Details

ISBN-10: 022642491X
ISBN-13: 9780226424910
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 12/05/2016
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 5.90" W, 0.90" H

The Truth about Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order

Paperback

Price: $30.00

Overview

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.

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Reviews
"What is 'crime'? A social pathology? A violation of social order? The object or raison d'etre of law enforcement? ...Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff unpack the place of crime in postcolonial, neoliberalized South Africa and beyond... Their argument is that the impact of postcolonial neoliberalism in South Africa, and similar shifts in ideas of citizenship and forms and practices of state sovereignty elsewhere, have led to crime taking on a position of heightened prominence in the social imaginary, serving as a symbol and symptom, cause and consequence of the breakdown in social order."– "Allegra Lab" (3/27/2018 12:00:00 AM)
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Details

ISBN-10: 022642491X
ISBN-13: 9780226424910
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 12/05/2016
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 5.90" W, 0.90" H
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