Interventions

International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

ISSN: 1369-801X (Print) 1469-929X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20

THE COMAROFFS AND THE PRACTICE OF

HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Steven Feierman

To cite this article: Steven Feierman (2001) THE COMAROFFS AND THE PRACTICE OF
HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY, Interventions, 3:1, 24-30, DOI: 10.1080/13698010020026976

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Published online: 01 Jun 2011.

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 THE COMAROFFS AND THE PRACTICE OF
HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Steven Feierman
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania

Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2, explores how Nonconformists

Africa
propagated the everyday practices of nineteenth-century British bourgeois
historical society. When the southern Tswana found missionary words irrelevant, the
ethnography missionaries set about remaking Tswana bodies, dress, and houses. The
Comaroffs describe resistance to, and refashioning of, European practices.
hybridity Their work has been central to the creation of a new and rich historiography
of cultural hybridity in Africa. When the works of hybridity are aggregated,
macronarrative
however, they contribute to a macrohistorical narrative grounded in Europe,
South Africa not balanced by a comparable Africa-centered macronarrative. This article
presents strategies which hold the promise of rectifying the imbalance.

What are the implications of the Comaroffs’ book – RRII (1997) – for
historical practice? How does this volume inform historical study in Africa,
and also in other places around the world where ostensibly isolated local
societies were brought into the domain of colonial capitalism? The contri-
bution of this volume to our understanding of the wider process is quite
stunning. The process has usually been seen as a violent one, narrowly politi-
cal, an act of conquest which was followed by the enforced appropriation of
labor, so that the bodies of workers were Žrst subjected to industrial work

interventions Vol. 3(1) 24–30 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)

Copyright © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 1080/13698010020026976
T HE CO M ARO FFS AND HIST ORICAL E TH NO G RAPH Y 25
S t e v e n F e i e rm a n

routines; only later, and gradually, were Africans brought to accept bourgeois
ideas of the person. A conquest of body and muscle, to be followed only Žt-
fully by a slow process through which local people reinterpreted the world in
which they lived. The Comaroffs reverse this process. They study the south-
ern Tswana on the frontier of what was later to become one of the world’s
most brutal racial and industrial regimes – with the borders of the Republic
of South Africa – but they examine the period before and during the time of
full conquest, before and during the institution of the mine labor regime.
Volume II of this remarkable work looks at the role of Nonconformist
British missionaries on this frontier and explores how propagation of the
everyday practices of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, of a capitalist
world, were at the heart of the missionary project. The evangelists began with
the Word, as this new story goes – they began with missionary preaching.
However, when the southern Tswana slept through sermons, when they found
the word irrelevant, the missionaries set about remaking the bodies, the dress,
the houses . . . a thousand elements of everyday practice in the lives of the
Tswana. The Comaroffs study mundane things: the building of houses in
straight lines, the cultivation of farms with ploughs, the tilling of the earth in
straight lines, the wearing of blue cloth. It was through these means, and only
later through the brute colonization of workers’ muscles, that habits of capi-
talist society were communicated. Here is a representative sentence from the
book:

Of all household Žttings, however, perhaps the most important were locks and
glass. The missionaries insisted on doors that could be properly secured and on
windows that let in light; indeed, these were essential to their very idea of home.
While latches and bolts ensured the sanctity of private possessions, personal space,
and family intimacy, windows were apertures of enlightenment. (Comaroff and
Comaroff 1997: 290)

Through a thousand such missionary interventions, and through the vigor-

ous Tswana resistance to them, and reŽguring of them, the modern Tswana
world was made. The everyday, the Comaroffs say, was the privileged terrain
of the missionary movement because it brought the Protestant ethic in line
with the spirit of capitalism. They rely on Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self
(1989) to argue that after the Protestant Reformation goodness ‘lay less in
contemplating the Divine Order, or in questing after sacral honors, than in
the fullness of “life itself”. . . . Out of this {Puritan} vision evolved the fully
edged bourgeois subject; that biologically framed, legally constituted,
morally accountable, right-bearing citizen subsumed in modern European
selfhood’ (RRII: 32). The missionaries remade selves who then marched off
to the huge industrial enterprises of South Africa, to dig the diamonds, to
mine the gold.
interv entions – 3:1 26

This project has powerful, and troubling, implications within the politics
of the southern African region, and the politics of postcolonial peoples more
generally. It implies that the search for African authenticity, so important for
African nationalism, is doomed to failure – that what seems quintessentially
African is inevitably hybrid. Among the Tswana, what is African is a product
of the propagation of Protestant habits and of their reŽguring. The
Comaroffs aim, as they said in Ethnography and the Historical Imagination,
at revealing ‘the reconstruction of a living culture by the infusion of alien signs
and commodities into every domain of Tswana life’ (Comaroff and Comaroff
1992: 36). The loss of an African narrative, in this story of hybridity, grows
out of a historical imagination in which the local and the global interact, but
in which the African is always local, and the global always originates outside
Africa. Once these local and global forces are set in motion, the story (as the
Comaroffs tell it) is a very rich one, Žlled with African resistance and with
the reŽguring of culture, leading to radically different outcomes in different
parts of Africa, or of the world. The Comaroffs ask, ‘How . . . do we do
justice to the fact that similar global forces have driven the colonial and post-
colonial histories of large parts of Africa, and yet recognize that speciŽc social
and cultural conditions, conjunctures, and indeterminacies have imparted to
distinct African communities their own particular histories?’(Comaroff and
Comaroff 1993: xiii). Their project, then, is seen as part of a larger study of
global capitalism and the myriad local forms which have grown out of the
encounter with it – the many hybridities, of which the southern Tswana
provide one exemplary case.
I react in signiŽcantly different ways to Volume 2 of this work when it is
taken as an imaginative reconstruction of a particular time and place, and
when it is taken (as the Comaroffs’ work has been, and for good reason) as
an exemplar for the construction of a broader Želd of the study of Third
World hybridities. Taken on its own, the picture of the missionary enterprise
and the hybridities which emerge from it – of the houses in straight lines, of
the implicit division (in mission villages) between work and leisure, between
public and private space, between the homes of women and the farms of men
– is a fascinating and provocative one, a picture which enriches our under-
standing. This is especially so when we learn of the myriad forms of resist-
ance. Missionaries insisted that Tswana wear cloth – and many Tswana
acquired store-bought blankets, and then replicated earlier gendered practices
in fastening them. ‘As with karosses, men’s were secured at the shoulder,
women’s across the breast’ (RRII: 268). The missionaries tried to create a
world of commodities and money, but Tswana maintained a trafŽc in cattle
– wet-nosed wealth – in which the object was not to accumulate wealth but
to knit human beings together (p. 174). The larger story is fascinating, and
illustrated with a thousand vivid details.
The Comaroffs have been an important inuence on a group of prominent
T HE CO M ARO FFS AND HIST ORICAL E TH NO G RAPH Y 27
S t e v e n F e i e rm a n

historians who have worked to create a new approach to the cultural history
of Africa. These historians were reacting against an earlier generation of his-
torical scholarship, which attempted the reconstruction of what was local,
and therefore authentic, in African life, without an adequate awareness of the
profound effects of colonial domination on the institutions being studied, and
also on the historians themselves. Historians had, for many years, considered
formal processes of the dissemination of colonial culture – missionary teach-
ings in church or in school, the political ideas which came with colonial
governments, or the rules governing work in colonial enterprises. But they
had also pictured a domain of African life which was quite isolated from
these inuences, where ‘traditional’ beliefs and practices survived. The new
historians of hybridity have a much richer understanding of the way local and
global inuences interpenetrate – whether through advertisements in every
village for Lifebuoy soap, or through surgeons’ actions in the operating
theater as the performance of a public spectacle, or through injections as new
ways of deŽning the signiŽcance of the body’s surfaces (see Burke 1996; Hunt
1999; White 1995). The results of this shift in the angle of vision can be strik-
ing in unexpected and unsettling ways. The addition of a single detail about
cultural circulation is capable of undermining the whole of an ethnographic
worldview. In one recent book on Rwanda, for example, the ethnographer
focused on processes of ow – the ow of blood, semen, saliva, milk, honey,
or beer. We learn that the king maintained the health of his domain by drink-
ing a milky laxative every day. In a review of this ethnography, a historian of
hybridity added a single detail to the story – the fact that the Belgians in
Rwanda promoted the use of enemas – and it was clear that the ethnography
of ow would never be the same again (see Hunt 1995; Taylor 1992).
Yet, underlying this important set of contributions is a difŽcult question
about the framing of cultural interactions as part of a general understanding
of Africa’s histories. The most common form of explanation in historical
writing is not causal – it consists in placing the particular in a general context.
Generality is usually found in yet another narrative (sometimes explicit,
sometimes left implicit) at a larger level of spatial scale, or over a longer time
horizon. Historians might describe events which take place in a single small
village, or a single region of Ghana or of Tanzania, but then generality is
found within a larger narrative – perhaps the story of the rise of capitalism,
or of the emergence of scientiŽc medicine. If we take the whole set of histories
of hybridity and consider them as a collective production – the creation of
what Ludwik Fleck called a thought collective – they usually share a common
structure, with regard to the layering of historical narratives (see Fleck 1979).
The story, as it occurs within Africa, does not usually begin before the Žrst
moment of colonial contact. What is African is local in its spatial distribution
– the culture of a particular place. The implicit narratives on which expla-
nation is built – the narratives which continue over a longer term and over a
interv entions – 3:1 28

broad swath of the globe – originate in Europe. The explanations are often
implicit. It is assumed that author and reader participate in a common culture
where the history of capitalism is known and the history of Protestantism is
known and the relationship between those two can be taken (at least in a
general sense) as given.
There is no necessary reason for this imbalance. Scholars have the tools
with which to build macronarratives that originate in Africa. For example,
1 For an example of historians and anthropologists at a number of places around the continent
an African have explored the history and the signiŽcance of wealth in people. There are
macronarrative, see
Schoenbrun 1998; local and regional variants in the organization of bridewealth, of the way
for an kinlessness is treated, of the use of wealth in deŽning bonds between leaders
archaeologically and followers, and of a whole range of related social and cultural phenomena.
based history over
the long term, see
The beginnings of a regional history are known, for the Bantu-speaking parts
Hall 1987. For of the continent, and then also for other regions. It is possible, also, at this
another approach, moment, to speak of the long-term history of healing associations, of ideas
through comparative
about wilderness and homestead, or of the conceptions which deŽne chiey
ethnography, see
Janzen 1992. sovereignty. I am arguing here that macronarratives are possible for the world
outside Europe, with great extension in time and space.1 If it is possible to
write a macronarrative of humoral medicine and of scientiŽc medicine on an
intercontinental scale, then it is also possible to write an intercontinental
narrative of healing as practiced in Bantu-speaking societies, with extensions
to the Caribbean, along with narratives of Ayurvedic medicine, with exten-
sions to South Africa and to the east coast of Africa.
The argument that I am making here has two parts. First, it is entirely legiti-
mate, and even richly rewarding, when any one historical work describes a
process of cultural interpenetration in which the macronarrative is centered
in Europe. The Comaroffs demonstrated to all historians of Africa that we
had not adequately problematized the European side of the colonial divide,
and that we needed to do so. However, there is a second point: that the col-
lective body of studies of hybridity needs to be balanced, so that we can
picture cultural interactions in terms of a dialogue among macronarratives.
This has not happened.
An alternative strategy at a local level, in the absence of macronarratives,
is the construction of histories of hybridity which begin in a period before
Europeans ever appeared, and describe the forces in motion at that time. One
way of crossing the boundary between the precolonial and the colonial, while
retaining the important focus on hegemony and on hybridity, is to study a
very different set of agents of colonial rule – Africans, people drawn from
2 For an impressive among the colonized – who served the colonizers, but who worked within an
history of Tswana idiom seen to be indigenous and precolonial, which is labeled ‘traditional’ –
Christianity which
Setswana and not Sekgoa. This is the case with the agents of colonization
gives great weight to
words, see Landau under indirect rule. In this case the discourse and the practice of the colonized
1995. are appropriated to serve colonial purposes, and the creation of hybridity is
T HE CO M ARO FFS AND HIST ORICAL E TH NO G RAPH Y 29
S t e v e n F e i e rm a n

set in motion, but in the opposite direction to the one described when mission
culture is appropriated.
The element in RRII which has proven to be the most unsettling to his-
torians who are not steeped in anthropology is the elegance with which the
Comaroffs sustain their focus on the everyday, on practice, yet it is this ele-
gance, this intensity of focus, which gives the volume its power. Historians’
practice would, almost universally, be radically different. The difference has
to do with the role played in works of historical reconstruction by words
spoken, or written, or sung, by the people about whom the story is told – by
the Tswana – whether at the time or in the twentieth century.2
Anthropological practice, as seen in this volume, grows out of an imagined
ethnographer’s situation in the Želd. The ethnographer is participating in
daily life while it is happening, and must somehow describe the everyday and
make sense of it. The assumed body of data, in ethnographic practice, is so
large as to defy description. It is inŽnitely expandable. If we picture, for
example, an ethnographer who is given the job of describing a meeting in an
academic department, the problem is immediately clear. Every gesture, every
raised eyebrow, every change of voice inection, every body movement, every
pause could potentially be recorded. When the Želd of data is so large, the
ethnographer cannot simply take on the job of describing what happened at
the meeting. A simple description of this kind can only be based on impres-
sions, which often tell more about the person observing than about the event
observed.
The way to deal with the ethnographer’s dilemma, of course, is through a
theoretically grounded principle of exclusion. In this context, an elegant study
of everyday practice would be enormously powerful. One could imagine a
study of dress, of gestures of deference, or of time management – how pauses
are arranged, who speaks, for how long, and in what order. These, and
numerous other possible studies of practice, would help in making sense of
a Želd of data which is too rich. The job facing a historian writing about
nineteenth-century Tswana, or about the Andes in the sixteenth century, or
about early twentieth-century American mineworkers, is a radically different
one because there is a prior principle of selection which drastically prunes the
Želd of data. The historical ethnographer has only the debris of the past with
which to work – the writings of the missionaries, but also songs and stories
told by Tswana about that time.
The question, then, is whether historical ethnographers can afford ele-
gance. It is high praise to say that the Comaroffs have chosen elegance, and
they have written a completely absorbing and engaging book while doing
so. But elegance inevitably has a cost – a cost in the texture with which we
understand the contradictions in the situation of Tswana, in various social
locations, living through the cultural transformations described in this
volume.
interv entions – 3:1 30

I have been arguing that underlying all the brilliance of particular obser-
vations about windows, and doors, and tilled Želds, is a representational
strategy which is deeply embedded in this volume. The book demonstrates
beyond any doubt that the strategy leads to richly fruitful results; but we, as
a scholarly community, need to think about the general implications of a
strategy which leads to histories of African practices (but not words), and
histories of African localities (but not macroregions).

R e f e re n c e s

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CommodiŽcation, Consumption, and Cleanliness
in Modern Zimbabwe, Durham and London: Duke
University Press.
Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L. (1993)
Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power
in Postcolonial Africa, Chicago, IL: The University
of Chicago Press.
Comaroff, John L. and Comaroff, Jean (1992)
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination,
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
—— (1997) Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume
II, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African
Frontier, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Fleck, Ludwik (1979) Genesis and Development of a
ScientiŽc Fact, ed. T. J. Trenn and Robert K.
Merton, trans. F. Bradley and T. J. Trenn, Chicago,
IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Hall, Martin (1987) The Changing Past: Farmers,
Kings, and Traders in Southern Africa, 200–1860,
Cape Town, SA: D. Philip.
Hunt, Nancy Rose (1995) ‘Review of Christopher C.
Taylor (1992) Milk Honey and Money: Changing
Concepts in Rwandan Healing’, International
Journal of African Historical Studies 28(2): 458.
—— (1999) A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual,
Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Janzen, John M. (1992) Ngoma: Discourses of
Healing in Central and Southern Africa, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Landau, Paul (1995) The Realm of the Word:
Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern
African Kingdom, Portsmouth, NH, and London:
Heinemann and James Currey.
Schoenbrun, David (1998) A Green Place, A Good
Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social
Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th
Century, Portsmouth, NH, and London:
Heinemann and James Currey.
Taylor, Charles (1989) Sources of the Self: The
Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA:
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Taylor, Christopher C. (1992) Milk Honey and
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White, Luise (1995) ‘ “They could make their victims
dull”: genders and genres, fantasies and cures in
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