Citation

Comaroff J, Comaroff J. Law Soc. Inq. 2004; 29(3): 513-545.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, American Bar Foundation, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1747-4469.2004.tb00999.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This study transgresses the received distinction between two genres: the scholarly essay and the grant proposal. An extended reflection on a research endeavor still in progress, it interrogates the methodological and conceptual questions raised, ab initio, by the effort to explore and explain an unusually perplexing phenomenon: the dramatic rise, in postapartheid South Africa, of witchcraft killings-and of their policing, both formal and informal, which has produced distinctly hybrid styles of cultural justice. Our objective is to address a number of interrelated questions concerning the description, interpretation, and analysis of (I) occult-related violence, itself legitimized locally by populist appeals to "culture" and (2) its regulation by a secular modernist state committed to, yet challenged by, the constitutional recognition of cultural difference. It is our thesis that this "epidemic" of occult-related violence, and the kinds of cultural policing that accompany it, are stark expressions of a structural contradiction within the "new" South Africa, a contradiction evinced in all postcolonies-and, increasingly, in other nation-states as well

Language: en