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Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People
In this sophisticated study of power and resistance, Jean Comaroff analyzes the changing predicament of the Barolong boo Ratshidi, a people on the margins of the South African state. Like others on the fringes of the modern world system, the Tshidi struggle to construct a viable order of signs and practices through which they act upon the forces that engulf them. Their dissenting Churches of Zion have provided an effective medium for reconstructing a sense of history and identity, one that protests the terms of colonial and post-colonial society and culture.
303 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 1985
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 16, 2021
1985, "- Tshidi transformations must be understood as the outcome of a reciprocally determining interaction of local and global forces whose logic must first be comprehended in its own terms. "
February 13, 2024
just very dense
November 24, 2009
(excerpt from a paper critique:)
Comaroff’s Body of Power stands for me as a highly commendable work on the study of a particular people’s way of life. In a way I feel as if this could fit quite snugly amidst the pantheon of classical works. I need not belabor on what has been discussed on the class regarding its glaring failure, though, of it being entirely too focused or dependent on archival material. In my re-reading of it, Comaroff could do no other but plunk the reader back in the middle of the historical vicissitudes that led to the context and nuances of what she aims to investigate: the way an oppressed people sought to locate themselves in the course of resisting, even while submitting to, the hegemony of a global industrial capitalism.
The title of the work itself provokes a symbolic discourse by projecting a vivid imagery of the body as an objectified fount of force used to silently contest ideals of a larger power.
In shedding light on the communicative capacity of social action, Comaroff grounded such meaningful elements of the Tswana culture into symbolic interpretations. Other rich descriptions of symbolic entities located either within the indigenous culture or the reactionary rituals of the Zionist movement underlie the dialectical role history has with culture. I particularly appreciate what Comaroff stressed as the rhetorical and practical power of rites to transform the meanings in the world of a culture, instead of merely just a reflection of those meanings (125).
Comaroff was also able to elucidate on what she calls the syncretistic bricolage of the symbolic orders. To refer to it simply as syncretism is wholly insufficient as it denotes a fluid reconciliation of differing ways of being or doing. The modification of meanings to suit the present (as was shown by the Tswana) has clear bearings on the agency of the marginalized.
By attending as well to the role of the bourgeoisie in the colonial and neocolonial period, the author emphasized that the complex intersection of domination and dependence is not only found on one side of the equation. As the Tshidi and other South African peoples became entangled in the capitalist regime, the ‘higher’ orders, particularly among the orthodoxy, also have had to account for the contradictions inherent in their dogma, with the subsequent rise of Independent Churches a glaring symptom of this ambivalence. Others would probably call it their ‘hypocrisy.’
Body of Power, for all its diachronic gaze, also has some stumbles along the way. Comaroff starts off by laying down a picture of pre-colonial southern Africa as seen through the state of the Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms, sprinkled with foreshadows of the far-flung implications of the not-as-yet-present missionary endeavor. The next episode, however, is bracketed as two chapters familiarize the reader on the pre-colonial Tshidi culture. Events then start to sputter on forward as Comaroff pans out and fast-forwards to the missionary arrival and eventual clash of ideologies with the indigenous ethos. The following segment is spearheaded by an advisory from the author of again suspending the flow of the narrative by presenting a picture of the modern Tshidi world as she encountered it. Succeeding segments concentrate on the rise of Zionism in South Africa (particularly within the apartheid) and later a comparison of this movement in other parts of the world.
The work, then, reveals its open-endedness as Comaroff trails off and leaves the reader with unsettling questions about the unavoidable (and probably inescapable) contradictions that the Zionist movement carries with it—on the one hand, it is possibly instrumental in paving the way for reshaping the consciousness of its followers amidst the harrowing circumstances of segregation and oppression; and on the other, it is caught in a stark tendency of being dependent to the neocolonial order, to say nothing of the inevitability of it perpetuating the very ideologies it claims to resist.
As was discussed in class, Body of Power may just have given off a more personal or reflexive bend to it had Comaroff lent snatches of opportunity for her voice as an ethnographer to be heard; that is, an ethnographer ‘seeing’ and ‘experiencing’ at least the contemporaneity of the South Africa she has encountered. Though her rich text on describing pre- and neocolonial Tswana rituals deserves praise, the overall approach still comes off as clinical.
But then again, reflexivity in the 1970s might as well have been from another planet as an ethnographic tool.
Comaroff’s Body of Power stands for me as a highly commendable work on the study of a particular people’s way of life. In a way I feel as if this could fit quite snugly amidst the pantheon of classical works. I need not belabor on what has been discussed on the class regarding its glaring failure, though, of it being entirely too focused or dependent on archival material. In my re-reading of it, Comaroff could do no other but plunk the reader back in the middle of the historical vicissitudes that led to the context and nuances of what she aims to investigate: the way an oppressed people sought to locate themselves in the course of resisting, even while submitting to, the hegemony of a global industrial capitalism.
The title of the work itself provokes a symbolic discourse by projecting a vivid imagery of the body as an objectified fount of force used to silently contest ideals of a larger power.
In shedding light on the communicative capacity of social action, Comaroff grounded such meaningful elements of the Tswana culture into symbolic interpretations. Other rich descriptions of symbolic entities located either within the indigenous culture or the reactionary rituals of the Zionist movement underlie the dialectical role history has with culture. I particularly appreciate what Comaroff stressed as the rhetorical and practical power of rites to transform the meanings in the world of a culture, instead of merely just a reflection of those meanings (125).
Comaroff was also able to elucidate on what she calls the syncretistic bricolage of the symbolic orders. To refer to it simply as syncretism is wholly insufficient as it denotes a fluid reconciliation of differing ways of being or doing. The modification of meanings to suit the present (as was shown by the Tswana) has clear bearings on the agency of the marginalized.
By attending as well to the role of the bourgeoisie in the colonial and neocolonial period, the author emphasized that the complex intersection of domination and dependence is not only found on one side of the equation. As the Tshidi and other South African peoples became entangled in the capitalist regime, the ‘higher’ orders, particularly among the orthodoxy, also have had to account for the contradictions inherent in their dogma, with the subsequent rise of Independent Churches a glaring symptom of this ambivalence. Others would probably call it their ‘hypocrisy.’
Body of Power, for all its diachronic gaze, also has some stumbles along the way. Comaroff starts off by laying down a picture of pre-colonial southern Africa as seen through the state of the Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms, sprinkled with foreshadows of the far-flung implications of the not-as-yet-present missionary endeavor. The next episode, however, is bracketed as two chapters familiarize the reader on the pre-colonial Tshidi culture. Events then start to sputter on forward as Comaroff pans out and fast-forwards to the missionary arrival and eventual clash of ideologies with the indigenous ethos. The following segment is spearheaded by an advisory from the author of again suspending the flow of the narrative by presenting a picture of the modern Tshidi world as she encountered it. Succeeding segments concentrate on the rise of Zionism in South Africa (particularly within the apartheid) and later a comparison of this movement in other parts of the world.
The work, then, reveals its open-endedness as Comaroff trails off and leaves the reader with unsettling questions about the unavoidable (and probably inescapable) contradictions that the Zionist movement carries with it—on the one hand, it is possibly instrumental in paving the way for reshaping the consciousness of its followers amidst the harrowing circumstances of segregation and oppression; and on the other, it is caught in a stark tendency of being dependent to the neocolonial order, to say nothing of the inevitability of it perpetuating the very ideologies it claims to resist.
As was discussed in class, Body of Power may just have given off a more personal or reflexive bend to it had Comaroff lent snatches of opportunity for her voice as an ethnographer to be heard; that is, an ethnographer ‘seeing’ and ‘experiencing’ at least the contemporaneity of the South Africa she has encountered. Though her rich text on describing pre- and neocolonial Tswana rituals deserves praise, the overall approach still comes off as clinical.
But then again, reflexivity in the 1970s might as well have been from another planet as an ethnographic tool.
January 2, 2025
One of the richest and most brilliant monographs ever written, ethnographically and theoretically.
March 16, 2013
This was a ground-breaking book when it first came out. It helped catapult Jean Comaroff into the realms of anthropological stardom. Her analysis of the structural violence of life in South Africa, as experienced at the level of the social body and the individual body was (is) lucid and compelling. Her descriptions of everyday forms of resistance - domestic's and their nail polish, the neo-church of Zion, for example - helped an entire generation of anthropologists understand that the body was (is) an important theoretical object of study, and that one could move beyond the very important work of Mary Douglass. Comaroff's work, paralleled with Alan Young's earlier work on Zar possession cults, offers important insights into the ways in which history, gender, the state, racism, religion and resilience collide with heart-wrenching and yet inspiring impacts.
March 14, 2007
Detailed and well-written, wish I could follow better (I'm no anthrodude, no africanist).
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews