person because there were certain orthodoxies (over-rigid structural models, for instance) that he had rejected early on. This was connected to the salience, and style of his photography; for him, photography was at one level just another extension of the empirical eye, but at the same time it was an unblinking gaze; he was very suspicious of people who were eager to create models which were based on exclusion; very suspicious of the overly systemic structural functionalist notions of tradition. In his writing and photography the world of the surrounding colonial labour market, for instance, the impact of depression era Southern Africa on local peoples always bled in. The empiricism was a form of critical watch on what he saw as flights of theoretical fancy. Along with that went an openness to the idea that rural African societies were hybridizing, dialectically entailed worlds; that you had to understand the impact of processes like migrant labour, that Africans were writing letters from the mines, and were operating with new genres, and were entailed in complicated ways with colonialism. There was an eye for small detail; he would keep the stock records of colonial traders so that when we ourselves went back and tried to trace the life of the commodity as one of the vectors of the colonization of life worlds among the Tswana, Schapera had kept all of these documents. Which colour blanket was sent to Bechuanaland, which were bought, and which stock was rejected; what styles did women not like to buy; he had an instinct for significant detail. There was a kind of material groundedness about the way he saw the world; it was also linked to his ideas of agency and his “big man” theory of history. He did many historical studies of chiefs and particular tribal innovators, and these were very interesting, clarifying; it was also based in a “practice theory,” though not theorized in that way. But this was very much where his centre of gravity was; you looked at what people did and there you found the concepts you needed to explain their actions, and you never closed your gaze prematurely because of an a-priori sense of the limits of your field.

42:32:05 John: That is an acute observation. Athough he objected to theory he never objected to our writing theory as long as we demonstrated a fealty to the ethnographic. He would cross-question us about an ethnographic practice; if he felt that we knew what we were talking about, the rest was OK...

42:58:02 Jean: The most poignant moment in our relationship was in dealing with his photographs: he was always in love with these pictures; in a way, the pictures spoke more clearly than he could. He was a very shy man; his father had committed suicide when he was quite young, and he had had a very strange and unrequited personal emotional history; so he was always more of an observer. We felt he was like a kind of Lewis Carroll figure who looked in, and was more comfortable with women and children in the field; it was not voyeuristic, just easier for him to relate directly to them. Also, he had been locked out of those kinds of intimacies as a child, and the pictures said more than he could about his affect. There was a tenderness in the pictures that he was never able to express directly; he was always gruff; he kept the picture as his life shrank in scope. He gave away most of his books, everything but the pictures. At Christmas or New Year he would send you a photograph, usually connected to what work you were doing, but he gave them out slowly and sparingly as though he were giving himself; he wanted to have these pictures published in a collection, and he started talking to an editor in Germany about this project. That editor got in touch with us, at Schapera's suggestion, and asked if we could write an introduction. There were many problems getting the copyright for the various photographs which he had lodged in various places, so that the German publication fell through. We picked up the project. Schapera was then in his mid-nineties, but he so much wanted this book to come out; before we finally settled the copyright matter we wrote the essay, in Derbyshire in England, where we spend a lot of our time. We took a certain liberty because we wrote about photography and empiricism, but we also wrote about him and what we thought the camera told us about him that he had not said about himself. We sent it to him with some trepidation, but he wrote back to say that we had shown him something about himself and his work that he'd never fully understood, and that we had “made an old man very happ.” Sadly, he died before we finally got all the permissions together but the book did come out...

45:28:17 John: It was one of our lifelong struggles getting it out. It took us about fifteen years in the end, a labor of love; had we known what it would take to do it we would never have started. In the end the RAI was very helpful, but there were many obstacles along the way. I hope that at ninety-five, if I am alive, I will be able to tell a student that they had taught me something I didn't know about myself...

46:14:20 Jean: He was a very generous person in some ways if not others, and could be very difficult...

46:21:17 John: [He] gave us an enormous sense of respect for the ethnographic detail. Over the forty years that we have been doing this we have written many kinds of different things but the spectral voice of Schapera (and Monica Wilson) has told us never to lose sight of the ethnographic. Many of our theory-oriented friends believe that the notion of “grounded theory” doesn't make any sense. To us it is the only thing that does make sense. Often we have been taken to task for our obsession with detail, but ultimately I think Schapera was right. His mantra was that he would like to be remembered, not as a theorist, but someone, like Gibbon or Samuel Pepys, who really captured a moment in all its fullness. Meyer Fortes once said that when they write the history of anthropology, he might rate three lines but Schapera would rate pages because he produced a record of a people that is absolutely unparalleled.

.47:51:23 Jean: And it is of great use to the people; in Tswana courts and in churches they use his handbook as a guide to what the tradition was...

48:05:13 John: As a result, you could argue with him in really interesting ways; this because [the wealth of detail allows] you actually to take passages from his books and interpret them in different ways. I don't think anybody really writes ethnography any more that you could really take and reinterpret compellingly from a different theoretical perspective.

48:32:09 Jean: The sense that there was a bounded world that was reasonably and self-evidently territorial that one was constrained to cover - the Tswana - was compromised from the moment we got to the field, and some would say it had always been so. It was already impossible to unproblematically  bound a unit of analysis, which was why one of the first long historical studies we did included both the English missionaries and the Tswana in its scope. It strove to capture the engagement of their worlds on the colonial frontier; that is an act of hubris as we are not English historians and many historians who were unhappy with the leaps in scale that we made. The study complicated the question of what constituted a field, and the different levels of analysis and scales of inclusion relevant to a particular problem. The idea of total coverage was less viable, here, than in the sense that Schapera understood it. But trying to get down onto the ground to arrive at some understanding was still the job, so that if one was writing about the non-conformist missionaries whole haled from the north of England in the nineteenth century, you really had to not only read their letters and scour the histories that have been written about that world, to read the local newspapers, etc. to get a sense of “where they were coming from.” But you also had to do that on the South African side. Over the years, have shifted, we have experimented with all kinds of analytical perspectives; there was a timing when looking at the national level in South Africa became key to a responsible understand of a “local” world, like that of Botswana communities in the Northwest. In order to do this, you try by whatever scholarly means available to get a responsible sense of the world about which you are speaking. It is not the same as doing the grounded ethnography that Schapera did. There are pictures of him sitting in the chiefly meeting-place in a three-piece suit, with his legs crossed and his notebook, and all the members of the chiefly council in attendance while he goes from one to the other taking their genealogies. That is not the kind of world that one is dealing with...

51:30:14 John: [Our own earlier work] was never traditional in the sense that we sought to do an ethnology of a “people.” But it was very deeply grounded in what anthropologists used to do: [among other things] we collected genealogies and analysed kinship, and took it all as very important because we figured that, if we were going to play at the edges of the discipline and make arguments for historical anthropology – some of the later stuff we have done is much further from classic anthropology – we had to do conventional things well or risk not being taken seriously. I am still perfectly happy to think back over the work that we have done [with this in view], work on such things as bridewealth and cattle economies.

52:57:07 Jean: The difficulty now is how one keeps faith with the kind of insight and humility that the ethnographic task should invoke. I find it hard, in our conversations with historians and literary theorists, those who like us are committed to a certain kind of radical view of the world that gives importance to the role of large unfolding processes (like capitalism and its consequences, modernity and its meanings) to keep faith with the fact that the ethnographic tells you that you don't know all the questions until you go and look at actual grounded practice. And then the world can surprise you. There may be a large picture and compelling theories of transformation, but the history that is actually happening is never totally foreclosed and determined. For instance, why was it that at the end of apartheid, people expected the diffusion of discourses of democracy and new forms of national politics and identification, but an obsession with crime and the occult overtook the popular imagination; concerns with violence, insecurity, and witchraft had been lively when we did our first fieldwork among rural populations under conditions of apartheid; people disenfranchised, impeded in their movements, etc. But if anything, these fears have intensified, nationalized, though their precise vectors might have shifted. How does one map the life of those ideas and their significance under putatively transformed conditions? That has been the challenge; it is both an exciting and difficult challenge, and that is what we have described in a paper that we published on method, 'Ethnography on an Awkward Scale.” It raises the question of what scale is appropriate to phenomena that seem to occur at the intersection of grounded realities and vastly expanded fields of forces; how do you save yourself from the trap of militant localism, or of falling into a certain kind of cultural analysis which takes ideas or images from here and there, and strings them together into a “universe of thought” that presumes the connective tissue. As the scale of our problems has increased, we as a profession still strive to write beautiful things from fragments. We cannot simply subscribe anymore to the anthropological hubris of describing “the whole” society or culture. So what are are units of analysis, and what methods do they demand. One does need to retain a sense of the responsibility for context, for the connections, and it is hard to do in the world in which we live.

55:09:04 John: Coupled with that is an anthropological obligation to avoid its own irrelevance. We live in an age in which retreat from theory has become a flight into rank empiricism, an empiricism that reduces complex historical phenomena into brute terms (like “culture”) and ignores the really difficult questions about the contemporary world; questions that arise out of the impact of late capital on the populations among which we work – a certain route to trivialization. We have just finished a book entitled Ethnicity Inc. Why? Because culture is no more what anthropologists long thought it was; instead, it is a commodity more deeply implicated in the market than ever before, a commodity possessed by those who claim it and claim all kinds of legal rights to/for it – including the right to brand and merchandise it. Cultural islands beyond history don't exist any more. They never have, of course; but, in the neo-liberal moment, this presents itself with real force. Many of the concrete abstractions that we treated as units of analysis no longer bear any scrutiny at all. Again, many anthropologists have avoided the problem by resort to empiricism. We have both argued against this and for the fact that anthropology ought never to have been – nor certainly should not now – be defined by a preordained, “traditional” sense of it subject matter. It is not what we study but how we study it that counts. We now have students working on policing in India, computer hacking in America, all kinds of stuff; the peculiarly anthropological dimension of this work is a particular way of thinking about those phenomena. The essence of anthropology is its capacity and its commitment to estrange, to decompose and deconstruct the surfaces of the world in order to explain them. Which takes both courage and humility in the face of the moment. We live in self-evidently complex times. But we can neither avoid this fact or treated it purely at face value.

58:13:12 Jean: I think one of the other issues is that it is simultaneously a commitment to the sense that the manifestation of big processes are always particular and mediated and complicated ways. These processes also have to be grounded in the subjectivity of actors; another thing that anthropology brings is a kind of phenomenology; one always must assume that human beings may not make history exactly as they please, but they do try to make it somewhat as they please. At the same time there are close family resemblances in the shape of local histories and struggles from across the world that underline the undeniable impact of wider global forces. We ourselves live simultaneously in several parts of the world – South Africa, England and here (USA); all areas of advanced capitalist modernity. We see similar elements in each contexts, but the particular formations in each place are different; the relationship between the similarity and difference is very important. Also, it is at moments like this current one, those of inter-linked economic crisis, for instance, that have parallel impacts in these various locales, and that require one to ask questions comparatively over a large span of space and time; what is neo-liberalism and its inherent contradictions, for instance, and how do we begin to ask questions that enable us to see that there are things going on in South Africa, England and here in the US that look increasingly, distressingly similar; unless one is able to do justice to the particularity of a grounded understanding, but also see these bigger questions, one is unable to speak with relevance to our times. It is not only difference or distinctiveness that is at issue, and anthropology has too easily allowed itself to take that kind of position, to be very suspicious of identifying similarity, particularly globally connected similarities, which need not merely devalue “the local” or imply simple determinations, but which track major impacts on the worlds we study and live in.

1:00:32:00 John: The courage to theorize critically is crucial. We ran into this after 1994, when we wrote about the rise of witchcraft after the end of apartheid. It was very clear to us that the epidemic of witch killings in South Africa at the time had a great deal to do with rising unemployment and the impact of structural adjustment on the countryside. When we first published this work, several anthropologists were quick to dismiss it: it was all about local relations, local hatreds, they said. They were correct. But local animosities don't end the chain of determination. Many of those killed were believed to have made it impossible, by magical means, for their compatriots to find jobs; this was global labor history writ small. In sum, we insisted that there was a hinterland that required accounting for here, that an occult economy had arisen in the countryside for reasons that lay well beyond the purview of parochial conflicts. Nonetheless, many anthropologists said, no, stop at the local, It is precisely this that dooms anthropology to irrelevance.

1:01:49:22 Jean: Advanced capitalism at this point had seemed to show evidence of the entry of the occult and speculative in many domains that were equivalent to the witchcraft phenomenon in Southern Africa; things like Ponzi and pyramid schemes, the rise of certain kinds of religious prosperity movements. The question of how to interpret the various forms of spectrality and speculation so evident in these practices had to do, for us, with a changing relationship between space, production, nation, and popular understandings of value. This approach meant that in writing about the question we took some quite wild leaps. We also argued that this was a pretty widespread tendency. We started out our paper on 'Occult Economies' (over which we had an argument with Sally Moore, for instance, about the nature of theory and evidence) with the claim that we were seeing in structurally equivalent places, like in parts of Russia, things that were equivalent to the concerns with occult production we had observed in South Africa; evidence of people’s preoccupation with the entry of both spectres and speculation into the way in which the market seemed to be working. People could not quite understand how wealth was being generated, why value was moving as it was, why suddenly some people were becoming rich and others, not; what was the magic in the form of the free market that they kept hearing about and in relation to the inaccessibility to these promised goods. We argued that there were similarities in the forms of popular imagery, belief and practice – between prosperity-seeking practices in various places (especially those undergoing rapid liberalization) – that you couldn't ignore, even though they were different in some other respects. This is not always a safe and popular move to make. The sort of thing we anthropologists should have been thinking about, at the peak of our faith in the infinite capacity of free markets to deliver to new fields of value, are things like cargo cults and millenniary movements (here our connection to Peter Worsley comes in).  Think about people building housing and warehouses along the new economic frontiers, hoping that business will come there; like villagers in Africa who develop resources to attract tourists, and pray for them to come to their village not their neighbours; these were the sort of phenomena that we wanted to bring together...

1:04:11:20 John: We looked to disciplinary tradition in asking how to make sense of these things in the historical moment of the here and now. Monica and Godfrey Wilson wrote a famous book about social change in which they argued that scale is one of the great anthropological problems. This is what we were dealing with [in the 1990's]: the scale of the mystical practice had expanded, we were being told by our own informants. Thus, for example, the difference between Satanism and witchcraft was that, in contrast to the latter, the former is global; it involves space-time compression. Tswana were voicing theories about the occult that our colleagues at the LSE wouldn't hear. And yet it is a classically anthropological gesture to estrange in this way: to take phenomena that don't seem as though they are the same – that are both similar and different – and listen to the way in which our “natives” explain them, thus to de-familiarize our own suppositions about them. This is how the anthropological imagination works at its best, especially when it forces us to think beyond the limits and the scale of the discipline. To wit, our post-Apartheid encounters with the African occult led us to produce a volume on millennial capitalism in which we argued that understanding capitalism itself was about understanding the old issue of millennialism in much the same ways that anthropologists had analyzed it before – but expanded into the moment, literally 2000, when capitalism itself became the ostensible to everything.

1:06:18:09 Jean: Interesting that Jeremy Cronin, who is the Deputy Secretary of the South African Communist Party, an also a Member of Parliament and noted poet, wrote a wonderful poem about South Africa’s attraction, in the mid 1990's, to the lure of laissez faire. He recall a millennial movement in the Eastern Cape in the nineteenth century, that involved a massive killing of cattle so that the millennium would arrive. He used the events as a parallel for the current moment, when policies of privatization and down-sizing were being presented to the public as the cost of market takeoff.

1:07:23:15 John: I think we will look back on the extraordinary events surrounding the Obama election in America as a profoundly anthropological moment. It is better understood through Durkheim and our knowledge of a particular form of social effervescence – of the way this congeals into what looks like a social movement but is  really an expression of momentary popularism – than through an orthodox political or economic analysis. All of which is a plea for anthropology not merely to leave the Reservation but to lose its reservations about confronting the contemporary. It may be the only way that we are going to save ourselves from death by irrelevance, a death perhaps hastened by various new anthropologies that have declared themselves – the anthropology of Christianity, of this and that – all of which seem to be motivated by an impulse to shrink back into a discipline which is either profoundly cultural or insular or both. To us, there is great danger in any reproductive impulse that kills off a productive engagement with the critical edges of the world. Not that this impulse prevails everywhere. There are many colleagues and students doing quite extraordinary things, although those who break boundaries often run into difficulties.

1:09:13:09 Jean: [Kalman] like your work in global pharmaceuticals, the ways you can track particular intersections -- the interplay of global marketing, the creation of a consumer consciousness by marketers, and the adoption of SSRI’s in places like Japan. This research throws important light on the way that global economic processes actually work, and it owes a great deal to an application of anthropological insights to marketing theory. Anthropologists work very well by simultaneously using their own models and moving beyond them...

1:09:39:24 John: I had in mind not so much the more interesting things in American anthropology, but British, European and Commonwealth anthropology, which seems more ready...

1:09:53:19 Jean: European anthropology is going through a renaissance now; the European Anthropological Association is flexing its muscles in some very interesting ways; people come to their increasingly well-attended meetings from different language and research traditions. There are lots of places on the continent where scholars are interested in things like global humanitarianism and NGOs; local and EU government policy in respect of immigration, adoption, and the like. The danger with such issues is that research can become disengaged from the kind of grounded, thick ethnography that we started talking about. Anthropology has become very capacious in its objects and methods. In respect of our own graduate students in Chicago: our core course in social theory now often begins with the writings of St. Augustine, and takes in the whole Western philosophical tradition. When I first arrived at this University in 1979, only anthropological texts – and direct ancestors, like Weber and Durkheim – were taught.

When our students do their graduate qualifying exams now, some have reading lists that include relatively few “anthropology” texts, and they have to be responsible for a huge expanse of modern social thought to be regarded as well-trained. There is something to be said for certain disciplinary limits; in a way, you can only be cross-disciplinary if you have some sense of a disciplinary rootedness to start with, albeit an open-ended one. Now anyone interested in practice theory in anthropology takes in not merely Bourdieu and his interlocutors but a whole history that includes Marx and pragmatist linguistics and philosophy. It is hard to gain control of these diverse fields and still have a sense of mastery of a particular craft.

1:13:09:00 John: We struggle with it. There isn't a single answer to the question, but there are answers to be found in each piece of work by each student in each project; that, to me, is again the creative possibility of anthropology, that we actually engage with those questions at all. Sometimes the answers are more successful than they are at other times. But the degree to which one sticks with a model of and for the discipline that is tied to a dialectic of the inductive and the deductive, that constantly seeks out new ethnographic problems, that elaborates theoretical and conceptual frames commensurate to those problems, that designs methodologies cogent enough to convince critical interlocutors of their appropriateness to the production of knowledge; these are the secure foundations of disciplinary practice. The notion of commensuration is particularly important: the commensuration of method to empirical work, of problem to solution, of argumentation to evidence. This is something we emphasize a great deal in our pedagogy: we constantly go through exercises with our students on how to convince us that their methods work.

1:15:31:00 Jean: We are talking here as if the community of practice at issue were the two of us and our students; we have worked at these things for many years with colleagues at the University of Chicago. This is an extraordinary place and there is no other like it; it is intense, sometimes overwhelmingly so, but one of the things that has developed here is a very strong sense of the craft of anthropology and of our responsibility as teachers. We tend to value teaching here and we feel it as a calling. Over the years we have devised a set of courses, from theoretical introductions to classes on method and research design. In creating and teaching these courses we actually hammer out all these things we have been discussing here. These are required courses that every student has to take. In them, they learn to express and defend positions, and to write research proposals – which doesn't come naturally to anybody. We encourage them to work interactively on preparing their projects. We also have a range of workshops and regular seminars; we believe in cultivating a culture of discourse, so that students are exposed to interesting arguments from the moment they come. That way they develop a sensibility that is anthropological. Then they have go to find something in the world to examine-- not merely to follow an abstract theory. And we work with them in developing the kinds of analytical apparatus they need to do justice to their particular interests, question, problems. 

1:17:34:21 John: Jean has developed what has become a department mantra: “to what question is your research an answer?” Until a student can actually address that challenge, nobody takes them seriously. In our own workshop – itself a socialized mode of producing anthropology – there is also another question always asked: What, in your work, is the value-added from a specifically anthropological perspective? What are you doing that your peers in sociology, psychology, political theory, or whatver don't add? We expect our students  – not to mention ourselves and our colleagues – to have an answer for everything they/we do. Some respond in rather mechanical ways, some very creatively. But it is a challenge that everyone internalizes very early. The workshop is also part of an apprenticeship system: faculty present their work in it and it is criticized in the same way as is students' work. Our graduates actually see how we produce our research and writing as well as being answerable to each other. I don't think that we have published anything since we have been here that has not emerged from conversations with our students.

1:19:36:13 Jean: 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. Also, everybody is doing what they call “ethnography” now – n fields like social work, nursing, law. It usually means “talking to people” – though it also should involve asking questions against the grain, watching what people do, never assuming the surface narrative is what is going on.

1:20:13:24 John: George Marcus wrote a paper not so long ago on the future of anthropology. Institutionally, it appears, anthropology departments are thriving, but what concerns him is that we have become a parasite discipline that is not producing its own theory: we look topost-colonial studies, feminism, and the like for our ideas. I think the opposite is true in some respects: other disciplines are actually looking to anthropology for all kinds of inspiration. When, for example, you look at recent work in Law and Society the impact of anthropology is enormous. I do not think we have anything to be particularly anxious about in that respect. But we do have to worry about the acuity of our questions in interrogating the very puzzling  world we live in, the age of revolution unfolding around us that we only dimly understand.

1:22:06:09 Jean: We have quite a large number of students who work in southern Africa although the biggest proportion don't. We both remain very interested in that region and also very keen to see it invest in an anthropology that is not just parochial. We take an undergraduate group there every year from the University of Chicago, and many go on to work in some domain of African studies. During the apartheid years there was a boycott called by the ANC and we respected that and had little to do with the universities during that time. After the transition to democracy, we became very involved in various kinds of projects aimed at getting the social sciences up and running again. We have been going back both to do that, working in university departments in South Africa, participating in the training of students there, having young scholars come to Chicago to spend time with us doing post docs. But also, we continue doing our own research. Our first engagement with critical feedback on our own work is always in South Africa.

1:23:42:14 John: We have ongoing research projects, at present on crime and policing and will probably follow up Ethnicity Inc. with a further, in-depth ethnographic study of the same phenomenon among San and some Tswana peoples newly involved in the political economy of identity. In addition to the twenty-four students who we take there every year for eleven weeks, we are both Honorary Professors at the University of Cape Town and also have had close links with the  Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research, in which we have been involved as engaged outsiders from its very beginning.

1:24:25:19 Jean: For the first time three of our recent students have taken up assistant professorships and are writing papers on rethinking anthropology in Southern Africa now, which is really exciting...

1:24:39:19 John: Chicago anthropology is being implanted and remade in South Africa! We have a pet project, soon to be a book entitled Theory from the South. For two hundred years, the social sciences have believed that theory is produced in the North; that, concomitantly, the South is merely a source of raw data. We and our students collectively think that the world has turned over, that more interesting theory is now coming from the South, whose history is running ahead of the North, a harbinger of its future/s. Our younger generation, incredibly smart and wonderfully able, is putting its own stamp on this issue...

1:25:24:18 Jean: They come from all kinds of backgrounds...

1:25:33:24 John: It is great to see them go it alone, become independent, think new thoughts, do new things. The last thing we ever wanted was for them to do what we do; they do us proud by exceeding us in all kinds of ways. Also, lots of our friends who left South Africa at roughly the time that we did are now back, doing creative things; we are part of a very lively network of scholars there, many of them beyond the academy...

1:26:06:00 Jean: That is the other thing: the line between the academy and the public world in South Africa is much more porous. When we are there, we are much more involved in public discussion, newspaper debate. We have friends who are in Parliament, advising the new political movements that are emerging, running significant human rights ngo’s. We have done everything from being involved in hip-hop collectives that wanted to read social theory to taking part in summer schools of various sorts. it is a much more immediately engaged world, one of incredible possibility and great hazards, of enormous dynamism and public debate.

1:26:50:00 John: We can't sit in some of our usual haunts without half a dozen people at the table within ten minutes arguing about whatever is going on in politics that day. It is that kind of society. Everybody reads the newspapers, listens to the radio...

1:27:03:12 Jean: And they are interested in culture; for years anthropology was the colonizing pariah discipline in Southern Africa, but with the kind of re-animation of culture, for good or ill, as the site of claims for rights and identity, anthropology has really become quite chic, and there are large numbers of black South Africans who want to study it, and bring anthropological insight to their own cultural projects...

1:27:30:16 John: They join in conversations about the broadest sets of things – with a sense of respect, a sense that anthropology actually has something to say in public discourses. It is no longer a pariah; quite the opposite. For example, the judiciary has begun to engage seriously for the first time with legal anthropology. Also, our colleague and friend, Steven Robins, is a major contributor to the local media; he writes really good stuff. (When the San pursued their land claims, their lawyer consulted him and other anthropologists, who have had a fair bit to say about the present and future of identity politics in South Africa.) There is a constant sense of engagement.

1:28:46:17 Jean: With research ethics, for instance. I have been teaching for three years on a program designed by Dr. Solly Benatar, who is a medical ethicist and former head of the medical school at UCT. We offer a course on things you [Kalman] have worked on yourself - on questions of clinical research ethics for the newly established Institutional Review Boards in universities and public setting in South Africa. How should they be prepared to deal wit the approach of ever more global pharmaceutical corporations wanting to do research in Southern Africa? What kind of human subject protection is appropriate to local conditions, especially in respect of poor populations? What kind of political constraint should be placed on profiteering in South Africa, which is a very desirable research destination, but also a vulnerable one? That is where anthropologists are called in, and we work with people who actually sit on these committees, debating the politics of global pharmaceutical research, the way in which it implicates cultural issues.

1:29:22:20 John: Our undergraduates are picking up on this. They volunteer for the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an AIDS activist organization, and for Bush Radio, a community medium. They have also worked at a local township school, and at other institutions. They quickly learn that that this is a world of engagement....