[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYngRIzG3Uk&w=600&h=373]

“In South Africa,” anthropologist Jean Comaroff tells us in this lecture, “murder rates are held to be diagnostic of violence run amok, of governance haunted by a past of inequities that no constitutional reform, no right of reconciliation can fully dispel. Especially indicative is the failure of the police to protect the populace, to win the war between crime and punishment that for many has turned the post-colony into a Hobbesian war zone.” When this obsessive drama of crime and punishment grips the South African imaginary at all levels, it edges aside older fantasies like ‘the rainbow nation’, or ‘a people born in struggle’. South Africans believe their country to be exceptionally violent, “captured by images of law and disorder (the more dire the better)” but “the public fixation far exceeds the facticity of crime” (more people die of AIDS, traffic accidents or heart disease than of criminal violence — thus making it a very unexceptional society in comparison to countries that share a similar past or transitional conundrum). But audacious crime fascinates, Comaroff argues, as does the figure of the ‘diviner-detective’ (think: renegade policemen like Jackson Gopane, or Kobus ‘Donker’ Jonker who combines a fascination for the occult with the ordinary police-work, or the now-disbanded ‘super-cops’ of the Scorpions) — the ‘diviner-detective’ who seems to be an embodiment of the paradoxes of law, order, and sovereignty in places where faith in the ability to explain lawlessness is lost, and with it possibly the nature of society itself. Recommended listening, if you like a good dose of anthropology.