On Of Revelation and Revolution

This special issue of Interventions brings together a range of scholars from across the disciplines to critically engage the recent work of anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff on the colonial encounter in nineteenth-century South Africa. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research, the Comaroffs’ Of Revelation and Revolution trains an especially sharp light on those cultural processes at play in missionary attempts to recruit Tswana to the mission – and to a European way of life and work. Convening scholars to comment on this project thus provides an opportunity to consider not only the sort of historical anthropology the Comaroffs bring to this conjunctural moment but also broad-ranging theoretical questions about the nature of colonization that lie at the heart of contemporary postcolonial studies. The recent turn to history in anthropology emerged out of the series of critiques – especially those of Edward Said and Eric Wolfe – that preoccupied the discipline during the 1980s. Though Said’s Orientalism (1978) was not explicitly a critique of anthropology per se, its thesis that western scholarship about the Orient was complicit with imperialism struck a resonant chord in a discipline that had long been preoccupied with the representation of places Other. Like those Orientalist projects criticized by Said, functionalist and editorial