In their writings on Africa and colonialism, John and Jean Comaroff have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated?These essays work toward an "imaginative sociology," demonstrating the techniques (...) by which social science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction the authors offer their most complete statement to date on historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade. (shrink)

How are relations between generations shifting? As anthropologists, our take on intergenerational relations and the rationalities on which they are based—i.e., generationality—is historically situated. In many parts of the world, generation has become a major axis of social and political struggle, sometimes of bitter conflict. This, we argue, is a corollary of post-Cold War transformations in economy and society—and a radical rupture in processes of social reproduction. These transformations have conduced to the perception of a rising ‘generation war.’ How, then, (...) in these circumstances, are we to think anew of intergenerational relations—and justice? (shrink)

“Cultural imperialism” has been an influential concept in the representation of the modern Christian missionary movement. This essay calls its usefulness into question and draws on recent work on the cultural dynamics of globalization to propose alternative ways of looking at the role of missions in modern history. The first section of the essay surveys the ways in which the term “cultural imperialism” has been employed in different disciplines, and some of the criticisms made of the term within those disciplines. (...) The second section discusses the application of the cultural imperialism framework to the missionary enterprise, and the related term “colonization of consciousness” used by Jean and John Comaroff in their influential work on British missionaries and the Tswana of southern Africa. The third section looks at the historiography of missions in modern China, showing how deeply the teleological narratives of nationalism and development have marked that historiography. The concluding section argues that the missionary movement must be seen as one element in a globalizing modernity that has altered Western societies as well as non-Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that a comparative global approach to the missionary movement can help to illuminate the process of modern cultural globalization. (shrink)