Top 5 Jean Comaroff Quotes

American anthropologist

Jean Comaroff (born 22 July 1946) is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. She is an expert on the effects of colonialism on people in Southern Africa. Until 2012, Jean was the Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

But beneath the phenomenon lie economic and political forces that have to do with the transformative history of the present

I wrote an essay some years back in which I made the argument that anthropology is not defined by its content but by its methodological curiosity, by defamiliarization of the world.

But not only white people should write about whites, or only men about men, or Navajos about the Navajo, or any human subjects only about themselves and their experiences of the world.

Many see this as “progressive,” but it’s retrogressive as imaginable. A discipline that for a century of its history was anti-essentialist is now sanctioning essentialisms of every kind.

We have always written against the grain, which is the point of critique … of any weight