Law and Disorder in the Postcolony

Law and Disorder in the Postcolony Edited by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff Law and Disorder in the Postcolony The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Jean Comaroff is the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. John L. Comaroff is the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2006 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2006 Printed in the United States of America 15141312111009080706 54321 ISBN-13 (cloth): 978-0-226-11408-8 ISBN-10 (cloth): 0-226-11408-2 ISBN-13 (paper): 978-0-226-11409-5 ISBN-10 (paper): 0-226-11409-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Law and disorder in the postcolony / edited by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-11408-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-226-11409-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Developing countries—Social conditions. 2. Crime—Developing countries. 3. Violence—Developing countries. 4. Democratization—Developing countries. 5. Postcolonialism. I. Comaroff, Jean. II. Comaroff, John L., 1945– HN980.L36 2006 364.9712Ј4—dc22 2006006541 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Contents Preface vii 1. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction 1 John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff 2. The Mute and the Unspeakable: Political Subjectivity, Violent Crime, and “the Sexual Thing” in a South African Mining Community 57 Rosalind C. Morris 3. “I Came to Sabotage Your Reasoning!”: Violence and Resignifications of Justice in Brazil 102 Teresa P. R. Caldeira 4. Death Squads and Democracy in Northeast Brazil 150 Nancy Scheper-Hughes 5. Some Notes on Disorder in the Indonesian Postcolony 188 Patricia Spyer 6. Witchcraft and the Limits of the Law: Cameroon and South Africa 219 Peter Geschiere 7. The Ethics of Illegality in the Chad Basin 247 Janet Roitman 8. Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder 273 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff 9. On Politics as a Form of Expenditure 299 Achille Mbembe Contributors 337 Index 341 v Preface What [can] one believe when reality mock[s] the imagination? lawrence durrell, Justine A problem, a presumption, and a paradox. In that order. First, the problem. Are postcolonies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America haunted more by unregulated violence, un/civil warfare, and ran- dom terror than are other twenty-first-century nation-states? Are they sinking ever more deeply into maelstroms of disorder? Or does the imag- ining that they might be doing so mock reality? Is there, in short, anything distinctive about their contemporary predicament, about the kinds of criminality, coercion, corruption, conflict, even chaos often attributed to them? Does the implicit hyphenation on which they are erected—the dis/articulation, that is, between the post and coloniality—refer to a pass- ing condition, an epochal transition, a Rabelaisian liminality? Or does it signal something more permanent: a longue durée unfolding, in which the modernist states put in place with “decolonization”—themselves a Weberian ideal type always more idealized than typical, always more the object of aspiration than accomplished fact, even in Europe—can no longer hold in the face of gathering lawlessness, of the privatization of almost everything, of creeping anarchy? The reflex answer to this brace of ques- tions, supplied alike by critical scholars, conservative public intellectuals, and the popular media of the world—which is where the presumption comes in—is yes. Yes, postcolonies are especially, excessively, distinctively violent and disorderly. Yes, they are sinking ever further into a mire of conflict, coercion, and chaos. Yes, this does seem to be a chronic, not a tem- porary, state of being. The evidence is taken to be, well, self-evident; so much so that little heed has been paid to the possibility that something deeper may be at issue here, something inherent in the unfolding conjunc- ture everywhere of violence, sovereignty, il/legality, modernity. Of which more in chapter 1. At the same time, and here is where the paradox appears to lie, many of these very same postcolonies seem to make a fetish of the rule of law, of its language and its practices, its ways and means. Even where they are mocked and mimicked, suspended or sequestered, those ways and means are often central to the politics of everyday engagement, to discourses of vii viii Preface authority and citizenship, to the interaction of states and subjects, to the enactments, displacements, and usurpations of power. New constitutions are repeatedly written, appeals to rights repeatedly made, procedural democracies repeatedly reinvented, claims of material and moral inequity repeatedly litigated. And governments, ethnic groups, and coalitions of interest and identity go repeatedly to the judiciary, sometimes against “the market” and sometimes against each other, to settle differences. As we shall see, even the great narratives and epics of the past—colonialism itself, for one—are reargued before bewigged judges in the often tortured argot of torts. All this in spite of the fact that more and more rulers show themselves ready to suspend the rule of law in the name of emergency or exception, to undermine its autonomy, to ignore its sovereignty, to fran- chise it out, to bend it to their will. Do these two putative tendencies—the excessive disorderliness of postcolonies on the one hand and their fetishism of the law on the other— describe a concrete reality? Or are they merely figments of fevered, stereo- typic imaginations? To the degree that they have empirical valence, are they something new or merely a continuation of things past? And are they, in fact, two sides of a paradox? Or just different aspects of one phenome- non? What, in this respect, may we draw from Walter Benjamin’s thesis— recently reworked, in various ways, by the likes of Derrida and Agam- ben—that violence and the law, the lethal and the legal, are constitutive of one another?1 It is this conundrum that brought a diverse coterie of scholars to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, in May 2003. Their specialist knowledge covered Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia. But, more important perhaps, their common and convergent interests lay in, among other concerns, theoriz- ing “the” postcolony, that disparate class of polities so often reduced to a definite article by discursive fiat. How are we to make sense of, to distin- guish, the forms of violence and dis/order commonly said to saturate those polities, plural? Why does the law appear to be so widely fetishized in them? And what might either or both of these things, and the relationship between them, have to do with broader, world-historical processes, not least the epochal rise of neoliberalism? Phrased thus, in the interrogative, law and disorder in the postcolony seemed, to this transdisciplinary assortment of academics, eminently worthy of critical attention—and critical to the yet more fundamental task of arriving at an understanding of what “the postcolony” actually is. With hindsight, it seems even more crucial. Preface ix The conference was facilitated by Katherine Newman, then dean of the Social Sciences at Radcliffe, who invited us to determine its content and to assemble its participants; it was funded by the good graces of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The event itself consisted of a number of the- matic sessions, at which papers were presented and subjected to the de- tailed attention of discussants. Those discussants were also the primary voices in a culminating roundtable conversation. Since their insights are echoed in our introduction (chapter 1 below) and in the chapters that fol- low, we should like to mention them by name: Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, J. Lorand Matory, Sally Merry, Ann Stoler, and Lisa Wedeen. Adam Ashforth, Fernando Coronil, Sally Falk Moore, Susan Slymovics, Mary Steedley, and Lucie White presented papers and also took an active part in the proceedings. For one or another reason, unfortunately, their es- says could not be included here. To all of these people we express our warm appreciation. We also owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Maureen Anderson, our long-term, ever-resourceful research assistant. Apart from everything else she did to abet the realization of this project, she translated Achille Mbembe’s chapter from its original French. We began with a problem, a presumption, and a paradox. Let us close with an assertion. Or, more properly, a provocation. Postcolonies have become especially critical sites for the production of social theory; social theory sui generis, that is, not merely anthropological theory addressed to the lives and times of those worlds formerly known as “third” or “second.” This is why, for the contributors to the present vol- ume, they are such eminently worthy objects of inquiry. This is not just for the obvious liberal humanist reason: that billions of human beings live their lives, and suffer their deaths, deep in the interiors of these polities, at a refractory angle to our television screens and the screaming front pages of the global press. Nor is it merely because their predicaments and ours are much more densely interwoven, much less extricable, than we typically imagine; indeed, the comfortable cleavage between “ours” and “theirs” has a habit of vanishing under scrutiny, notwithstanding the cordons san- itaire that histories of violence have forced between different parts of the planet.

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