The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff (review)

The Truth about Crime meets the expectations one may have of Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff: a book that is captivating, theoretically insightful and comprehensive, and appealing to scholars across disciplines interested in power, crime, and social (dis)order. Drawing from and expanding upon some of their previous work, this book is a valuable addition to a large body of scholarly work aimed at unraveling the intricate dynamics of crime, citizenship, and authority in contemporary South Africa and beyond.

The strength and core of this book is its theoretical sophistication. As the authors themselves state, the book is a “criminal anthropology” that aims to make sense of the ways in which citizens give meaning to and understand their social realities, particularly in relation to crime, power, and policing. By drawing from anthropological, criminological, and sociological classics and expertise (such as the works of Agamben, Beck, Caldeira, Douglas, Durkheim, Fassin, Foucault, and Wacquant, to name but a few), this book proposes several perspectives for understanding the making and re-making of the thin lines between legal/illegal, order/disorder, and informal/formal that define many facets of South African society.

The book is divided into two distinct parts. Part 1 addresses the “big picture” and presents the main (conceptual) argument—namely that we are experiencing a “tectonic shift” in the relationships among capital, governance, and the state. This shift refers to a transformation from “vertical, relatively integrated structures of sovereign authority toward lateral patchworks of partial sovereignties” (182) and entails changes that allow contemporary policing to be focused more on maintaining public and social order than on fighting crime. This claim consolidates and reifies the main insight that has emerged from numerous anthropological studies on sovereignty and policing—namely that societies across the globe are marked by differentiated forms of multiple sovereigns, described as either fragmented, contested, twilight, or variegated. The explicit comparison made to the United States in part 1 further demonstrates that this tectonic shift is a global one.

The second part of the book comprises five “pieces” that outline various dimensions of crime and policing. The first four focus on (1) representations of crime and popular culture, such as the South African television shows and films Hijack Stories and Jerusalama; (2) occult practices and the role of “impostors,” such as the “return” of the singer Khulekani Khumalo in December 2009; (3) the vernacular nature of crime statistics; and (4) the prominence and diversity of various nonstate crime fighting initiatives, such as community policing efforts and “Lone Rangers.” The fifth and final piece outlines Eina, an emic concept and actual South African device consisting of wires and metal fingers used for protection on properties. With this metaphorical analysis, the authors visually capture the contestation over various fault lines that define contemporary policing in South Africa. Combined, these five pieces exemplify why South Africa is regarded as “a petri dish” (49) and serves as an excellent case study demonstrating the tectonic shift taking place in regard to capital, governance, and the state.

Yet despite the strengths of this book, I found myself missing the “anthropology” in “criminal anthropology—that is, the ethnographic detail that often constitutes the beauty and erudition of anthropological work. Although it is evident that the authors are locally embedded, and they support their claims with references to various South African artifacts, individuals, and case studies, I wanted to know more about the experiences and sentiments of South African citizens themselves and how they configure their daily lives in the context of this tectonic shift. The authors state that crime is “the discursive medium in which South African speak to each other”(52), and I wanted to hear their own voices. Although the book is theoretically insightful and entrancing, I was left pondering the question of how South Africans themselves construct and define their own “truths about crime.”