Overview

In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves-it is by our crimes. Surveying an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing-from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions to the collateral damage of war-they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world. Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen. To do so, the Comaroffs draw on their vast knowledge of South Africa, especially, and its struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of law out of the wreckage of long years of violence and oppression. There they explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion, drawing illuminating comparisons to the United States and United Kingdom. Going beyond South Africa, they offer a global criminal anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral panics voiced, and populations ruled. The result is a disturbing but necessary portrait of the modern era, one that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, how we think about morality, and how we are going to proceed as a global society.

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9780226424910

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Reviews

The Comaroffs constant articulation of sparkling ethnographic vignettes, rich statistical data, and highly imaginative insights makes for a truly effervescent argumentation, creative and, at the same time, thoroughly documented. With this combination they offer a powerful book that newly addresses a theme that is becoming central all over the world: our increasing obsession with (in)security. --Peter Geschiere, author of Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust

What is 'crime'? A social pathology? A violation of social order? The object or raison d'etre of law enforcement? ...Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff unpack the place of crime in postcolonial, neoliberalized South Africa and beyond... Their argument is that the impact of postcolonial neoliberalism in South Africa, and similar shifts in ideas of citizenship and forms and practices of state sovereignty elsewhere, have led to crime taking on a position of heightened prominence in the social imaginary, serving as a symbol and symptom, cause and consequence of the breakdown in social order. --Peter Geschiere, author of Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust Allegra Lab (3/27/2018 12:00:00 AM) The Truth About Crime [is] a useful book for anyone examining the relationship between the state and the citizenry and how the citizenry responds in the fields of political science, criminology, anthropology and sociology. --Peter Geschiere, author of Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust African Studies Quarterly (3/27/2018 12:00:00 AM)

Author Information

Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology and an Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University, where John L. Comaroff is the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology and an Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies. Both Honorary Professors at the University of Cape Town, they have authored and coauthored many books, several together, including Of Revelation and Revolution (Volumes 1 and 2), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony and Ethnicity Inc., all published by the University of Chicago Press and, most recently, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa.

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