Beschreibung
Jean and John Comaroff investigate why it is that crime
statistics have become a pervasive public passion in the
South African postcolony. They explore what exactly
those crime statistics make real, how they take on
public life, by what means they convert the abstract
into the intimate and tertiary knowledge into primary
experience. Why is it that they have become deeply
inscribed in narratives of personal being, so vital to the
construction of moral publics, so integral to debates
about the meaning of democracy, freedom and security? Conventionally framed as value-free information, these numbers appear to be taking on ever more
political weight as the modernist state deregulates the
functions of governance, as sovereignty is parsed and
privatized, as control over the means of violence is
rendered ambiguous, as a culture of «popular punitiveness» gains credence, as race is criminalized and crime
racialized. As they do, modes of producing and deploying crime statistics themselves proliferate. This sets in
train processes whose effects are deeply implicated in
remaking the nation-state, its governance, and citizenship within it.
Jean Comaroff is the Bernard E. & Ellen
C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of
Anthropology and of Social Sciences, John Comaroff is
the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of
Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of
Chicago.
