Open Seminar: Conflict and (dis)order among Tswana in Colonial and Postcolonial South Africa

Held by John Comaroff, professor of anthropology at Harvard University.

He has been among the leading anthropologists who have written about postcolonialism for several decades, centered around the Tswana people in South Africa.

Comaroff is participating in the CAS project The Nordic ‘Civil Wars’ in the High Middle Ages in a Comparative Perspective, led by Jón Viðar Sigurðsson and Hans Jacob Orning, both professors of medieval history at the University of Oslo, with financial support from the Research Council of Norway.

For the CAS project – and for medieval historians – Comaroff has been an important source of inspiration, especially his book Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context, co-authored with Simon Roberts in 1981.

In this lecture, Comaroff will discuss conflict studies based on his legal 
anthropological approach in Rules and Processes.