Professor John Comaroff speaking with students after the event.

Yesterday evening John Comaroff, Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, delivered the Graduate Institute’s official opening of the year lecture entitled, “Theory from the South: Or, How Europe is Evolving Toward Africa”. The lecture by the renowned anthropologist coincides with the launch of the Institute’s new Anthropology and Sociology of Development department in autumn 2011, which adds a master and PhD in the discipline to the Institute’s repertoire of study programmes.

John Comaroff’s lecture focused on presenting the ideas of his recently released book, written with his wife Jean Comaroff, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, also entitled “Theory from the South”. The premise of the lecture and the book is that the part of the world once known as the third world, the developing world, and most recently the Global South, has been seen as a source of raw facts rather than a source of knowledge. He said that Euro-American theory, with its roots in the Enlightenment, has largely ignored third world narratives of modernity. Professor Comaroff argued that the notion of modernity should be grasped through both the views of the Global South as well as of the North.

During the lecture Professor Comaroff said that as many nation-states of the Northern Hemisphere experience increasing fiscal meltdown, state privatisation, corruption, ethnic conflict, and other crises, it seems as though they are becoming more like Southern countries, in both positive and problematic ways.

Drawing on his experience of living in Africa and teaching in Europe and the US, he gave several examples demonstrating that while the traditional perception in the North has been that the Global South was always behind, that it may now be the North that is trying to play catch-up with the Global South.

Professor Comaroff said “the Global South is producing ingenious modes of survival”. He also said that while Euro-America is becoming more hostile to social science theory, there are calls for the Global South to become a source of more social science theory as that part of the world plays an ever-increasing role on the world stage.

“The Global South is a label that describes relations and not a place”, he said. “There is much North in the South, and much South in the North and there is much more to come”, he said.

A video of the event is available here.

The Graduate Institute’s new Master and PhD in Anthropology and Sociology of Development were created to provide students with the analytical and methodological tools to explore the social and cultural systems that influence, and are influenced by, policy interventions, especially – but not exclusively – in the field of development. Other areas of interest include conflict and peace-building, location and migration, as well as identity politics.