Jean Comaroff

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

"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 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."

"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."

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