The political, law and temporality, theology in relation to state and the economy, memory and subjectivity, magic, violence, value, experimental writing. Southern/West Africa, Latin America.
My forthcoming book, The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique, (Univ. of Chicago Press) constitutes a legal ethnography of the postcolonial state, understood as an entanglement of temporalities, collective memories and versions of national history. Its object is one of the current key political processes in Africa: the status of "customary law" and "traditional chieftaincy" in a context of post-civil war and post-Socialist transition to neo-liberal "rule of law". Moving from ritual and kinship to state reform, and from chiefs and people's courts to multilateral donors, the study engages with an elusive, metaphysical kernel of the law's legitimacy and its ambiguous relation with violence, revealing the aporias in the "democratic" project of a politics of recognition. The book analyzes the state not simply as a unitary institution of sovereign power governing a territory or a population, but rather in its original sense as status or condition: a mobile assemblage of authorities, rythms, imaginaries, subjectivities, norms and desires. The study is based on two years of field research funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.
I am currently working on two other projects. The first one, "In the Interest of Time", encompasses various historical settings and ethnographic spaces in which sacredness is linked to political economy. My perspective focuses on interest and surplus in relation to temporality. Various chapters analyze the question of economic excedent in terms of Christian and Islamic theology, medieval usury, colonial concessionary companies, modern finance and credit as belief, structural adjustment as gift and Being, and spirit ritual in peasant economies. I aim at researching the politics behind the genealogy of two curious concepts: that money begets money, and that time alone can bear an interest.
The second, broad set of interests is gathered under the rubric of "The Gift of Justice". Combining anthropological theories of the gift and philosophical conceptions of justice, it forms the basis of my recent writing and teaching. The emphasis on circulation and reciprocity frames a central concern with the issue of political community. Based on these concepts I have been drafting essays on Latin America and Africa on classical topics such as state, labor, contract and development.
A key influence in my work on these issues is the writing of Georges Bataille. I mention it as token of my permanent interest in areas of thought where anthropology meets continental philosophy and literary avant-gardes.
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