John Comaroff

John Comaroff is the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, and Oppenheimer Research Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. Comaroff also serves as a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Cape Town and his doctorate from the London School of Economics.

Comaroff has held numerous influential teaching positions, includng the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago as well as positions at Duke University, Tel Aviv University, and University of Wales. He has been recognized an Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town since 2004. He has also held fellowships at the University of Manchester in the International Centre for Contemporary Cultural Research and for the Center for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin.

His research interests have included occult rituals, religious practices, culture, society, and law throughout Botswana and South Africa, where he was born and raised. Most recently, his research in South Africa focuses on crime and policing in the North West Province, the commodification of ethnic identity and cultural property among Tswana and San peoples, and the case of Khulekani Khumalo which examines the effects of imposture and personhood as a result of postcolonial social conditions.

He, in collaboration with his wife, anthropologist Jean Comaroff, have explored the impacts of hegemony, witchcraft, and global capitalism in Africa, yielding numerous written works, such as:

• Civil Society and Political Imagination in Africa
• Law and Disorder in the Postcolony
• Of Revelation and Revolution Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa
• Ethnography and the Historical Imagination
• Modernity and its Malcontents
• Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism
• The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa

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