Skip to content

Jean Comaroff Quotes

born 1946 South Africa

Jean Comaroff (born 22 July 1946) is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. She is an expert on the effects of colonialism on people in Southern Africa.

South Africa
Academics
Anthropologists

Random Jean Comaroff quote

5 quotes

But not only white people should write about whites, or only men about men, or Navajos about the Navajo, or any human subjects only about themselves and their experiences of the world.

Many see this as “progressive,” but it’s retrogressive as imaginable. A discipline that for a century of its history was anti-essentialist is now sanctioning essentialisms of every kind.

But beneath the phenomenon lie economic and political forces that have to do with the transformative history of the present

I wrote an essay some years back in which I made the argument that anthropology is not defined by its content but by its methodological curiosity, by defamiliarization of the world.

We have always written against the grain, which is the point of critique … of any weight

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Jean Comaroff (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.