In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a
startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is
not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand
ourselves--it is by our crimes. Surveying an astonishing range of forms
of crime and policing--from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar
scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions to the collateral damage
of war--they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world.
Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the
state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing
are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new
forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political
economy of representation that have arisen.
To do so, the Comaroffs draw on their vast knowledge of South Africa,
especially, and its struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of
law out of the wreckage of long years of violence and oppression. There
they explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in
policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion,
drawing illuminating comparisons to the United States and United
Kingdom. Going beyond South Africa, they offer a global criminal
anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of
contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral
panics voiced, and populations ruled.
The result is a disturbing but necessary portrait of the modern era, one
that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, how we
think about morality, and how we are going to proceed as a global
society.
