Jason Hickel

"The revolution that brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power in South Africa was fractured by internal conflict. Migrant workers from rural Zululand rejected many of the egalitarian values and policies fundamental to the ANC's liberal democratic platform and organized themselves in an attempt to sabotage the movement. This antidemocracy stance, which persists today as a direct critique of 'freedom' in neoliberal South Africa, hinges on an idealized vision of the rural home and a hierarchical social order crafted in part by the technologies of colonial governance over the past century. Drawing on this ethnographic context, this work addresses the broader concerns in the literature of liberalism, democratization, and violence in the era of globalization, examining Western ideals about 'freedom' and 'agency' from the perspective of 'others.' Democracy as Death also interrogates the concept of 'interest' underpinning theories of antiliberal movements and argues that both democracy and the political science that attempts to explain resistance to it presuppose a model of personhood native to Western capitalism, which may not operate cross-culturally"--Provided by publisher.

Globalization promised to bring about a golden age of liberal individualism, breaking down hierarchies of kinship, caste, and gender around the world and freeing people to express their true, authentic agency. But in some places globalization has spurred the emergence of new forms of hierarchy-or the reemergence of old forms-as people try to reconstitute an imagined past of stable moral order. This is evident from the Islamic revival in the Middle East to visions of the 1950s family among conservatives in the United States. Why does this happen and how do we make sense of this phenomenon? Why do some communities see hierarchy as desireable? In this book, leading anthropologists draw on insightful ethnographic case studies from around the world to address these trends. Together, they develop a theory of hierarchy that treats it both as a relational form and a framework for organizing ideas about the social good.

Two backcountry skiers find the body of a young woman embedded in the ice of a remote mountain creek. Identifying her takes no time at all - Abbie Cooper is wanted for murder and acts of eco-terrorism, and her picture is on law enforcement computers all across America. But how did she die? And what was the trail of events that led this golden child of a loving family so tragically astray?

"This book examines the African home as a key site of struggle in the making of modern KwaZulu-Natal, a South African province that instantiates in extreme form many of the transformations that shaped the colonial world. Its essays explore major themes in African and global history, including the colonial manipulation of kinship and the exploitation of labour, modernist practices of social engineering and the changes wrought within intimate relationships by post-industrial decline. Ranging from the rural to the urban and the pre-colonial era to the presidency of Jacob Zuma, this volume emphasises the affective and ideological dimensions of ikhaya. It offers insight into how the home, which embodies both modernist aspirations and nostalgic longings for the past, has become the touchstone for popular discontent and political activism in recent decades. Just as colonialism in South Africa was a colonialism of the home, so too politics in South Africa are a politics of the home."--Back cover.