Alien-Nation" Zombies, Immigrants & Millennial Capitalism

by Jean & John Comaroff, 1999

What might zombies have to do with the implosion of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the twentieth century? What might they have to do with post-colonial, post-revolutionary nationalism? With labour history? With the "crisis" of the modernist nation-state? Why are these spectral, floating signifiers making an appearance in epic, epidemic proportions in several parts of Africa just now? And why have immigrants-those wanderers in pursuit of work, whose proper place is always elsewhere-become pariah citizens of 'a global order in which, paradoxically, old borders are said everywhere to be dissolving? What, indeed, do any of these things, which bear the distinct taint of exoticism, tell us about the hard-edged material, cultural, epistemic realities of our times? Indeed, why pose such apparently perverse questions at all when our social world abounds with practical problems of immediate, unremitting gravitas?

Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony

by Jean & John Comaroff, 1999

Postcolonial South Africa, like other postrevolutionary societies, appears to have witnessed a dramatic rise in occult economies: in the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends. These embrace a wide range of phenomena, from "ritual murder, "the sale ofbody parts, and the putative production of zombies to pyramidschemes and other financial scams.And they have led, in many places, to violent reactions against people accused of illicit accumulation. In the struggles that have ensued, the major lines of opposition have been not race or class but generation-mediated by gender. Why is all this occurring with such intensity, right now?An answer to the question, and to the more general problem ofmaking sense of the enchantments of modernity, is sought in the encounter of rural South Africa with the contradictory effects of millennia1 capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. This encounter, goes the argument, brings "the global" and "the local"-treated here as analytic constructs rather than explanatory terms or empirical realities-into a dialectical interplay. It also has implications for the practice of anthropology, challenging us to do ethnography on an "awkwardscale, on planes that transect the here and now, then and there. [postcoloniality, modernity, millennia1 capitalism, occult economy, witchcraft, South Africa].