Lecture: Criminal Accounting: Quantifacts and the Production of the Unreal in South Africa

Posted by on November 26, 2004

Lecture at Temple University by Jean and John Comaroff
http://www.temple.edu/CLA/About/News/Comaroff.asp

The Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University present a lecture by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff of the University of Chicago entitled, ?Criminal Accounting: Quantifacts and the Production of the Unreal in South Africa.? The lecture will be held on Thursday, December 2 nd , 2004, at 3:00 PM in Anderson Hall in the 12th Floor Lounge. Anderson Hall is located at the intersection of 11th Street and Berks Mall on the main campus of Temple University in Northern Philadelphia.

?An excursion into the criminal anthropology of the Brave Neo-South Africa,? in the words of John Comaroff, ?this lecture asks why it is that crime statistics have become a pervasive public passion in this postcolony. It explores what, exactly, those crime statistics make real, how they take on public life, by what means they convert the abstract into the intimate, tertiary knowledge into primary experience. And why it is that they have become deeply inscribed in narratives of personal being, so vital to the construction of moral publics, so integral to debates about the meaning of democracy, freedom, security. Conventionally framed as value-free information, these numbers appear to be taking on ever more political weight as the modernist state deregulates the functions of governance, as sovereignty is parsed and privatized, as control over the means of violence is rendered ambiguous, as a culture of ?popular punitiveness’ gains credence, as race is criminalized and crime racialized. As they do, modes of producing and deploying crime statistics themselves proliferate. Which sets in train processes whose effects are deeply implicated in remaking the nation-state, its governance, and citizenship within it.?

John L. Comaroff is the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and a senior research fellow of the American Bar Association. His current work, in his words, focuses ?on crime, violence, and cultural justice in post-apartheid South Africa; it investigates not just the ?problem’ of disorder in a particular place at a particular time, but also the sui generis nature of the postcolonial nation-state.? His earlier work includes contributions to legal and political anthropology; the anthropology of colonialism, postcolonialism, and modernity; and historical anthropology. His books include the prize-winning two-volume Of Revelation and Revolution, coauthored with Jean Comaroff.

Jean Comaroff is the Bernard E. And Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She describes her work as focusing on ?the intersection of anthropology and history to theorize the ways in which large-scale forces?such as colonialism, globalization, and the making of modernity?occur in particular local contexts and practices. Her books include the classic Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, written while she was a Bunting fellow at Radcliffe College in 1981? 1982.

In addition to Of Revelation and Revolution, the Comaroffs also edited Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa and, more recently, a special issue of Public Culture, titled ?Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neo- Liberalism,? which won the Best Special Issue Award of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2000. Both Comaroffs are members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A reception will follow the talk in the Religious Studies Lounge on the 6th Floor of Anderson Hall. All are welcome.

For more information, contact: Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought, 648 Anderson Hall, 114 West Berks Street, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122-6090, (215) 204-5621 / Fax: (215) 204-2535 / E-mail: [email protected].