Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier

Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier v. 2

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Out of stock. Get In-Stock Alert. Delivery not available. Pickup not available. Comaroff ISBN Log In Sign Up. Religion, Society, and the Everyday.

Adeline Masquelier. It is a lesson I took to heart after I arrived in Niger in to conduct doctoral research on bori spirit possession. Like the Tshidi of the South Africa-Botswana borderland, whose contestation of political power and social inequality found shape in ritualized practice, sartorial syncretism, and poetic language, the bori devotees among whom I worked resisted the ascendency of Islam through the medium of symbolic activity and the enactment of minor acts of defiance.

Needless to say, Body of Power is much more than an ethnographically situated history of Afri- can resistance on the periphery of the industrial world. One of its key arguments is that mission Christianity in southern Africa provided both the scaffolding for the colonial project of prole- tarianization and the tools deployed by disempowered Africans to reverse the logic of industrial capitalism and resist oppression.

It has emboldened a whole generation of scholars to think critically about the relationship between history and ritual, consciousness and embodiment, and ideology and lived practice—and ultimately about the role of religion in the making of modernity. As an individual author or in tandem with John Comaroff, with whom she has built an extraordinary intellectual partnership, Jean Comaroff has pioneered a brand of historical anthropology whose mission is to illuminate the contours of wide-scale processes of social transformation through the lens of the local and the ordinary.

Whether she explores the workings of colonial evangelism in nineteenth-century Tswana communities or what later emerged out of it—in the image of Zion, for instance—she does so through a detour into the everyday. With a nod to de Certeau , Elias , Goffman , and Lefebvre —who have variously urged us to consider dimensions of life that generally go unremarked because they are deemed unremarkable—she locates the ethos of a whole society in its practices of bodily adornment, its architectural aesthet- ics, its patterns of production and consumption. Granted, the notion that the realm of the sacred intersects with and may even be indistin- guishable from the world of the everyday is far from novel.

Seventy years ago, Evans-Pritchard [] insisted that witchcraft was such a ubiquitous part of Azande life that scarcely a day went by without reference being made to it. Stressing the everyday- ness of religion by tracing its embeddedness in the mundane does not imply that quotidian acts and ordinary experiences can be dismissed as meaningless or as transparent, however.

As Jean Comaroff has beautifully shown in the southern African context, it is by dissecting dress codes and domestic patterns, built forms, bodily disciplines, and regimes of temporality and property that one can glimpse the contours of not just material worlds but moral orders as well. Summoning Marx , who understood well how the most trivial stuff can acquire an almost magical character, Comaroff tracks the social life of ordinary objects—church uniforms, clocks, coins, and so on—demonstrating that such life makes little sense outside of the wider spiritual order of things and vice versa.

In the end, Comaroff is more interested in what is produced out of the wider dialectic between religion and society.

Note that this interest is informed by a Weberian insistence on the specificity of historical circumstance. Thus, when Comaroff exam- ines the relation between Protestantism and say, capitalism, it is in the context of particular historical circumstances and with an eye to the particular configurations it produces. Through careful descriptions of how local mission work, with its struggles and its successes, routinely unfolded and how such work subsequently spawned new practices and new persons, it is also the vaster project of European colonialism— that is, the expansion of not just Christian culture but industrial capitalism—that is afforded vis- ibility.

Resolutely eschewing predictions of the impending demise of religion as well as affirmations of its irrelevance as an analytical category Bloch , , yet mindful that its very definition is the outcome of a particular history of knowledge and power Asad , Comaroff writes with great passion and sensitivity about the historical entanglements of reli- gion and society out of which the modern world—including Africa—emerged. As an individual author and in partnership with John Comaroff, she has probed the complexities and practicali- ties of religious engagements beyond the domain of the divine or the supernatural to show how religion remains enduringly rooted in social configurations that it helps sustain, replenish, and revise.

She has written on a range of topics, including spirit possession, Islam and Mus- lim identity, and youth.

Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2

She won the Herskovits Award for best scholarly book on Africa, and in she received the Aidoo-Snyder Prize for best scholarly book about African women; amasquel tulane. Bal- timore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bloch, Maurice. Essays on Cultural Transmission. Oxford: Berg.

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Comaroff, Jean. Chapter1 reviews the Comaroffs'first volume Chicago, and reactsto criticismsagainstit, puttingreadersunfamiliarwith Volume 1 at a disadvantage. Their "missionaryimperialism" included underminingchiefly authority,drastic changes to the tenets of Tswanaculturalidentity,and occasionallyresortingto the bruteforce of the colonial governmentto enforceEuropeanculture.

Chapters3 to 7 probe differentdimensionsof Tswana identity, focusing on the missionarydesire to changeTswanapatternsof subsistence replacingherding with cultivation , exchange introducing a cash economy , material culture especially clothing , architectureand the use of space, extendedfamily systems, and medicine. Missionary abhorrencefor Tswana culturalpractices meant that theirquest for refashioningthe people undertheirevangelizinginfluencewent far beyondspreadingthe gospel.

The resultanthybridTswanaperson,the subjectof so many sociological and other studies, is widely representedas a neocolonial caricature. For example, within the Comaroffs'Mafikeng study areauntil recently lived the formerpresidentof the Republicof Bophuthatswana, LucasMangope,who was also a Tswana "chief' now turnedChristianDemocratpolitician. An interestingsubthemeof these chaptersis the reconfigurationof gender relations.

It is ironic thatcuiTentlyfavored"traditional" Tswananormsof gender relationscan apparentlybe tracedback to VictorianEngland. SouthernAfrican archaeologistsare also unpackingthe presentmyth of Tswanawomanhood,demonstratinghow genderrelationswere differentlyconstitutedin precolonialsouthern Africansocieties.

I The Comaroffsdemonstratehow missionarydisempowerment was often resisted by groups such as women.

World War I and increasing migrationto the diamondand gold industriesof South Africa permanentlydislocated the Tswanaworldview. The Comaroffsgive furthersubstanceto the study of the peasantizationof African societies. By creating a dependency on cash exchange, missioraries were instrumentalin the creation of the migrant labor system,which remainsa dominantfeatureof southernAfricansocieties.

Chapter8 summarizesthe personalimpactof colonial evangelismon Tswana people. Using case studies, the authorsdemonstratehow colonialism "promised equality but sustainedinequality" p. The "subjectother"createdthrough missionaryevangelismcould be a challengeto the colonial state,however, as was demonstratedby Kgosi Tshekedi Khama,who used his knowledge of European cultureto resistcolonial rule. The Tswana indigenized Europeanculture and Christianityas much as they were changed by these new experiences.

This is a highly commendable work, invaluable to the scholarly readerof southernAfricanstudies,Tswanahistory,andculturalstudies.

Of revelation and revolution

It will be an excellentresearchcompanionfor futurescholars. Volume 3 is eagerlyawaited. See for example S. Kent, ed.

Comaroff, John & Jean

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