John Comaroff was born in South Africa in 1945. In 1968 he received his B.A. at the University of Cape Town. In 1973 he received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He is a Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. " Critical estrangement" is the term Comaroff uses to explain how he tries to educate students. Comaroff says "what the term captures is the attempt to make students look at their world critically and make strange what they take to be familiar, all the better to understand it anew."
Some of Comaroff's research in southern Africa has been on the building of a modern society under post-modern conditions. His interests also include corporate Christianity, witchcraft, political culture, colonialism, the history of consciousness, politics, historical anthropology, law, post colonialism, modernity, and social theory.
Comaroff is President of the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology and has been both Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the Board of University Publications of the University of Chicago Press. In 2002 he was also named the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology. It is obvious why Comaroff was given the award when one reads the following quote:
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"I don't care if students come to share my views," said Comaroff. "That's irrelevant to my teaching. I just want to see them develop intellectual passions, to see their eyes open, their nerve-endings jangle." |
His wife, Jean Comaroff, is also a Professor of Anthropology and the co-author or coeditor on many of his books. Together, they have written Of Revelation and Revolution I , Of Revelation and Revolution II, Of Revelation and Revolution III, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, and Modernity and Its Malcontents. Jean and John Comaroff hold workshops and discussion groups to enhance the learning and understanding of their students. Some of Comaroff's solo publications include:
The Meaning of Marriage Payments (1980)
Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context (1981)
The Discourse of Rights in Colonial South Africa: Subjectivity, Sovereignty, Modernity (1994)
Perspectives on Nationalism and War (1995)
References:
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Newsletters/afstd296.html
John Comaroff, University of Chicago page http://anthropology.uchicago.edu/faculty/faculty_comaroff_john.shtml
Former Link: http://www.abf-sociolegal.org/comaroff.html (October 2006)
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/020523/quantrell-johncomaroff.shtml
Written by: Crystal Black
Edited by: Lillian Dolentz, 2009