Second plenary session
Friday, 9.1.2009 (10.00 – 12.00, SSS1 auditorium)
Chair: Julia Eckert
Panelists
Commentators
Detective Fictions: Law, Longing, And The Search For Sovereignty In The Postcolony
Jean Comaroff [bio]
Walter Benjamin famously insisted that modern police wielded a “ghostly,” all-pervasive violence, called upon at points where the state was unable to govern by legal means. Yet many African postcolonies are haunted by a different spectre: the waning efficacy of enforcement, the ambiguity of authority, and the apparent abandonment of subjects by the state. This paper, part of a larger work entitled “Policing the Postcolony,” examines the problematic relation of law, violence, and sovereignty in contemporary African polities, especially in post-apartheid South Africa. It focuses on the “metaphysics of disorder” that is palpable in popular culture here, and the kinds of forensic fetishes that seem to be conjured in its wake.
[top]
About the Speaker
Jean Comaroff is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. Her current research is on crime, policing, post-colonial politics and state sovereignty, religious revitalization, and the commodification of identity. Her books, coauthored and co-edited with John Comaroff, include Of Revelation and Revolution, Volumes I (1991) and II (1997), Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992), Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Africa (1993), Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa (1999), Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2006), and Ethnicity, Inc. (2009).
[top]
Law, Fear And The Obligation To Obey: On The Cremation Grounds Of Delhi
Veena Das [bio]
This paper looks at the deceptively simple process of recording deaths on the cremation grounds of Delhi. What do people understand by the obligation to make the deaths of their kin recognized by the State? How does law insert itself within the scene of the powerful affects that connect the living to the recently dead? How does the fear of law create boundaries between the “normal” death and the “abnormal” death? These are questions I seek to answer with the help of ethnography of making death “legal”.
[top]
About the Speaker
Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent book is Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (California University Press, 2006). She has worked on themes of violence, social suffering, health and disease, and anthropology of the everyday. Currently she is engaged in a longitudinal study of urban neighbourhoods in Delhi. Das is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Sciences for Developing Societies. She has received several honours including the Andrez Retzius Prize of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography and an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Chicago.
[top]