Truth about Crime Sovereignty, knowledge, social order

Surveying an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing, the Comaroffs offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen. The result is a disturbing portrait that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves and think about morality.

Jean and John L Comaroff make the startling but convincing claim that it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves it is by our crimes. Surveying an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions to the collateral damage of war they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world. In an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen. The Comaroffs explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion, drawing illuminating comparisons with the United States and the United Kingdom. They offer a global criminal anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral panics voiced, and populations ruled. The result is a disturbing portrait that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, how we think about morality, and how we are going to proceed as a global society