Interventions

International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

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SPECIFYING AGENCY The Comaroffs and Their

Critics

Sherry B. Ortner

To cite this article: Sherry B. Ortner (2001) SPECIFYING AGENCY The Comaroffs and Their
Critics, Interventions, 3:1, 76-84, DOI: 10.1080/13698010020027038

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 SPECIFYING AGENCY
The C omaroffs and Their C ritic s

Sherry B. Ortner
Columbia University

This article addresses the debate over whether or not the Of Revelation and
Revolution (RR) project has, compared to earlier Comaroff ethnography,
agenc y
adequately addressed issues of Tswana ‘agency.’ I argue that the idea of
ethnography agency encompasses several dimensions, that the RR project largely
addresses one of them – cultural reworking of missionary ideas and projects
projects – at the expense of others, especially Tswana projects and agendas that are
not primarily reactive to missionary endeavors.

I am honored to contribute to this discussion of John and Jean Comaroff’s

Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume II (1997) (RRII). I am a great fan of
the Comaroffs’ work, both individually and jointly authored. It forms an
extraordinary corpus of theoretical and ethnographic writing that, no matter
what one’s theoretical proclivities or areal specialities, quite simply must be
reckoned with. Personally, I agree with many of their positions, but it is not
necessary to agree with them in order to appreciate the meticulousness of the
research, the elegance of the writing, the depth and complexity of thought,
and the sheer quantity of production.
It is extremely useful for the task at hand that the Comaroffs have sum-
marized in the Introduction to RRII a range of criticisms that were leveled

interventions Vol. 3(1) 76–84(ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)

Copyright © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 1080/13698010020027038
S PECIFYING AGENCY 77
S h e rr y B . O r t n e r

against RRI (1991), and have presented their responses to those criticisms.
In this article I am going to risk inserting myself into one fairly prominent
area of debate that they discuss: the debate over the presence, absence, and
forms of Tswana ‘agency’ represented, or not, in the RR project.
In the context of responding to critics, the Comaroffs at one point charac-
terize ‘agency’ with some irritation as ‘that abstraction greatly underspeciŽed,
often misused, much fetishized these days by social scientists’ (RRII: 37). This
characterization is apt in most respects, but I would argue none the less that
agency is an indispensable theoretical category, so what I wish to do here is
precisely to provide it with further speciŽcation, and hopefully to de-fetishize
it as well.
I begin by turning to the title essay in Ethnography and the Historical
Imagination (1992), where we can see in greater detail how the Comaroffs
themselves are thinking about agency. In this context, where they are trying
to develop a general theoretical framework for an anthropological history, we
can see that they are thinking of it in two interrelated ways: in terms of con-
scious intentionality, and in terms of the actions of ‘heroic’ individuals or
‘great men’ in marked historical moments or ‘events.’ However, neither of
these agentic modes or forms Žts with the kind of history the Comaroffs are
trying to write. As against an emphasis on the power of conscious intention-
ality to make history, they wish to emphasize how history works in unex-
pected ways: ‘The scattered signs retrieved in {the research} all pointed to
wider social transformations borne unwittingly by the missionaries. In many
respects these actually ran counter to their own desires and motives’ (1992:
36; italics in original). As against an emphasis on heroic men and trans-
formative events, they wish to emphasize the importance of ordinary people
and everyday practices. Thus a focus on ‘individuals’ is equated with ‘great
man’ type historiography and with an unthinking privileging of the ‘bour-
geois subject’ (p. 10). As for events, ‘our methodological concern is less with
events than with meaningful practices’ (p. 37)
Let me suggest, however, that none of these is mutually exclusive. On the
contrary, the idea of agency, and the wider theoretical matrix of so-called
practice theories in which it must always be embedded, is precisely concerned
with the mediation between conscious intention and embodied habituses,
between conscious motives and unexpected outcomes, between historically
marked individuals and events on the one hand, and the cumulative repro-
ductions and transformations that are the results of everyday practices on the
other (Bourdieu 1977; Ortner 1989, 1996; Sahlins 1981; Sewell 1997).
I suggest, then, that when the Comaroffs reject ‘agency,’ they are thinking
only of certain dimensions of the theoretical package; and when their critics
attack them for neglecting ‘agency,’ they too are thinking only of certain
dimensions of the theory. What I want to propose in this brief article is that
the kind of argument that is central to the entire RR project is precisely an
interv entions – 3:1 78

argument grounded in one form of ‘agency.’ At the same time, another form
of agency – visible in some of the Comaroffs’ earlier work – is minimized,
opening up the project to this set of criticisms.
I would like to distinguish broadly between two modalities of agency, one
of which is closely related to ideas of power, including both domination and
resistance, and another that is closely related to ideas of intention, to people’s
projects in the world and their ability to both formulate and enact them.
These modes do not necessarily exhaust the entire category of agency, nor are
they mutually exclusive. My point is not to develop some sort of rigorous
typology of forms of agency, but to break down some of the either/or con-
structions noted above, and to expand, rather than contract, our sense of the
relationship between human intentionality (which is not, contrary to some of
the assumptions in play, solely a property of the bourgeois subject) and the
historical process.
Let us start with agency as power. In probably the most common usage,
‘agency’ is virtually synonymous with the forms of power people have at their
disposal, their ability to act on their own behalf, inuence other people and
events, and maintain some kind of control in their own lives. Agency in this
sense is relevant for both domination and resistance. People in positions of
power ‘have’ – and are authorized to have – what might be thought of as ‘a
lot of agency,’ but the dominated too always have certain capacities, and
sometimes very signiŽcant capacities, to exercise some sort of inuence over
the ways in which events unfold. Resistance then is a form of ‘power agency,’
and by now we have a well-developed theoretical repertoire for examining it.
It includes everything from outright rebellions at one end, to various forms
of what James Scott (1985) so aptly called ‘foot dragging’ in the middle, to
– at the other end – a kind of complex and ambivalent acceptance of domi-
nant categories and practices that are always changed at the very moment
they are adopted.
Although the Comaroffs have largely set aside – perhaps too readily – a
language of domination and resistance, readers will immediately recognize
this last form of agency, which I would locate as one modality of ‘resistance,’
as the one that the Comaroffs so brilliantly tease out over the longue durée.
Throughout their work (1985, 1991, 1992, 1997) they have consistently
sought to deepen our understanding of the complex dialogics of the colonial
encounter, which ‘transformed everyone and everything caught up in it’
(Comaroff 1997: 29), and speciŽcally in which Tswana reworked western cul-
tural forms even as they seemed to yield to them. There is a powerful narra-
tive of non-passivity, of people sometimes resisting in the more overt sense,
but at the very least always reframing, rethinking, and reshaping virtually
everything that came their way.
Given this point, it is wrong to characterize the Comaroffs, as their critics
seem to have done (RRII: 47), as ‘denying’ or failing to represent Tswana
S PECIFYING AGENCY 79
S h e rr y B . O r t n e r

‘agency.’ The ‘long conversation’ between Methodist missionaries and

Tswana people, in which each imposed their forms on the other, involved
‘agency’ on both sides, though of course it was asymmetrical; but it was one
speciŽc kind of agency, the kind that can take shape within the space of
encounters of power.
The agency of (unequal) power, of both domination and resistance, may be
contrasted however with a second major form of agency, what I will call an
agency of intentions – of projects, purposes, desires. I want to spend some
time on this as I think it is this that becomes muted (though not entirely
absent) in the RR opus. In the Comaroffs’ earlier work on Tswana social and
cultural life (including the chapter ‘African worlds’ in RRI), Tswana actors
are portrayed as having plenty of agency of this sort, and I will pick out a
few examples. But in RRII only the missionaries seem, for the most part, to
have this kind of agency. The missionaries have projects – do they ever – but
Tswana emerge as largely reactive to these projects. They have distinctive cul-
tural categories, values, ways-of-being in the world. They put their own
stamp, their own twist, on missionary projects, and sometimes they evade
1 In John’s
comments on the them altogether, but they are not portrayed as having projects of their own.
meetings version of It is important to be clear about the level at which this point is pitched. On
this article, this
the one hand, I am not talking about some unitary Tswana culture, in which
seemed to be the
main criticism – that ‘the’ Tswana have some sort of homogeneous set of culturally constituted
I was treating desires.1 (On the contrary, I have been consistently concerned with structures
‘Tswana’ as some of difference and inequality, and with the different agendas they produce for
kind of unitary
culture, while the
differently positioned actors.)2 On the other hand, I am not simply talking
Comaroffs were not about individual actors who draw on a cultural repertoire or habitus in order
doing this. If I did to pursue personal strategies (that is not entirely irrelevant to the issues at
that, it was certainly
hand, but it is not my point here). Rather, I am talking about what I think
inadvertent; I hope
my position is the Comaroffs are talking about too, in their more ethnographic modes: a
clearer here. variety of culturally constituted desires, purposes, and projects that emerge
from and of course reproduce different socially constituted positions and
2 See my work on
‘serious games’ in subjectivities.
Ortner 1996. What would such projects look like? Let me give two examples. One comes
from the extensive discussions of precolonial Tswana politics, kinship, and
marriage (see esp. Comaroff and Comaroff 1981; Comaroff 1987; RRI: ch.
4). Here the discussion is organized precisely around male political inten-
tionalities, male political careers in which men seek to better their positions
in relation to royal families, local rivals, and the like. We learn how Tswana
men seek to ‘eat’ their rivals, and to establish themselves as patrons with
arrays of clients in their service. We see how kinship relations and marriage
transactions are managed in relation to the furtherance of these careers.
This is an example of the agency of (culturally constituted) intentions. It is
not about heroic actors or unique individuals, nor is it about bourgeois strate-
gizing, nor on the other hand is it entirely about routine everyday practices
interv entions – 3:1 80

that proceed with little reection. Rather, it is about (relatively ordinary) life
organized in terms of culturally constituted projects, projects that infuse life
with meaning and purpose. People seek to accomplish things within a frame-
work of their own terms, their own categories of value. This is not free agency.
The political rivalries are themselves generated by various orders of social and
political relations between chiefs and commoners, free men and serfs, fathers
and sons, men and women, agnates and afŽnes, and so on. The cultural
desires or intentions, in other words, emerge from structurally deŽned differ-
ences of social categories and differentials of power, but what is signiŽcant
about the structure of relations is the range of intentionalities it produces.
For a second, and slightly more complicated, example, let us look at the
women. We learn from earlier Comaroff writings that women had some sig-
niŽcant disadvantages within traditional Tswana society. In the traditional
division of labor, women did all the agricultural work. The work was fairly
laborious in itself, and its laboriousness was compounded by certain kinds of
chiey powers and demands in relation to agriculture. In addition, women
were culturally viewed and ritually remade as inferior and subordinate
(Comaroff 1984, 1985). It was a speciŽc feature of the initiation rites that
young girls were trained in ‘passive obedience’ and ‘docile endurance’
(Comaroff 1985: 115, 116). One could go so far as to say that the rites con-
3 See Ortner (1996) structed the girls precisely as subjects from whom any vestige of agency was
for a similar ideally drained out.3
example. Under these circumstances, much of the ‘agency’ of women that appears
even in the earlier works is reactive to power, an agency of ‘resistance.’ For
example, during the initiation rites, even as the women were constructed as
docile bodies ready for sex, marriage, and hard agricultural labor, they
expressed ‘resistance to established gender relations: provocative song and
dance, intrusive noise and explicit accusation’ (Comaroff 1985: 117). Further,
although in the traditional context such gestures appear to have had a rela-
tively minor impact, Jean Comaroff suggests that they represented ‘a sup-
pressed, but continuing undercurrent of female discontent in the precolonial
system’ that played a signiŽcant role in the ‘enthusiastic response of Tshidi
women to the Methodist mission’ (1985: 118). Here, then, the agency of
resistance moves towards the status of something more active, something
resembling a ‘project’ in which many Tswana women begin to formulate pur-
poses that go beyond the reactive opposition to power.
In addition, however, we can perhaps tease out an agency of intentions, a
sense of project, among women even in the precolonial context. This is more
difŽcult to see, in part because women were, as noted above, precisely not
supposed to have agency in this sense. Yet there are hints in the texts that one
could see women’s relationship to their agricultural work, for example, in this
light. Women not only did all the agricultural work; they also ‘held Želds in
their own right as daughters or wives’ (Comaroff 1985: 64). They seem to
S PECIFYING AGENCY 81
S h e rr y B . O r t n e r

have invested a lot of pride and planning in their agricultural activities (RRII:
128); and Žnally, when the missionaries actively sought to make agriculture
men’s rather than women’s work, the women strongly resisted this change
(RRII: 136–7). I call attention here less to the resistance itself, than to the
likelihood that the resistance signaled an important arena of women’s inten-
tionality, of projects of empowerment and identity, with which the mission-
aries were interfering. Perhaps resistance is always of this nature: protecting
projects, or indeed the right to have projects. I note again that the distinction
between an agency of power and an agency of intentions is purely heuristic.
In practise they are often inseparable.
Both of these examples – of men’s political projects, and women’s projects
of fertility (there was a close cultural link between agricultural and physical
fertility (Comaroff 1985: 65)) – are examples of what I call an agency of
intentions. The agency of intentions is not necessarily about domination and
resistance, although there is some of that going on. It is about people having
desires that grow out of their own structures of life, including very centrally
4 For similar their own structures of inequality, and it is about ethnographic writing that
arguments and brings these to the fore.4 These were visible in the Comaroffs’ earlier ethno-
examples of the graphic and ethnohistorical work, but they have largely dropped out of the
alternative, see e.g.
Kelley 1997; Ortner
RR project. Here, in contrast, the texts present us with a kind of systematic
1999; Sahlins 1994. asymmetry between the missionaries, who have schemes and projects – even
if they do not quite work out as planned – and Tswana who are able to
react, often quite creatively, but who do not appear to have lives, as it were,
outside of their relationships to the missionaries, lives with their own forms
of intentionality.
If this is correct, one is led to wonder about the conditions that may have
contributed to this apparent shift in the Comaroffs’ focus of inquiry and style
of presentation. One may be the imbalance in the sources. Since the sources
are primarily missionary writings, it would seem to be much easier to gain
access to the missionaries’ intentionalities, in terms of both collective and
individual projects, than to the thinking of Tswana actors. Yet, on second
thoughts, this argument does not carry much weight, since in the chapter on
‘African worlds’ in RRI, an ethnographic sketch of the life-world of pre-
colonial Tswana (1800–30) is quite vividly presented, including a sense of the
passions and values and purposes of life in that world. This suggests that it
is possible to retrieve these kinds of perspectives from the missionary sources,
and indeed that it would not be much more difŽcult – and maybe even easier
– than retrieving the kinds of data on everyday practices that the Comaroffs
have done so effectively (see esp. Guha 1988). Indeed I would argue that the
retrieval of both dimensions – everyday practices and tacit consciousness on
the one hand, purposeful projects and strategic consciousness on the other –
are necessary to constitute the full agenda of ‘ethnography and the historical
imagination.’
interv entions – 3:1 82

Another reason for the relative disappearance of these kinds of Tswana

agency in RRII, and the one that the Comaroffs themselves stress, is related
to the strong sense of human and cultural damage that they see in Tswana
history under colonialism. The ‘agency’ discourse – what they call at another
point the ‘political chic-speak of appropriation and agency’ (RRII: 49) – tends
to underplay the real and tremendous costs of several centuries of European
occupation. Thus, for example, the book opens with an image of some squat-
ters living in the Lotlamoreng Culture Park, in which they are described as
‘human otsam of poverty, migration, forced repatriation’ (p. 5). Moreover,
the Comaroffs remind us of the many postcolonial writers and thinkers who
themselves ‘spoke about the contradictory experience of being colonized . . .
in very different terms; often much darker, more concretely political, more
concerned with what it meant to be acted upon’ (p. 18) – precisely what it
meant to not be an agent. In short, the main reason suggested for not por-
traying Tswana as having projects of their own is that they no longer have
them, that this is in fact one of the effects of colonialism. I respect this point
(see esp. Ortner 1995) and I agree that too facile a recourse to ideas of resist-
ance, agency, and so forth may not acknowledge both the material and
emotional damage of the colonial experience.
Yet I wonder if there isn’t something else going on, in which a certain kind
of ethnographic writing is being avoided or ‘refused’ (Ortner 1995). The
classic social anthropological project, in which one sought to understand the
orders of relations in which people were (indigenously) enmeshed, has
become problematized as Orientalist. Ethnography of this sort has become
tainted with paternalism – one can hear the Comaroffs defending against this
taint when they say, ‘we have never pretended to speak for Southern Tswana
nor to represent them’ (RRII: 52). Yet, ironically, it is precisely out of a certain
kind of classic social anthropological perspective that, in their earlier writ-
ings, the Comaroffs were able to convey Tswana life as a life of purpose and
intention.
A major problem in earlier anthropologies was the effort to capture some
authentic culture by pretending that there was no colonialism, indeed almost
no history. The representation of the authentic ‘primitive’ society, untouched
and pristine, encased in its own culture, produced ethnographic texts that
today have an air of unreality. A case in point is one of the great ‘classic’
ethnographies, The Nuer (1956), in which Evans-Pritchard tells us in the
Preface about serious ongoing hostilities between Nuer tribesmen and the
British colonial authorities, but then goes on to discuss Nuer social and politi-
cal organization as if it were wholly self-contained, and unaffected by this
larger colonial situation. Indeed the only effect of the violent colonial pres-
ence that appears in the text is that of making potential Nuer informants
hostile towards Evans-Pritchard and uncooperative with his ethnographic
enterprise. The disconnection between the Preface and the rest of the book is
S PECIFYING AGENCY 83
S h e rr y B . O r t n e r

quite shocking to a late twentieth-century anthropologist. Yet at the same

time, at least parts of The Nuer provide us with a powerful portrait of Nuer
life – its constraints, its values, its projects of life. We do not have to believe
that the Nuer are untouched by the colonial occupation to appreciate them
as maintaining their own (multiple, of course) centers of cultural gravity.
Like The Nuer and other ‘classics’ that many of us look upon with ambiva-
lent eyes today, the best ethnographies took as their mission the attempt to
understand what used to be called ‘the native point of view.’ The Comaroffs
are leery of this idea; in several somewhat dense passages, they link it both to
persisting assumptions about bourgeois subjects in anthropology (RRII: 10)
and ‘great man’ theories of the historical process (p. 14). I have problems with
the concept myself, but more along the lines that there is no single ‘native point
of view’ (and let us immediately drop the term ‘native’ as well), and that any
social world is irreducibly a world of social differences and political and econ-
omic differentials. Yet heightened awareness of multiple and cross-cutting
forms of power and difference only makes the basic ethnographic enterprise
more complex and more urgent. It does not change the basic epistemological
project, which is to understand desires, agendas, and projects that take shape
(or that are disabled from doing so) within complex local worlds.
I agree with the Comaroffs that subjects (who make, enact, contest, or resist
‘projects’) are culturally and politically and historically constructed, and that
understanding the construction of subjects within the ‘long conversations’ of
history is central to the anthropological/historical endeavor. Yet subjects like
the Tswana men and women who are the actors of this story have continued
to occupy spaces, literally and metaphorically, at least partly outside of that
conversation, where they are constructed by other relations, within other con-
versations, in other ways. To represent those other spaces as having at least
to some extent their own distinctive qualities is not to fall into some essen-
tialized culturalism; it is just ethnography.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Tim Taylor and Akhil Gupta for very useful comments on, and
conversations around, this article. Thanks also to Karen Carroll for expert
editorial assistance.

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