Two ethnologists rely on zombie stories to reveal the reverse of the alleged South African capitalist miracle. They describe the violence caused by belief in the occult, the forms of exacerbated nationalism and the disappointed expectations of the post-colonial era.
South African ethnologists Jean and John Comaroff are above all known for historical and religious anthropology extremely attentive to the symbolic and material effects of the colonization which they undertook among Tswana in northwestern South Africa, from of their field surveys conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They notably became interested in developments in representation systems, village political organizations and Tswana production methods, in a series of studies (which have so far not been translated into French) both extremely localized and very attentive to the transverse forces which contributed to defeat or reconfigure social relationships in this region of southern Africa. After a long period of attendance at the colonial archives, the Comaroff were able to return to investigate in South Africa, after the fall of apartheid. They propose to move our gaze by now paying attention to contemporary social phenomena which might seem anecdotal, but reveal excellent drivers for the understanding of our postcolonial and neo-liberal world. Zombie stories such as the claims linked to the indigenousness they analyze in this work are the levers of a much more general remarks. They find in this the founding gesture of another South African anthropologist, Max Gluckman, who contributed significantly to the renewal of anthropology by his article “ Analysis of a social situation in modern zululand “(1940), describing not this or that” ethnic group Characterized by its cultural specificities, but the inauguration of a bridge-a singular moment which allowed the author to analyze the complexity of South African colonial relations.
A historical anthropology of capitalism
Preceded by a very good introduction by Jérôme David on the training and the journey of the Comaroff, the three texts gathered in this work testify to the intellectual shock that aroused their return to their field of investigation, and constitute a good introduction to their current work, which form the top floor of their historical anthropology of the culture of capitalism. These subtle texts are quite diverse, even heterogeneous. The first constitutes a methodological recovery of the post-Apartheid empirical work of commaroffs: from the study of the figure of the zombie, he wonders about ethnography as a method of investigation in postcolonial situations. The second deals with the place of the foreigner in the national construction of contemporary South Africa. The third concerns the savings of the new millennium. As the authors write in an article which is not reproduced here, it is for them, starting from social phenomena extremely visible in the South African social fabric, to account for relatively unnoticed aspects of contemporary capitalism ::
“” Our goal (…) is to dissect the capitalism of the new millennium and the culture (s) of neoliberalism ; To explore their impact on the ways by which people located in different places in the world come to define the nature of the value, to do with the production and reproductive forces, to live in moral savings, and to commit in political action. The witch hunts are forms of political action: they aim to divert and control power, to channel the distribution of resources, to establish a public sphere in which a moral order can be negotiated, and to build reality itself- even. “(“ Response to Moore: Second Thoughts “, American Ethnologistflight. 26, n ° 2, 1999, p. 309).
Zombies and deregulation
How do you go from historical anthropology to an anthropology of globalization ? It is the anchoring of their reflections in the ethnographic survey that enabled the Comaroff to influence their project, focusing on several figures of humanity or inhumanity crossed in the speeches of their South African interlocutors of Today. They are attached in particular to the current forms of Lumpen-Prolétariat South African, where occasional, wandering, desocialized, idle, crazy workers, crazy, and other spectral undead, are locally perceived as zombies. Such a perception leads to a multitude of accusations in witchcraft against individuals supposedly responsible for this zombification, who can be accompanied by passages to the extremely violent act against the people thus accused. In general, it is rather elderly people who are implicated, and sometimes killed, by young unemployed. Comaroffs do not stick to these descriptions from their investigation experience ; Their greatest originality is certainly in the bundle of facts that they put in view of it to think of zombies like the reverse of “ miracle »South Africa capitalist post-Apartheid. Violence then appears to be one of the aspects of the disappointments of the postcolonial era, where individual failures and the difficulties of young people access to a satisfactory economic and social condition are accompanied by the presumption that some people obtain rapid gains by Occult ways. Witchcraft, games of chance or Pentecostalism then appear as so many quick means of achieving objectives if not inaccessible – and are inseparable from the circulation of rumors as to the reality of organ traffic or zombification processes. The violence caused by beliefs in the occult as the generation conflicts are at the heart of the current mechanisms of reproduction and evolution of South African society.
The second analytical thread unrolled by commaroffs in this work consists in understanding how the community, identity, locality is made, based on the transformations of reality that accompany globalization. To a certain extent, the end of apartheid could be understood as the end of the location of populations, the end of ethnicization, at the same time as it arouses the liberalization of flows of all kinds ; But it is not, and exacerbated forms of nationalism have been able to accompany the last years – for example when the fires around the CAP were attributed to the plants “ foreign “Accused of having taken precedence over the shrubs” natives ». They join many other analyzes on this level contemporary forms of nationalism and indigenous affirmation.
On the two planes of the occult and the identity, the book of the Comaroff takes the form of an incessant and unstable circulation between the local scale and the global logics which are expressing themselves there. The project to give materials from ethnographic field surveys the status of a starting point for very general scope analyzes constitutes a challenge as stimulating as it is difficult for anthropological discipline, which is based on extremely localized survey practices – Challenge that the authors claim in the first chapter. One can however wonder about the way in which this rise in general is accomplished in this work: on the one hand, while waiting to find argumentative relays (historical or statistical) allowing to assess the extent of occult phenomena and dissemination Beliefs here analyzed, one wonders if the variation of scale does not give the ethnographic material the illustrative but disappointing status of the sticker. On the other hand, the explanatory place given here to the neo-liberal economy is centered on the analysis of the consumption and reproduction models of society, but the evocation of the productive sphere would undoubtedly be developed by -Ali the only mention of the deregulation of the labor market and the growth in the number of unemployed.
In this work, there is a question of zombies and borders, in a context both neoliberal and postcolonial. However, his subtitle is certainly misleading, because the aim of the book is not exclusively to better understand the case of South Africa post-Apartheid. Rather, it is about learning from the south, in understanding our very situation: in fact, weakened or retracted states, deregulation, corruption, poverty, incivility and de -socialization are far from us be foreigners. The translation of these three essays is precious, because it constitutes an invitation to discover the other texts in which Jean and John Comaroff implement this project, at the same time as to question the argument modes developed by the anthropology of the Globalization.