Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People

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University of Chicago Press, Jun 15, 1985 - History - 296 pages
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.
 

Contents

1 Introduction
1
Part 1
15
A Chronicle of the Problem
17
The Precolonial Sociocultural Order
42
Precolonial Cosmology and Ritual
78
Part 2
121
5 Culture Consciousness and Structural Transformation
123
Part 3
157
6 Alienation and the Kingdom of Zion
159
Mediation in the Neocolonial Context
194
8 Conclusion
252
Notes
265
Bibliography
277
Index
289
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About the author (1985)

Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology and an Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. For more information, visit https: //www.jeancomaroff.com/.

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