ETHICS OF SCALE: RELOCATING POLITICS AFTER LIBERATION

Soccer City, Johannesburg, South Africa. Capacity 88,460. Photo by Jesse Weaver Shipley

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ETHICS OF SCALE: RELOCATING POLITICS AFTER LIBERATION

IntroductionJesse Weaver ShipleyHaverford College

The essays in this volume are concerned with theorizing changing insti-tutional and embodied forms of power in this post-liberation epoch.

The end of apartheid in South Africa symbolized for many the final con-quest over explicit oppression. As romanticized celebrations of successfulliberation faded and promised hopes for change became mired in webs ofinequality, the language of liberalization emerged as hegemonic in stateand international circles, naturalized by global finance, developmentorganizations, and marginal economic actors. South Africa’s hosting ofthe FIFA World Cup in June-July 2010, perhaps, most starkly representshow privatizing forces have become embedded within the state form,aligning corporate profit with collective political institutions. Hosting theWorld Cup involved a mammoth effort in which the South African statewas mandated by FIFA to invest huge amounts of capital and institutestrict regulations in exchange for the right to put on the sporting event.For South Africa, this corporatized global sporting spectacle presented

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 3, pp. 472–496, ISSN 0003-549. © 2010 by the Institute for EthnographicResearch (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.


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hopes for global recognition and investment. Its dynamics sum up theblending of service industry consumption and citizenship that character-izes the early 21st century. The valorization of individuated entrepreneur-ship blurs legal discourse, human rights, and movements for politicalchange with profit, where personal gain stands in for collective well-being. State and corporate bodies work together in the increasingly banalproject of neoliberalism. Cultural, political, and religious collectivitiesuse the language of privatization and liberalization to stake claims on cul-tural signs and material resources. Crucially, there has been a shift in howpeople contest power: from processes that produce place towards theways that entrepreneurial subjects deploy the languages of mobility andrights to reinvent circulatory mechanisms themselves. Ethnographershave struggled to address shifts in the scalar relation between lived, bod-ily experience and institutional and geographical circuits of power. Rapidyet uneven velocity in the movements of bodies, signs, and technologiescreates uncertainty, complicating the social and political alignments thatcoalesce around an entrepreneurial aesthetic.

These essays are concerned with understanding the various articula-tions of neoliberal political economy and postcolonial life. Scale—that is“how to relate the micro-social to the macro-social frame” (Silverstein2003:193)—is both a methodological and political issue. Ethnographersstruggle to connect “evidence and explanation” (Comaroff and Comaroff2003), which requires understanding the historically specific ways thatpeople reflexively negotiate event-making processes and ideologies ofhow small things relate to big forces. An ethics of scale entails thinkingnot about resistance or consciousness in an abstract sense, but exploringhow local people themselves imagine causality and intent; how people inseemingly intractable situations live through the possibilities and impos-sibilities of transformation.

This special edition began with a workshop I convened at the Center forCultural Analysis at Rutgers University in April 2007 to critically engageComaroff ’s Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History ofa South African People in relation to the changing object of ethnographicinquiry.1 Published in 1985, this text is a landmark in the political, ethi-cal, and intellectual work of anthropological field research. Comaroff ’sethnography develops an historical ethnography of changing forms ofpower manifest in the practical and sensual aspects of cultural embodi-ment—in particular, in ritual structure and the rise of the Zionist Church


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movement among Tswana peoples in South Africa. Using current ethno-graphic research, these papers reflect on the theoretical influence of Bodyof Power by historicizing its theoretical frame as a part of the ethnograph-ic contexts it examines. This volume theorizes the changing nature of thecontemporary political-moral landscape from the perspective of variousmobile life-worlds.

Comaroff ’s text provides an historical snapshot of how apartheid-erastruggles over power and meaning were carried out in the making ofevents out of the flux of daily experience. In tracing how the mundaneand the spectacular are demarcated through built forms and bodilyactions, Comaroff details how intentionality and conscious political oppo-sition are made through the historical struggles of a political economicsystem. Her work further shows how the realms of practice, aesthetics,spiritual feeling, and embodied meaning are also historical and changingeven as they appear to participants and observers to be static and ahistor-ical. Indeed, one of the lasting lessons of the book is for critical theory tohistoricize the way that the historicity of consciousness is understood.New ethnographies must consider the ethical and methodological issuesin theorizing periods after liberation to assess changing configurations ofpolitical consciousness and embodied, cultural meaning.

A key preoccupation of Body of Power, researched and written in theera of late apartheid, was understanding how social subjectivities wereforged in the contestation of political power. But what happens to theseways-of-being when a system of rule—and its oppositional forms—basedon racial hierarchies formally ends? How does critical theory find trac-tion in social practice within and against the hegemony of market-basedforms of social being understood to be liberatory? How do changingforms of labor, modes of production, and mobility reshape the landscapeof power? How does the language of culture as reflexive commentarytake on new implications in the change from racial to economic rule?How are the dislocations of migrant labor and violent demarcationsbetween the rural and the urban that dominated late 19th and 20th cen-tury life in Africa reformulated through 21st century circulatory practicesfor producing value?

Almost two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africans areremoved from the exceptional moment of liberation and have become,like the rest of the continent, postcolonial. When the African NationalCongress (ANC) initially took power, the structures of South Africa’s racial


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state officially unraveled. The end of apartheid is reminiscent of the endof earlier colonial struggles in India, Ghana, Kenya, and across formerempires. As colonies become independent states, older opposition politicsaround race and culture no longer provide the language for understand-ing how power operates. Racialized inequalities produced under colonialrule continue; though are now primarily discussed in terms of class differ-ence and access to resources. Public amnesia about the structuring prin-ciples of the apartheid state, for example, makes discussions about thehistorical conditions of inequality increasingly difficult. The southernAfrican landscape has been shaped by the 20th century migrant labor sys-tem. Mining and other types of production that demanded a mobile laborforce—and reinforced the divides between rural and urban, cultural andmodern domains—generated great wealth while creating the radicalinequalities of South Africa and other settler colonies. The apartheid statereinforced the dichotomy between rural and urban.2 As it became encod-ed in cultural practices—and anthropological research about them—ritu-al form and religious practice naturalized this divide by signifying on it.After apartheid, the legal encoding of racialized access to space disap-peared and rapid circulation between spaces was authorized. Ironically,this historical distance has been re-inscribed through the potentials ofvelocity—in travel, communication, and consumption—which oftenreveal stark cultural and economic differences, publicly debated in termsof individual potential rather than historical precedent. Authors in thisvolume point out that reflexive awareness of distance and of the uncer-tainties of place raises local questions about the location of tradition andthe relationship between the living and the dead (White); the right to andvalues of locales (Makhulu); risk, accident, and event-making (Morris);value and mobile spirituality (Amrute); and legal jurisdiction (Clarke).

Aspirations towards new freedoms for the Black majority are not prima-rily expressed in the language of political history, socialist morality, tradeunionism, or Pan-Africanist unity, but rather in the language of non-stateentrepreneurship. Discussions have shifted ever more to concerns with thelocal articulations of global free-trade economics. Rushed idealisms aboutlife in the new South Africa, fostered at home and abroad by a radically pro-gressive constitution, have been tempered by rising violent crime rates,xenophobic attacks against foreign workers, and electricity load shedding.

Body of Power, as an intellectual work and a political intervention,was shaped by the political climate of apartheid and its opposition. It


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juxtaposed details of ritual events, spatial organizations, and bodily sen-sibilities, carving a critical space between history and anthropology. Forthose in anthropology and beyond, the text reassessed the relationshipbetween religious movements and political stance, consciousness, andembodiment. The ethnography’s small-scale analysis is shadowed by theviolent encounter of the longue durée and the polarizing political strug-gles of apartheid’s end-game. The text was defined within the logic ofgrand ideological projects of modernity; both the racial, authoritarianstate and its opposition. And while the work has a sensibility of politicalhope through cultural embodiment, it recognizes both the violence andmelancholy of the colonial project.

Authors in this volume were asked to use their current research toreflect on older theoretical paradigms of political agency and its critiques,the location of politics, the affective nature of power, mobility, and therelationship between urban publics and rural social reproduction, self-fashioning, and its historical contexts. The problematic of scale in therelationship between cultures of circulation and the production of placebecame central to our inquiries into thinking about how emotionallycharged signs and events emerge from the flow of daily life. In the work-shop, we contextualized current understandings of affect and spirituality,technology and embodiment, sovereignty and the political import oflife/death. We asked, how current concerns with neoliberalism relate topossibilities of critical agency? How does the shifting nature of politicaleconomy and of state and religious institutions require new ways of think-ing about structuring affective subjects, spaces, political oppositions, andtechnologies? We re-read Body of Power in a political moment where pri-vatization and the corporation have become hegemonic institutionalforms that collapse redemptive politics with state discipline, culturalrevival, and business opportunity.

In reassessing the stakes for a semiotically-sensitive historical anthro-pology in the present, discussion in the workshop revolved around howthe hegemony of neoliberal sensibilities is manifest across dispersed insti-tutions and lifeworlds. We focus on ethnographic accounts of how author-ity is experienced in bodily practices and material realities as local artic-ulations of transnational forms. For local peoples, circulation becomes, inand of itself, an institutional configuration. Comaroff ’s work argues forthe reciprocal production of both African and European life-worldsthrough their encounters—what Sahlins’ terms the structure of the con-


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juncture. Political struggles around the apartheid state were often arguedin the language of liberal rights and culture. Liberalism of the colonialencounter provided a different set of possibilities and constraints thanthe forms of circulation now at play. As encounter and mobility are nor-malized over time, movement itself is appropriated as a bodily poetics ofpossibility. While Body of Power uses symbolic mediation in the high mod-ern, Durkheimian sense of signs that affectively bind communitiesthrough central markers and place-based affiliations, the essays in thisvolume reveal the changing role of symbolic mediation in orienting sub-jects to institutional and technological networks that regulate life as pri-marily in rapid motion.

Embodiment: Ritual and the EverydayComaroff ’s historical ethnography, focusing on the Tshidi people alongthe South Africa-Botswana borderland, legitimized new directions forsocial analysis by showing how popular and political forms shape cultur-al and spiritual meaning. The structural contradictions and historicaltransformations of racial rule and the proletarianization of the SouthernAfrican landscape transformed local religious experience manifest in con-tested bodily and ritual practice. She foregrounded the temporal and spa-tial processes through which a contradictory, yet coherent logic of embod-ied signs emerged. This provided a critique of structuralist analyses thatreduced signs to surface texts rather than portraying the historical role ofsigns in emotional experience and in making the interiority of the subject.

The proletarianization of rural South Africans drew the Tshidi into com-modity and monetary economies and incorporated them into the symbol-ic and material logics of property ownership and wage labor. As Comaroffand others point out, this was never a complete process and rural SouthAfricans inhabited both traditionalist/peasant and proletarian worlds inwhich culture provided a reflexive language for contesting this dichotomy.Comaroff argues that it was in the quotidian practices of bodily adornmentand spatial organization, as well as the historical transformation of ritualthrough missionization and new church movements, that the culturalgroundwork for the apartheid state was established. In these continuingencounters grounded in rural Africa—as Comaroff and Comaroff continueto argue in Of Revelation and Revolution (1991, 1997)—we glimpse theemerging dialectics of African modernity. This complex socio-economic


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terrain provided the historical context for recent privatization of stateresources and the rapid movements of investments, as well as the abstrac-tion and consolidation of wealth that characterize finance capital.

Body of Power has shaped ethnographic approaches to considering rit-ual practice as embodied historical memory. Bodily reformation was atthe center of the Protestant civilizing mission and the colonial project ofproletarianization in Southern Africa. In the organization of both urbanand domestic spaces and in the disciplining practices of dress, worship,and labor, African peoples were apprehended by the political, economic,and religious projects of European rule. However, as Comaroff argues,these encounters were inherently dialectical endeavors. Tshidi reframedand reshaped an historical consciousness through the bodily reformationsand practices that mark their subjugation.

In this formulation, resistance is a form of embodiment experienced ascultural self-assertion. Critics such as Mbembe argue that notions of resist-ance imply a coherence that is only defined by and made legible throughthe terms of oppression. Resistance reproduces singular identities aroundwhich power is maintained. What makes Body of Power an important textis that it gives an historical grounding for understanding opposition poli-tics, not as mimetically recreating the coherence of power, or using thelocal to counteract global economy or state authority, but rather as fram-ing the circulatory nature of bodily practices that reconfigure authorityfrom within its own always incomplete poetic structures. In revisitingresistance and its critiques, these articles historically situate the circula-tion of power in new guises and the actual forms of movement that areredeployed on the ground as counter moralities—practices that producethe interiority of the subject in what may be read as a ritual process.Spiritual and aesthetic practices as critical opposition do not imply aholistic subject, but in fact, often comment on the contradictory natureof an idealized citizen-subject itself.

Reading Comaroff ’s examination of ritual as poetic structure fore-grounds the relationship between consciousness and embodiment.Comaroff ’s work helped enunciate the idea that culture is not the lan-guage of tradition, but rather a highly reflexive mode of discourse subjectto simultaneous reproduction and transformation, providing the termsthrough which modernity itself can be negotiated. Cultural form producesand contests power and its opposition.


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Place of Culture: Theorizing from Historical EthnographyBuilding upon British Cultural Studies, Comaroff ’s work legitimized popu-lar practices as worthy of serious scholarly enquiry. Rather than a text-based Cultural Studies or structuralist analysis which tended to abstractpopular expressive genres as distinct realms, Comaroff ’s ethnographicmethod emphasized how the sacred and the secular are intermingled inpractice and how the realm of the popular is constantly being reconstitut-ed. Building on Max Gluckman’s work on social change and ritual,Comaroff (1985:254) points out in the conclusion of Body of Power thatexamining popular and countercultural movements provides a way torethink how a theory of culture enters narratives of colonial rule and itsopposition. African opposition movements have consistently drawn on thesymbolic languages of counterculture and populist religious movementsfor embodied critiques of Western rationalism and social order—what sheterms “ counterhegemonic European forms” (Comaroff 1985:254).Scholars working outside of Africa have seen Body of Power as a model forhow to look at new religious and popular movements in other locales. Atthe time of its writing, claims that a populist religious movement shouldbe a topic of ethnographic inquiry framed in relation to political con-sciousness were still contentious. In trying to historicize practice theory,Comaroff argues that in the “everyday production” of bodies, objects, andspaces, Tshidi peoples’ struggled with political, economic, and culturaldomination by the South African state. The text makes critical interven-tions in arguments about the relationship between history and culture,the location of politics, the symbolic production of bodily praxis, and theuses of ritual. Here the realm of the popular becomes intimately connect-ed—through the bodies of religious participants—to spiritual experience,on the one hand, and the abstraction of labor, on the other.

A theory of culture was central to British rule and to the imaginations ofcenter and periphery. European mercantile, missionary, and colonialenclaves across the globe relied, since the 18th century, upon theories ofculture to remake local socio-political institutions into markers of differ-ence and forms of external control. English military and cultural domina-tion of Ireland and Scotland provided a template for colonial rule abroad.European powers looked to Africa as a laboratory on political control,experimenting with techniques of coercion and consent. Lord Lugard (1922)formulated British policies of indirect rule, bringing lessons from Asia toEast and West Africa. In the battle over the meaning of signs (Comaroff and


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Comaroff 1991), colonial and missionary forces relegated African lifeworldsto objectified, ahistorical signs of both immoral degradation and exoticiz-ing celebrations of romantic primitivism (cf. Mudimbe 1988). British impe-rial rule promoted an idealized version of English civility, duty, and reli-gious piety as the basis for a new colonial society. Life in the colonies, andthe narratives and objects of imperial exploration, however, shaped cultur-al forms and political rule in Britain (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997).

Comaroff argues that for Tshidi peoples, culture delineated affective-ly-charged and powerful symbolic practices—ritual, in both a sacral andan everyday sense. In colonialist and missionary discourse, culture rel-egated Africans to the realm of tradition, removing them from thepotentials of political and legal subjectivity. Culture objectified livedpractices for display and rule of African peoples. Comaroff ’s interven-tion was to explore how African peoples redeployed culture in its objec-tified forms to claim positions of authority within and against colonialdisciplinary practices (Cohn 1996, Mudimbe 1988). High modern anthro-pologists and artists often looked to the realm of culture for resistanceto colonial rule. At independence, nations such as Ghana, Senegal, andTanzania re-worked colonial notions of culture through national andPan-African arts and theater movements to build new collective senti-ments. Politicians like Ghana’s first Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah,recognized the polarizing effects of dichotomies between traditionaland modern and tried to reimagine the frameworks through whichAfrican politics could be lived. Postcolonial theorists of power, likeFranz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and David Scott, posited the micro-dynam-ics of lived experience as ways disempowered people copy, enact, andresituate race-based oppression and the ways that difference is internal-ized and inverted. In some instances, the intellectual search for resist-ance and “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985) has led to the re-natural-ization of a cultural-bound, authentic subject or the romanticization ofnew populist movements. The popular is not an emergent style ofauthentic cultural expression, simultaneously more and less historicalthan other forms—as cultural studies proponents often portray it.

Comaroff ’s work opposes the tendency to romanticize or dehistoricizecultural expression as resistance and, instead, leads us to examine theconditions through which polarizing political ideologies emerge and areexperienced. Her work historicizes the realms of the traditional, the pop-ular, and the modern by showing how the sacred and the popular are


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mutually constituted, coming together in unexpected ways. Comaroffcasts resistance not in relation to opposition, but rather in terms of thehistorical continuities of legibility. Social practices forged through struc-tures of oppression present ways for local peoples to be illegible to powerand simultaneously make sense of—and act upon—their lifeworldsthrough new channels. New practices of power are emergent in the samehistorical and ideological struggles that make power appear coherent andnatural, but question official modes of social reproduction in the process.

Mobility has characterized both apartheid and neoliberal eras,though in different ways. Under apartheid, Africans struggled foremplacement and recognition within state and nation. Increasingly,political discourse imagines the possibility of movement itself. Previousstruggles were often about using cultural identifications to reclaim asense of place in the face of dislocation, whereas now there is a val-orization of movement and mobility, and a desire to enter its logic withactive agency. In the postcolony, discourses of African tradition have re-aligned with the authority of the new privatized state. Culture delin-eates a corporatized identity deployable as a form of collective and indi-vidual authority for political mobilization and income generation (cf.Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Culture also becomes part of debatesredefining legal rights and national morality. In 2005, ANC leader JacobZuma—now President of South Africa—was charged with rape. Hisdefense included claims that, according to Zulu cultural norms and cus-toms, the woman had dressed and acted in provocative ways and thatonce she was aroused it would have been considered rape not to havesex with her, even though she was HIV positive and there were no con-doms. Zuma was acquitted of the rape charges and the woman publiclydemonized by his growing supporters. Media attention on his use of cul-ture cast him as a defender of traditional values, polarizing publicdebate about gender, violence, and modern morality. As a Johannesburglawyer told me, “He used culture as an excuse for sexual violence. I amfrom the same culture as him and I have never heard of this. His use ofculture would be a joke if it was not so disturbing.” African culture jus-tified the rural confinement of Black South Africans under apartheid.Later it became a tool of embodied and explicit political opposition forthe Black Consciousness Movement, Inkatha Freedom Party, AfricanNational Congress, and others. In the 21st century, the invocation of cul-tural morality becomes the language of opportunism.


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Scale and a Methodology of the QuotidianScale of analysis has an ethics to it. European analyses of African culturein the mid-20th century highlighted the aesthetic and highly visibleaspects of ritual and daily practice. In discerning significance in aesthet-ic form and mundane activity, ethnographers depoliticized and dehistori-cized their analyses of culture.3 South African anthropology in particularcontributed to images of African culture as anti-modern, providing posi-tivist accounts to justify the confinement of Africans to Bantustans,unproductive rural tracts defined as cultural homelands. While detailedstudies of cultural poetics were recontextualized outside of realms ofpower, analyses of labor and politics tended to ignore bodies in action,aesthetic form, and phenomonological experience. As I describe earlier,Mbembe has criticized Comaroff and others arguing that framing cultureas resistance, in fact, reinforces the dominant power’s ability to define thelanguage of social being. For Mbembe (2001, 2002), political possibilityrests upon either the potentials of the creative “self-writing subject” tolive through unthought possibilities or upon the subversions of thegrotesque, inverted, or excessive.

Comaroff ’s Body of Power, however, is not arguing for the redemptivepossibilities of counter-cultures in the face of hegemonic power. Ratherher work provides a methodology that shows scalar shifts between bodilyaesthetics and institutions of power, defining a sustained, lived ethics.The interplay between historical consciousness and embodiment mani-fests an ethics of survival, focusing on the incomplete aesthetics of subtledetails and small things. Practices of adornment, spatial organization,and temporal sensibility are not surface aesthetics, but point in complexways to powerful networks within extended historical projects.Ethnographic method provides an ethics for detailing the historical condi-tions through which power is embodied, naturalized, and contested;through which culture—especially African culture—has been understoodas an aesthetic realm separated from history and politics.

Multiple historical registers coexist in the poetic nuances of the livedbody. Contradictions are played out in incommensurable temporal/spatialregisters—for example, between wage-labor oriented clock-time, reli-gious time, and rural-urban travel time. Overlapping, simultaneous tem-poralities reveal the complex historical legacies of colonial rule. Theoriesof ritual practice posit that the body becomes a microcosm of socialdis/order, especially in heightened moments of symbolic action. In classic


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ethnographies of rituals of transformation that influenced Comaroff, ritu-al participants both question and reproduce social order. Comaroff his-toricizes the reflexive aspects of ritual—and ritual theory—showing hownew forms of labor and social organization are abstracted in changingspiritual and religious practices.

For Tswana peoples under colonial rule, locality was reproducedthrough encounters around semi-coerced wage labor and the distancesbetween rural homeland and mining or semi-urban work. With the grow-ing hegemony of free-market logics, new forms of mediation of local com-munities have become dominant: labor has dried up, been casualized, oroutsourced; media deregulated; water and electricity privatized; main-stream churches overrun by high-tech, charismatic preachers of the pros-perity gospel. Anti-globalization campaigns have organized around notionsof locality put in terms of resource access and land-use. Economic anxietyis expressed in re-assertions of ethnic, cultural, and national identity.

The fading hopes of post-liberation South Africa were perhaps mostemphatically demonstrated in 2008 with widespread xenophobic violenceagainst “ foreign” Black workers. Poor South Africans attacked otherAfricans, especially from Mozambique and Zimbabwe, for taking jobs andresources they felt should be reserved for South Africans. As one workerexplained to me, “after years of fighting for our freedom, now we seethese foreigners coming and benefiting while we are still suffering. I donot condone violence but I understand why Black South Africans are sofrustrated when many of us are actually worse off than we were underapartheid.” The visible rise of “corrective rape” against lesbian women,the prevalence of sexual and domestic violence, and the coercion ofyoung girls for sex work all refract masculine uncertainty about control ofsocial reproduction. For many living on the margins, violent assertions ofautochthony and gendered control reflect the incoherence of politicaluncertainty, rather than cohesive collective movements.4

Current political conundrums revolve around individual rights and own-ership versus social collectivity, reflecting the importance of scalar relationsin current debates about moral citizenship. South Africa’s Truth andReconciliation Commission (TRC) demonstrated this after the end ofapartheid by raising questions about the relationship between legal culpa-bility and economic rights. The TRC asked apartheid-era perpetrators of vio-lence—whether they were state police or military or anti-apartheidactivists—to publicly and fully confess their actions. If their deeds were


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deemed to be politically motivated, they would be granted amnesty. Herewas an attempt to reconcile individual intent and responsibility with collec-tive, race-based forms of power and expropriation. New state support foruniversal individual rights conflicted with moral recognition of the historyof institutionally-structured inequality. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was thepublic voice of the idea that emotional healing for the new multiculturalnation trumped economic restitution and justice for victims of apartheid.

Post-independence land claims against white farmers in southernAfrica have also been framed by conflicts between individual rights andcollective moral restitution.5 White landowners continue to rely on colo-nial, moral justifications for white expropriation of land in arguing thatthey are using the land “properly,” for the economic benefit of the nationand that Black management of resources would deter foreign investors.How groups and individuals lay claim to land is complicated by the longhistory of forced movements and displacements across the country. Asjobs and economic resources remain in urban centers, and in privatehands, the idea of “returning” to reclaim rural lands and social collectiv-ities does not seem to promise economic progress. South Africa’s BlackEconomic Empowerment (BEE) policy has aimed to create progress, not byrectifying past cases of inequality but by including Black entrepreneursand business people in helping the nation reach its full economic poten-tial. In this model, the problems of apartheid are framed as failures offree market access in that the state “systematically excluded African,Indian and coloured people from meaningful participation in the coun-try’s economy.”6 For both poor workers and a rising Black middle class,prosperity is tied less to production and land than to access to capitalflows that facilitates mobility between rural and urban, as well as acrossnational borders. Race-based politics is blurred with the desire of youngBlack entrepreneurs to claim mobility itself. As politics is contested inmoral terms and economics in terms of mobility, ethnographers need topay attention to how people understand the relationship between smallscale action and broader social forces.

New Institutions of Power, or What Happens After Opposition Politics?For South Africa, hosting the 2010 football FIFA World Cup was a form ofnational investment providing economic hope through sports-related


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infrastructure development, tourism, and positive global media exposure.In the preceding years, the global media questioned whether South Africawas up to the task of hosting this global event, for the first time in Africa.In order to win the right to host the Cup, South Africa followed FIFA’sdemands for state capital investment to build “world class” stadiums,roads, trains, and tourist facilities. Marketing the country as a rainbownation, FIFA and South Africa de-emphasized politics and conflict, fram-

Ghana fans at the World Cup 2010. Photo by Jesse Weaver Shipley


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ing the World Cup as a global, unifying event. While South Africa mademajor investments for the right to host the World Cup and took on long-term financial risk, FIFA’s primary revenue was secured before the eventeven began coming from corporate sponsorship and sale of media rights.It is a non-profit organization, though earned estimated profits of between$1 and $2 billion from the World Cup.

The World Cup gave hope for emotional and economic rebirth, thoughit also bred moral panic as South Africa saw itself through the eyes of theworld. Several years before the World Cup, rumors began that thousandsof sex workers would be imported for the World Cup. Some argued sexwork should be legalized for the event so the state could regulate it andbenefit from a business that would go on anyway, while others felt thenation was compromising its moral sensibilities and the long-term fightagainst HIV/AIDS for the sake of tourist revenue. In terms of crime, thestate created fast-track legal courts exclusively for the World Cup so thatvisitors would feel secure and criminals would be discouraged by the vis-ibility of justice. Shack dwellers were removed for stadium constructionand undesirables were prevented from entering tourist areas. FIFA licens-es were required to sell goods near stadiums, effectively preventing localtraders and food sellers from benefiting economically. Security visibilityincreased in tourist areas. In the end, South Africa’s international reputa-tion for corruption and violence deterred many foreign visitors as num-bers did not come close to estimates of 500,000 and merchants were dis-appointed. The World Cup was deemed a success in marketing the countryas a world class destination, but the emotional upheavals of hosting theCup were more complex. As one media producer explained to me, “ foryears everyone has been asking ‘what are you doing for 2010?’ it was likethat was the future that would make everything good. But it was only amonth and now that it came and went there is a let down. The party isover and its not clear what we actually got out of it…what it did for thenation. South Africans, we always underestimate ourselves, we put on thisworld class event but for what? To impress people? Do we feel betterabout ourselves now? What about all the money we spent; will we getreturns on the investment?”

The contradictions of the market-oriented African state in the 2010 WorldCup are, perhaps, best represented by the way Ghanaians were treated inSouth Africa. As the Ghana Black Stars were the only African team to advanceto the quarter finals, they were supported by South Africans and Africans


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across the continent as the hope of the continent. The Pan-Africanist sensi-bility of Marcus Garvey’s initial use of “Black Star” was invoked as peoplebegan calling the team the Black Stars of Africa. Ghanaians resident in SouthAfrica felt renewed pride in their country. As one hairdresser living inPretoria told me Ghana’s success countered normal xenophobic sentimentsthey faced, “we feel it is ok to be openly Ghanaian. We are not afraid to beproud of where we are from. All of Africa is behind the Black Stars.”However, as the games ended, rumors that foreigners would be violentlykicked out of the country spread. A few days after the July 11th finals, aGhanaian was shot in the Western Cape and many Zimbabweans fled acrossthe border for safety amidst sporadic violence against Black foreigners.While massive attacks did not occur, Ghanaians who, several days earlier hadproudly worn their team’s jerseys in the streets, were again in fear of beingtoo visible. The market-driven Pan-Africanist celebrations of the Ghana BlackStars was quickly riddled with a familiar uncertainty about the place of otherAfricans in South Africa’s economy.

Neoliberalism’s critics seem as dazzled by it as its proponents. Mostanalyses of how the free market permeates and transcends the state seeneoliberalism as both a thing to be analyzed as well as a form of analysisor explanation. As the papers in this volume demonstrate, pointing tonew forms of liberalism is not an adequate way to explain the disparateset of scalar dichotomies—rural/urban, market/state, movement/stasis,legal/illegal, rights/obligations, alive/dead—that dominate contemporarylife. In this post liberation moment, ethnographers must ask how individ-uals are apprehended by and negotiate structures of free marketization.As this ideology permeates economic forms, it inflects mobile lifeworldsthat are historically connected, but imagined as new—that often havemore in common with the past than with an idealized neoliberal future.These practices require creative ethnographic approaches if they are to bemade visible rather than relying upon theories of neoliberalism them-selves as explanations.

In Africa as elsewhere, the language of entrepreneurship, contract, andbusiness dominate political discourse. Neoliberalism presents a “…col-lapse of the distinction between…market liberties and civic liberties…[It]commodifies a critical notion of political agency…” (Giroux 2008:140).Ideologically, private ownership and individual aspiration have infusednational and cultural imaginaries. Preoccupations with service industries,consumption, and circulation have eclipsed a politics of production.


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Widespread public debates on the moralities and strategies of post-apartheid transformation shifted in the past decade from the possibilitiesof state-driven restitution towards structuring access to business opportu-nities and the movements of capital. The idealism of transformationbecame hope for private investment and service delivery. In countriessuch as Ghana and Kenya, the state has tried to attract foreign capital bycomplying with IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World BankStructural Adjustment Program (SAP) mandates decentralization and pri-vatization. In this process, socialist and populist discourse is expungedfrom public debate. Of course, this is not an all-or-nothing transforma-tion, but rather the primary public language around transformation andpossibility has dramatically shifted.

Giroux (2008), Harvey (2005), and Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) haveexamined the cultural-political implications of neoliberal transformation.Their analyses of its ubiquity are also indictments of the rampant intellec-tual examinations of neoliberalism in the early 21st century. “As neolib-eral ideology successfully normalizes and depoliticizes its basic assump-tions and its market-based view of the world, people find it increasinglydifficult to recognize that neoliberal rationality is a historical and politi-cal construction…” (Giroux 2008:175). In South Africa and around theworld, scholarship focuses increasingly on development, popular culture,the rule of law, new religious movements, and human rights understoodin terms of the potentials of entrepreneurship and local efforts to recon-cile rising bourgeois aspirations with other enduring collective identities.Ethnographic-historical methodologies that link nuanced experience tobroader political projects must provide crucial insight into local poetics ofpower. Comaroff ’s Body of Power does this for the moment of lateapartheid; the essays here attempt to do so for the post-liberation epoch,raising questions such as what realms of social life does the neoliberalencompass? What does it allow us to think through and what does it pre-vent us from considering? What aspects of its project remain unfinished?

Jerusalema, a South African gangster film that premiered at the 2008Durban International Film Festival, describes the transition to democracyfrom the perspective of Lucky Kunene, a black youth growing up in Sowetoaround the transition of 1994. He is admitted to study business atUniversity, but is unable to pay school fees so turns to carjacking. AspiringBlack youth like Lucky have no more economic resources after 1994 thanthey did before. So Lucky decides to empower himself by manipulating gaps


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in legal codes and taking advantage of lax policing to take over multipleJohannesburg housing projects in the notorious Hillbrow neighborhood.The gangster is a real estate developer who profits from Johannesburg’shousing crisis while actually helping poor people. Lucky follows his dream,finding a white girlfriend and buying a house in affluent Houghton. The vio-lence of his business dealings eventually bring him down, though heescapes prosecution. The film ends with Lucky eluding the law and leavingJohannesburg as he walks down a Durban beach proclaiming, “after everyrevolution comes a new order.” In this new world, the lines blur betweencreative market-oriented business and robbery. Claiming Karl Marx, AlCapone, and Andrew Carnegie as his unlikely combination of heroes, thefilm’s protagonist asks, if all property is theft, how in the new South Africacould he claim his share by other than criminal means? Tendeka Matatu,the film’s producer, tells me that at a pre-release screening, an “old social-ist academic complained that the film did not properly portray a leftistpolitical message. But that is exactly the point: to show the collapse of olderpolitical oppositions and the possibility of that position.” This ideologicaldisconnect is indicative of the divergence between the old left movementsand new popular expressive identities.

Whereas art was often seen as a realm of resistance to the apartheidstate, after 1994 the language of arts and culture aligned with individualexpression and entrepreneurship against political collectivity. For some,this seemed to be a relief. For example, in the 1990s, when kwaito musi-cians were criticized for making non-political, commercial dance music,one producer commented on YFM that musicians had for decades beenobligated to make political music and that now it was a relief to have thefreedom to make non-political music and just dance. In effect, blackartists felt liberated to forge creative messages from within the main-stream market. Non-politics was the new politics.

The dominance of Black urban popular culture in the South Africanmediascape points to the shift from art as collective action to the stylisticsof Black entrepreneurship. Music video and popular culture satellite tele-vision stations, Channel O in the 1990s and MTV Base Africa after 2005,have been the most visible manifestations of the generation of youngBlack media professionals and artists who dominate South African publicculture. Black Rage Productions is a successful Johannesburg multi-mediacompany founded in 1996 “specializing in South African urban culture runby Rhodes University trained Maria McCloy, Dzino, and Kutloano


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Skosana.”7 It has included hip hop, soul, and kwaito music productionthrough Outrageous Records, an urban culture website (rage.co.za), televi-sion productions such as Soul Sundays and Street Journal on SABC 1, andinternational media consulting. As Skosana explains to me, they haveimbued “global Black popular culture with an eclectic South African urbanfeel” for consumption by a new Black middle class. “Black American count-er-culture speaks to young South Africans both because of its struggle sto-ries as well as its images of Black success.” But Black Rage has recognized,it is not as much the progressive political agenda or radical politics ofracial unity that are popular. As Skosana jokes, “we celebrate Black culturefor our generation, not try to start a revolution.” South African youth aresituated within an explicitly de-politicized imaginary through class-based,media consumption. The small rising African bourgeoisie imagines Blackempowerment less in terms of the politics of collective transformationthan the identity-based conditions for individual success and entitlement,expressed in terms of the aesthetics of Black urbanity and lifestyles of mid-dle class comfort. Conversely, underclass South Africans, excluded from thehopes of transformation, organize their dissent around their right to basicservices which are increasingly privatized like electricity, water, housing,etc. Increasingly, they turn to illicit forms of wealth redistribution as analternative freedom.

Considering the transformation of the ANC from a banned terroristorganization to a political party leading its nation and the shift from raceto class-based public discourse, how do we theorize resistance and oppo-sition? What kinds of politics and subversion are at work in dispersedinstitutions? How do we find methodologies to address the nuances ofpower embedded in new market practices and their representation? And,crucially, why is so much critical theory failing to be relevant?

As sovereignty is dispersed within myriad legal, technological, and spiri-tual forms, the poetics of possibility take on circulatory forms of their own.Mbembe (2001) describes that in the face of the postcolonial state’s contra-dictions, impoverished peoples relocate hope within individuated notionsof self-fashioning, aimed to counter speed, dispersal, and deterritorializa-tion. Patrick Bond (2006) and others have argued that opposition politicscontinue through local protests against the privatization of water and elec-tricity delivery, through organized movements such as the Congress ofSouth African Trade Union’s national strike (6 August 2008) and the privatesecurity guard strike at the World Cup against low wages, and the legal bat-


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tles against the state and international drug companies for HIV/AIDS treat-ment programs fought by organizations such as the Treatment ActionCampaign. Comaroff’s Body of Power is important for anthropologists as itlocates the body as a nexus for contesting historically contextualized formsof power. When authority takes highly mobile, diffused forms peoplerefashion their desires and aspirations in the language of mobility.

Economic liberalization is most visibly manifest in the privatization ofmedia, the mobility of labor and capital, and struggle over individual’srights to basic resources. In a symbolic sense, this entails the valorizationof the entrepreneur as the preeminent national citizen. Across socialrealms, there is a convergence among the figurations of business entre-preneur, armed robber, creative artist, media-savvy consumer, new spir-itual leaders, and religious converts. The lines between entrepreneurshipand hustling, formal and informal are blurred such that individual aspi-ration expands the productive possibilities of violence and coercion asvalue production.

Works on PaperThe essays in this volume focus on various processes of circulation—urban, spiritual, financial, legal, technological, and automotive—as con-stitutive of political possibility and constraint. Recent theories of circula-tion revive older anthropological interests in gift exchange as producingand challenging social status by creating ritual obligations. Examining aculture of circulation reveals the processes and mediations of movementthrough which meaning and locale are produced. In the reflexive aspectsof technologies of mediation and movement, self-conscious communityaffiliations coalesce (Appadurai 2006). The poetic structures of circulationprovide a cultural formation within which subjects produce and contestpower and authority (Lee and LiPuma 2002). As labor and productionbecome increasingly mobile, technological, legal, and trans-state institu-tions dislocate rights and obligations from state institutions while stillgrappling with older historical encounters that transformed the Africanlandscape. While production remains a key site of anxiety in Africa, theeconomic and political rights of a citizenry congeal in increasingly explic-it ways around circulatory practices themselves. Bodies, spirits, money,and electronica harbor mobile forms through which marginalized peoplesnavigate the hopes and impediments of the free market.


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These papers theorize a contemporary politics of hope, historicizingideas of practice, showing the anxieties, inequalities, accidents, creativi-ties, and opportunities that emerge in the place of naturalized forms ofpower, that in previous moments, were experienced as inflexible,unchanging, and reiterative. How does the culture experience of over-whelming power and embodied resistance under apartheid reappear innew places after the end of colonial struggle, aspirations of freedom, andthe subsequent end of liberational pleasures? Scalar difference—therapid juxtaposition of the very small with the vast—is crucial for us inassessing the effects of liberalization, transnational systems of work, andlegal and political systems that extend beyond nation-states though, inthe process, re-instantiate a national domain.

In the first paper, White examines the mediating ties between the liv-ing and the dead in apartheid’s aftermath, tracing the re-territorializationof mobility, and transformations in notions of home and social obligation.White focuses on how transformations in ritual practice and the domesticbuilt environment refract a younger generation’s changing relationship tothe past and future. Makhulu focuses on how township dwellers makeviable networks of financial circulation to mediate rapidly changing formsof social reproduction, debt, and the lived contingencies of spatial ideolo-gies. White and Makhulu focus on the experiential and material aspects ofspace and the management of the body in relation to changing forms ofvalue production.

Morris and Amrute examine the material forms of technology andmovement, and the dynamics between displacement and contingency. ForMorris, the automobile becomes a marker of speed, structuring a land-scape of violence that is at once disciplinary and a laboratory for a popu-lar, masculine imaginary. The road is an indexical icon, a pathway to pos-sibility where mobility itself is pleasure. But the immanence of the roadaccident marks the moral anxiety of displacement and movement, theever-present contingency of disaster. Amrute shows how for IndianInformation Technology (IT) workers based in Germany who describe them-selves as Hindu, religion is not based in a particular set of institutionalspaces, but rather takes on the mobility of a programming code for theworkers who live through rapid global networks of web-based program-ming. Here, religion is not a form of collective affiliation aligning workerswith nationalist Hindu movements, nor is it a site of resistance to Germanracial-nationalism. Rather Hinduism viewed as a programming code shows


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how religion provides a language of both mobility and displacement.Finally, Clarke addresses how international networks of law and discours-es of rights are in tension with local and national obligations and rights.Increasingly transnational bodies like the International Criminal Court(ICC) define the legal jurisdiction of postcolonial states. Clarke shows howinternational legal and human rights frameworks shape how individualsand collectivities become liable for various kinds of violence, not basedupon universal principles but rather on the pragmatics of internationalaccess to natural resources. In using Body of Power to examine contempo-rary configuration of spirituality, mediation, and bodiliness, these paperspoint to a markedly changed relationship between power and its opposi-tion measured in the speed and distance of movement itself.

This volume ends with an edited version of the conversation betweenJean Comaroff and Achille Mbembe that concluded our workshop. Theirdiscussion reflects broad debates about the nature of African politics andresistance, and lays out some of the primary concerns in thinking aboutthe contemporary political landscape. Comaroff and Mbembe reflect onthe overlapping temporalities and heteroglossia of African social life, newforms of work, and the pleasures and anxieties of heightened speed,showing that Africa is not late in coming to modernity, but rather mustcontinue to be seen as central to the project of global political economyand theorizing contemporary life.

In the midst of missionization, proletarianization, and racial rule,Tshidi people refashioned a popular religious movement to recast symbol-ic meaning and historical affiliation in a prolonged political struggle.Now, increasingly rapid movements structure the value of labor andmeaning of place. While the manifestations of power have changed sincehigh apartheid, the scalar relationships between nuanced, bodily activityand macro-social institutions continues to inform how people, more orless reflexively, inhabit, reiterate, and re-symbolize authority. The essaysin this special volume show that value is increasingly made in the strug-gle to control technologies and channels of circulation. While the marke-tized state tries to regularize and locate the institutional bases for control,local peoples struggle to re-make their own terms of circulation.


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ENDNOTES1First, I want to extend my gratitude to Jean Comaroff for her intellectual generosity inagreeing to let me organize a conference and volume around Body of Power. I feel priv-ileged to have the chance to reread this book through the eyes of the author herself. Ihope it was as productive for her to look into this intellectual legacy as it was for therest of us. I thank all the participants and the editors at Anthropological Quarterly fortheir hard work and persistence in making this volume a reality. I want to extend spe-cial thanks to Michael Warner and Brent Hayes Edwards for helping shape and organ-ize the conference. I thank Hylton White, Tabetha Ewing, and Jyoti Mistry for comment-ing on various versions of my essay. I also want to thank Dorothy Hodgson, whopresented a paper at the original conference but was unfortunately unable to includeher paper in this volume due to previous commitments. See “Cosmopolitics,Neoliberalism, and the State: The Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa.” In PninaWerbner, ed. Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist andVernacular Perspectives. I must also thank Brian Larkin who presented a paper whichhe later published in a special issue of Social Text 26 (3 96) that he co-edited withCharles Hirschkind on “Media and the Political Forms of Religion” in 2008. See “AhmedDeedat and the Form of Islamic Evangelism.” Social Text 26(3 96) 2008.2Thanks to Zolani Ngwane for reading drafts of this introduction and reminding me toemphasize that the rural-urban divide in South Africa was reinforced by labor require-ments and was subsequently naturalized by South African anthropology.3Marshall Sahlins’ concern in the 1990s that literary-oriented disciplines had takenover the domain of anthropologists and were unwittingly misusing the notion of “cul-ture” continues to be relevant in how non-anthropologists draw on ethnographicmethodologies without precision.4Many perpetrators of violence were friends and neighbors of those they attacked.Other rioters devised techniques to identify foreigners. For example, they would speakZulu and expect people to be able to speak fluently even though for many SouthAfricans this is not their mother tongue. This polarizing idea of nationhood excludedthose of mixed parentage and southern Africans resident in South Africa for long peri-ods. Questions arose about who belonged to the nation and how the rights of citizen-ship were conferred. The attacks and burnings that occurred formally replicated olderviolence between Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and African National Congress (ANC) sup-porters which often broke down along cultural lines. The violence also structurallyresembled riots against the apartheid state. The fact that violence around nationalbelonging invoked these older forms of disorder, points to historically structured anx-iety and divisiveness around South African collectivity.5Since the 17th century, Europeans in Southern Africa argued that Africans forfeitedmoral and legal rights to land through their inability to use land property. Christianmorality was linked to political sovereignty and the economically productive use ofresources, justifying European expropriation of property.6http://www.southafrica.info/business/trends/empowerment/bee.htm7http://rage.co.za/


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REFERENCES

Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bond, Patrick. 2006. Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation. London: Zed Booksand Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press

Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of aSouth African. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Comaroff, John L. and Jean. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity,Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

____________. 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution Volume 2: The Dialectics ofModernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

____________. 2000. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.”Public Culture 12 (2):291-343.

____________. 2003. “Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropologyand the Violence of Abstraction.” Ethnography 4(2):291-324.

____________. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Giroux, Henry. 2008. Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age ofGreed. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hodgson, Dorothy L. 2008. “Cosmopolitics, Neoliberalism, and the State: TheIndigenous Rights Movement in Africa.” In Pnina Werbner, ed. Anthropology and theNew Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, 215-230.Oxford: Berg.

Larkin, Brian. 2008. “Ahmed Deedat and the Form of Islamic Evangelism.” Social Text26(3 96):101-121.

Lee, Benjamin and Edward LiPuma. 2002. “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations ofModernity.” Public Culture 14(1):191-213.

Lugard, Lord Frederick J. D. 1922. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. WilliamBlackwood and Sons.

Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.

____________. 2002. “African Modes of Self-Writing.” Public Culture 14(1):239-273.

Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order ofKnowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. NewHaven: Yale University Press.

Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “ Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.”Language and Communication 23 (3-4):193-229.


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ETHICS OF SCALE: RELOCATING POLITICS AFTER LIBERATION

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