STS Circle at Harvard [image.png] Jean Comaroff Harvard, African and African American Studies/Anthropology
on Divine Detection: Crime and the Metaphysics of Disorder NOTE: Date and location change! Tuesday, February 12 12:15-2:00 p.m. HUCE Seminar Room, 24 Oxford Street [image.png] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to sts<mailto:[email protected]>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:[email protected]> by 5pm Wednesday, February 6. Abstract: Conceptions of crime are inseparable from conceptions of truth. They are integral, too, to modern modes of producing knowledge – and to the very idea of society as a normative order. Durkheim, after all, saw crime as the negative imprint of the law, a vision linked to the rise of the modernist understanding of detection. But if functionalist views of law, order, and truth rest on the belief that human interaction – even at its most transgressive – can be made sense of in retrospect, and can serve to reinforce social order, what are we to make of situations in which that faith conspicuously wavers; in which the signs have been occulted, and the canons of forensic science brought into question? An exercise in “criminal anthropology,” this paper investigates the metaphysics of disorder so palpable in the popular culture of contemporary South Africa (and elsewhere) and explores the various fetishes conjured in its wake. Biography: Jean Comaroff was educated at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. After a spell as research fellow in medical anthropology at the University of Manchester, she moved to the University of Chicago, where until 2012 she was Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. She is currently professor of African and African-American Studies and Anthropology, and Oppenheimer Research Fellow at Harvard University. She is also Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. Comaroff’s research, primarily conducted in southern Africa, has centered on processes of social and cultural transformation – the making and unmaking of colonial society, and the nature of the late modern world as viewed from the Global South. Her writing has covered a range of topics, from religion, medicine, and body politics to state formation, crime, and difference. Her publications include Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: the Culture and History of a South African People (1985), “Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order” (2007); and, with John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (vols. l [1991] and ll [1997]); Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992); Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2006), Ethnicity, Inc. (2009), and Theory from the South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011). A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/ Follow us on Facebook: STS@Harvard<http://www.facebook.com/HarvardSTS> _______________________________________________
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