Comaroff 1999 - Occult Economies
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featured article: issues in debate the Max Gluckman memorial lecture, 1998 occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony JEAN COMAROFF AND JOHN L. COMAROFF— University o hicago New situations demand new magic .... — E . E. Evans-Pritchard' Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of system. —George Eliot I. Consider the following four fragments, four notes from postcolonial South Africa. Each is drawn from the archaeology of the fantastic in this new global age, this Age of Futilitarianism wherein postmodern pessimism runs up against the promises of late capitalism. 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 of body parts, and the putative production of zombies to pyramid schemes 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. W h y is al l this occurring with such intensity, right now? An answer to the question, and to the more general problem of making sense of the enchantm ents of modernity, is sought in the encounter of rural South Africa with the contradictory effects of millennial capitalism and the culture ofneoliber- alism. This encounter, goes the argument, brings the global and the lo- cal — 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 awkward scale, on planes that transect the here and now, then and there, [postcoloniality, modernity, millennial capitalism, occult economy, witchcraft, South Africa] American Ethnologist 2b(2):279~3O3. Copyright © 1999, American Anthropological Association.
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