ESSAYS DONALD L. DONHAM 1 The Woodrow Wilson Center Washington, DC 20004 and Department of Anthropology Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322 Thinking Temporally or Modernizing Anthropology Recent changes within social and cultural anthropology have made history a key issue, but in this essay I argue that the field has yet to develop the resources that are required to deal with temporality. This point is made through an extended ex- amination of Jean and John Comaroffs work on Christianity and colonialism in southern Africa. Arguably, the Comaroffs read history backward and then present its unfolding as a kind of inexorable logic. In doing so, they homogenize mission- ary and Tswana "cultures" and attribute agency to abstractions rather than to people acting in particular material contexts. In contrast, I argue for a narrative approach to historical anthropological explanation. The emergent qualities of events—and the variable ways in which capitalism, hegemony, Protestantism, and vernacular modernisms relate—require narrative for explanation, narrative that encompasses within itself the narratives of social actors themselves, [historical an- thropology, narrative, the modern, South Africa] O ver the past thirty years, static representations of societies and cultures have lost all power to con- vince anthropologists. Just how far the structure of feeling has changed can be gauged with an example. In 1968, Roy Rappaport published Pigs for the Ancestors, to wide acclaim. His equilibrium model of the ritual regula- tion of the environment, of the feedback between rite, war- fare, and politics in the New Guinea highlands, appealed in a deep way to a then prevalent way of thinking about so- called tribal societies. Pigs made Rappaport's academic reputation, so much so that he spent years defending and amplifying it—as the spirit of the times changed about him. 2 More than three decades later, we are now convinced that the locales we study are caught up in change rather than in stability, that cultures are hybrid and mixed rather than homogeneous and exactly patterned, and that societies are increasingly interconnected rather than bounded and independent. On this new terrain, "history" has become a touchstone, a key symbol, sometimes even a fetish, for vir- tually every school of current social and cultural anthropol- ogy. 3 But how far has a concern for heterogeneity, unbound- edness, and temporality actually transformed the practice of current cultural anthropology? Do we now have methods and theories adequate to capture social and cultural pat- terns in motion? What issues have yet to be faced? Jean and John Comaroffs multivolumed Of Revelation and Revolution is one of the most influential projects in recent historical anthropology and so provides a rich body of work from which to consider these larger questions. Since the present essay retains the marks of its begin- ning, I should make those clear to the reader. The editors of this journal asked me to review volume 2, Of Revelation and Revolution. I suggested, in turn, that a review essay of the Comaroffs' most recent and closely related three books would make more sense, a suggestion to which the editors agreed. I would like to thank Jean and John Comaroff for reacting to a shorter and earlier draft of this essay, con- ceived in such terms. After pondering their objections to my arguments, I decided that an article was the only way to make the larger points I wanted—ones that related to the work of the Comaroffs but that went beyond to the very question of how to pursue the anthropology of the modern. 4 Disagreements, pursued in the right spirit, can be richly productive. By now, there is a large specialist body of criti- cism of the Comaroffs' work (see the bibliography in Vol- ume 2 and the Comaroffs' response in 1997:36-53).' Here, American Anthropologist 103(l):134-149. Copyright © 2001, American Anthropological Association