@article{ref1,
title="Policing culture, cultural policing: law and social order in postcolonial south africa",
journal="Law and social inquiry",
year="2004",
author="Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean",
volume="29",
number="3",
pages="513-545",
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 &quot;culture&quot; 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 &quot;epidemic&quot; of occult-related violence, and the kinds of cultural policing that accompany it, are stark expressions of a structural contradiction within the &quot;new&quot; South Africa, a contradiction evinced in all postcolonies-and, increasingly, in other nation-states as well<p /><p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0897-6546",
doi="10.1111/j.1747-4469.2004.tb00999.x",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2004.tb00999.x"
}