Julie Soleil Archambault | Concordia University (Canada) (original) (raw)
Books by Julie Soleil Archambault
Papers by Julie Soleil Archambault
This article explores the relationship between Mozambique’s so-called “success story” and the rap... more This article explores the relationship between Mozambique’s so-called “success story” and the rapid spread of mobile phones in recent years, in an attempt to shed light on the dynamics of transformation underway in the country, namely growing disparity and changing patterns of accumulation and redistribution. Drawing on research conducted in Inhambane, Southern Mozambique, it examines some of the implications telecommunication is having on sociality and argues that mobile phone practices not only reflect and reproduce social hierarchies, but also participate in the negotiation of inequalities.</p
Critique of Anthropology, 2020
In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa, piles of fresh concrete blocks vividly convey a sense of t... more In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa, piles of fresh concrete blocks vividly convey a sense of the momentous transformation under way in a place where building is now described as being ‘in fashion’. Exuding promises of a better future, this fresh concrete is emerging amidst the ruins of a not so distant violent past, in a country where the built environment has been scarred by decades of war, economic decline, neglect and vegetalization. If ruins are reminders of what once was or of what could have been, what do they become in a context of growing prosperity? The contrast between fresh and rotting concrete seemed to beg for anthropological attention, to call for an approach that would simultaneously capture the poetics and politics of concrete throughout its life and even longer afterlife. What my ethnography revealed, however, was that unlike the fresh concrete, which inspired songs and made people fall in love, the decaying concrete scattered across the suburb often inspired lit...
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018
As the world's most used material, after water, cement is particularly good to think with. And as... more As the world's most used material, after water, cement is particularly good to think with. And as I show below, it may also be good to 'become with', especially across the Global South, where demand is soaring. In Africa, the continent with the fastest-growing cement consumption at the moment, demand is expected to rise by 50 per cent over the next couple of years. The cement industry even refers to sub-Saharan Africa as 'the last cement frontier', and speaks of cement as the continent's 'new oil'. Fueling this consumption, alongside the spectacular projects of futuristic satellite cities, shopping malls, tower blocks, and ring roads, are the millions of small domestic construction projects increasingly visible on the landscape, especially the peri-urban landscape. Although Mozambicans have long engaged with concrete as a politically and affectively charged material, this engagement now increasingly starts at the level of the bag of cement, as young people acquire cement to make their own concrete blocks, and eventually to build their own houses. Inspired by this ethnographic observation, this article is analytically driven by a wider interest in transformation. Based on research in a Mozambican suburb under expansion, it examines, through an analysis of changing domestic building practices, how the hope of achieving something-in a word, aspiration-congeals and materializes. Drawing on the literature on affect and materiality, I show how cement and concrete-as materials that young Mozambicans dream about, invest in, and play with-participate in shaping aspiration. In the end, I argue that the transformative outcome is very much the contingent result of an encounter, at a specific historical moment, between particular subjectivities and the materiality of cement and concrete.
Cultural Anthropology, 2016
Behind some of the tall fences that compartmentalize domestic space in Inhambane hide luxurious g... more Behind some of the tall fences that compartmentalize domestic space in Inhambane hide luxurious gardens that are usually under the care of an individual who answers requests for cuttings and who seeks out, in everyday meanderings, new species to add to his or her collection. In this Mozambican city, gardeners articulate their engagement with plants as guided by an overriding principle: the love of plants. One gardener even described his plants as his lovers. What makes human-plant relations in Inhambane even more ethnographically intriguing is that the most romantic gardeners tend to be either young men or older women. In this essay, I engage with the growing posthumanist literature on multispecies ethnography and explore what it would entail to take the love of plants seriously. I ask whether the statement “my plants are my lovers” should be taken metaphorically or literally. I situate human-plant relations in Inhambane against the backdrop of the region’s particular social and his...
New Media & Society, 2011
In Southern Mozambique, most people have a story about themselves or a couple they know who split... more In Southern Mozambique, most people have a story about themselves or a couple they know who split up ‘because of the phone’ ( por causa do telefone). Although some stories are more dramatic than others, the kinds of misunderstandings they represent are described as the mobile’s biggest drawback. Based on research on mobile phone use among young adults in the city of Inhambane, the article focuses on instances when connections backfire and when mobile phone communication generates conflict. It examines the ways in which mobile communication participates in the circulation of and access to information: not necessarily the kind of ‘useful information’ referred to by endorsers of the ‘ICT for Development’ perspective, but rather information that is meant to remain secret. The aim is to provide an alternative perspective on the transformative potential of mobile communication in the hopes of enhancing our understanding of the impacts of the spread of the technology.
American Ethnologist, 2013
Cell phones play a conspicuous role in the way young people in Inhambane, Mozambique, juggle visi... more Cell phones play a conspicuous role in the way young people in Inhambane, Mozambique, juggle visibility and invisibility in their everyday lives. By opening up new social spaces within which individuals can engage in various pursuits with some degree of discretion, cell phone communication helps redress socioeconomic inequalities while preserving an unpleasant public secret about the workings of Mozambique's postwar economy: that young women are encouraged to exchange sexual favors for material gain. Drawing on the literature on secrecy and building on the local notion of "visão," I propose an extended use of the idea of "social navigation" that captures concerns about appearances and the reproduction of wider epistemologies of ignorance. [cell phones, Mozambique, youth, secrecy, social navigation, intimate economy, respect, appearances]
Africa, 2012
ABSTRACTThis article examines the ways in which young men in the city of Inhambane, southern Moza... more ABSTRACTThis article examines the ways in which young men in the city of Inhambane, southern Mozambique, harness communication to express and address experiences of constrained physical and social mobility. It starts with an analysis of a highly valued form of oral communication –bater papo– that youth, especially young men, engage in on a daily basis before turning to mobile phone use. Tying these different forms of communication together is a profound desire to claim membership of, and to participate in, a world that remains elusive for most. However, if mobile phone communication builds on pre-existent forms of communication, it takes on particular aesthetic qualities that speak of, rather than resolve, exclusion. The article argues that, while helping bridge distances in significant ways, mobile phone communication nonetheless, and somewhat ironically, also betrays young men's immobility.
Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa
In Moments of Freedom, Johannes Fabian (1998) writes, If freedom is conceived not just as free wi... more In Moments of Freedom, Johannes Fabian (1998) writes, If freedom is conceived not just as free will plus the absence of domination and constraint, but as the potential to transform thoughts, emotions, and experiences into creations that can be communicated and shared, and if ‘potential’, unless it is just another abstract condition like absence of constraint, is recognized by its realizations, then it follows that there can never be freedom as a state of grace, permanent and continuous. As a quality of the process of human self-realization, freedom cannot be anything but contestatory and discontinuous or precarious. Freedom, in dialectical parlance, comes in moments (21).
American Ethnologist, 2022
In Mozambique, class and gender have long produced sweating bodies entangled in hierarchies of ca... more In Mozambique, class and gender have long produced
sweating bodies entangled in hierarchies of care and labor.
Today, the growing popularity of fitness is complicating the
cultural politics of bodily substances, especially sweat.
Challenging ideals of feminine propriety, new ways of
sweating are fostering health-conscious subjectivities and
encouraging alternative ways of becoming and relating. As
a bodily “thing,” sweat sits somewhat uncomfortably within
posthumanist and neomaterialist efforts at decentering the
human. But our understanding of matter’s potentiality can
be refined by an ethnography that apprehends sweat as a
material-semiotic thing, one that operates simultaneously
as matter and as an index of transformation. [anthropology
of sweat, fitness, workout ethic, bodily substances,
materiality, semiotics, health-conscious subjectivities,
excretion, Mozambique]
Journal of Southern African Studies
Sub-Saharan Africa is no longer an outlier in the global 'fitness revolution'. In cities across t... more Sub-Saharan Africa is no longer an outlier in the global 'fitness revolution'. In cities across the continent, a growing number of people are adopting a more active lifestyle. In Mozambiquewhere only a few years ago, gyms and joggers were few and far between, and not many people would have considered working out at all, let alone in publicexercising is now remarkably popular. Based on ethnographic research carried out in various fitness sites in Maputo, this article examines the new urban rhythms and temporal orientations fostered by the growing popularity of fitness in the region and extends genealogies of the self-improving subject by situating the pursuit of fitness in relation to successive colonial and post-colonial regimes that promoted various forms of bodywork as part of broader ethical projects of the self. I argue that, while it might be tempting to dismiss the growing popularity of fitness as the mere encroachment of neoliberal ideals of the selfimproving subject, doing so would not only gloss over significant historical continuities but risk overshadowing the ways in which the pursuit of fitness is enhancing the quality of life of many. In recognising the ethical value that these projects have for those who pursue them, the article sheds light on the appeal of fitness in a specific space-time, while moving away from what are often contemptuous assessments of this global trend. I show how, as an aspirational pursuit that operates at the intersections of health and beauty, fitness creates a particular orientation towards the future that borrows from socialist registers of discipline and struggle while, in turn, highlighting the continued relevance of such registers within contemporary imaginaries. At a time when global health priorities are shifting, ethnographic accounts like the one presented here are needed to help to complicate understandings of the articulation between health and moral imaginaries of self-improvement.
Politique africaine, 2021
C’est a travers un examen historique de la place de l’objet au sein des etudes africanistes de la... more C’est a travers un examen historique de la place de l’objet au sein des etudes africanistes de la parente que cet article propose d’aborder certaines transformations tant theoriques qu’empiriques survenues au fil des annees. L’article soutient que les etudes africanistes de la parente se sont penchees serieusement sur le rapport aux objets bien avant le « materiality turn » et que cet avant-gardisme s’explique, du moins en partie, par une realite ethnographique, a savoir le role fondamental que jouent depuis longtemps les objets dans la production et la negociation des relations de parente en Afrique. Les etudes africanistes « classiques » prefigurent donc en quelque sorte une orientation theorique future sur la materialite. Suite a un apercu historique de cet important champ d’etude, j’examine deux « objets de parente » choisis pour leur role transformateur dans la constitution et la redefinition des rapports de parente : les telephones portables et le ciment. Alors que les objets ...
Politique africaine, 2021
It is through a historical examination of the place of the object within Africanist kinship studi... more It is through a historical examination of the place of the object within Africanist kinship studies that this article proposes to address certain transformations, both theoretical and empirical, that have occurred over the years. The article maintains that Africanist kinship studies took a serious look at the relationships people have with objects long before the “materiality turn” and that this can be explained, at least in part, by the role that objects have long played in the production and negotiation of kinship relations “on the ground” across Africa. “Classical” Africanist studies therefore prefigure, in a way, a future theoretical orientation on materiality. Following a historical overview of this important field of study, I examine two “kinship objects” chosen for their transformative role in the constitution and redefinition of kinship relationships: cellphones and cement. Although the objects themselves have changed, their role in the construction of kinship relationships ...
Critique of Anthropology, 2021
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308275X20941573 In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa,... more https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308275X20941573
In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa, piles of fresh concrete blocks vividly convey a sense of the momentous transformation under way in a place where building is now described as being ‘in fashion’. Exuding promises of a better future, this fresh concrete is emerging amidst the ruins of a not so distant violent past, in a country where the built environment has been scarred by decades of war, economic decline, neglect and vegetalization. If ruins are reminders of what once was or of what could have been, what do they become in a context of growing prosperity? The contrast between fresh and rotting concrete seemed to beg for anthropological attention, to call for an approach that would simultaneously capture the poetics and politics of concrete throughout its life and even longer afterlife. What my ethnography revealed, however, was that unlike the fresh concrete, which inspired songs and made people fall in love, the decaying concrete scattered across the suburb often inspired little more than indifference. By examining how Mozambicans remember the past and project themselves into the future through their engagement with the built environment, I propose to approach indifference neither as refusal to engage, nor simply as silence, and certainly not as political illiteracy, but rather as an affective experience in its own right that speaks of a particular orientation towards the future.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X20941573
“Nowadays, relationships are more commercialised”, explained Antonio, a 22 year-old Mozambican wh... more “Nowadays, relationships are more commercialised”, explained Antonio, a 22 year-old Mozambican who had recently broken up with his girlfriend, “if you don't phone back when a girl sends you a bip, she'll run to another guy.” As he recalled the events that lead to their break-up, Antonio used mobile phone etiquette as an idiom to express his understanding of contemporary gender relations. In Mozambique, many people have passed “from no phone to [mobile] phone” (Orlove 2005: 699) and the recent integration of telecommunication into everyday life has opened up new spaces and possibilities. Despite generating great enthusiasm, however, the phone is also understood to challenge power relations between men and women, as well as between generations. Indeed, although few would do without their phone, many are rather ambivalent in their evaluation of this new technology. In this chapter, I look into the integration of mobile phones into courtship practices amongst young adults in Inhambane, Southern Mozambique. I argue that while reproducing gendered ideals, mobile phone etiquette acts as a new register to express and address the reconfiguration of gender relations and the redrawing of ideas of masculinity already underway.
Anthropologie et Sociétés
This article explores the relationship between Mozambique’s so-called “success story” and the rap... more This article explores the relationship between Mozambique’s so-called “success story” and the rapid spread of mobile phones in recent years, in an attempt to shed light on the dynamics of transformation underway in the country, namely growing disparity and changing patterns of accumulation and redistribution. Drawing on research conducted in Inhambane, Southern Mozambique, it examines some of the implications telecommunication is having on sociality and argues that mobile phone practices not only reflect and reproduce social hierarchies, but also participate in the negotiation of inequalities.</p
Critique of Anthropology, 2020
In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa, piles of fresh concrete blocks vividly convey a sense of t... more In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa, piles of fresh concrete blocks vividly convey a sense of the momentous transformation under way in a place where building is now described as being ‘in fashion’. Exuding promises of a better future, this fresh concrete is emerging amidst the ruins of a not so distant violent past, in a country where the built environment has been scarred by decades of war, economic decline, neglect and vegetalization. If ruins are reminders of what once was or of what could have been, what do they become in a context of growing prosperity? The contrast between fresh and rotting concrete seemed to beg for anthropological attention, to call for an approach that would simultaneously capture the poetics and politics of concrete throughout its life and even longer afterlife. What my ethnography revealed, however, was that unlike the fresh concrete, which inspired songs and made people fall in love, the decaying concrete scattered across the suburb often inspired lit...
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018
As the world's most used material, after water, cement is particularly good to think with. And as... more As the world's most used material, after water, cement is particularly good to think with. And as I show below, it may also be good to 'become with', especially across the Global South, where demand is soaring. In Africa, the continent with the fastest-growing cement consumption at the moment, demand is expected to rise by 50 per cent over the next couple of years. The cement industry even refers to sub-Saharan Africa as 'the last cement frontier', and speaks of cement as the continent's 'new oil'. Fueling this consumption, alongside the spectacular projects of futuristic satellite cities, shopping malls, tower blocks, and ring roads, are the millions of small domestic construction projects increasingly visible on the landscape, especially the peri-urban landscape. Although Mozambicans have long engaged with concrete as a politically and affectively charged material, this engagement now increasingly starts at the level of the bag of cement, as young people acquire cement to make their own concrete blocks, and eventually to build their own houses. Inspired by this ethnographic observation, this article is analytically driven by a wider interest in transformation. Based on research in a Mozambican suburb under expansion, it examines, through an analysis of changing domestic building practices, how the hope of achieving something-in a word, aspiration-congeals and materializes. Drawing on the literature on affect and materiality, I show how cement and concrete-as materials that young Mozambicans dream about, invest in, and play with-participate in shaping aspiration. In the end, I argue that the transformative outcome is very much the contingent result of an encounter, at a specific historical moment, between particular subjectivities and the materiality of cement and concrete.
Cultural Anthropology, 2016
Behind some of the tall fences that compartmentalize domestic space in Inhambane hide luxurious g... more Behind some of the tall fences that compartmentalize domestic space in Inhambane hide luxurious gardens that are usually under the care of an individual who answers requests for cuttings and who seeks out, in everyday meanderings, new species to add to his or her collection. In this Mozambican city, gardeners articulate their engagement with plants as guided by an overriding principle: the love of plants. One gardener even described his plants as his lovers. What makes human-plant relations in Inhambane even more ethnographically intriguing is that the most romantic gardeners tend to be either young men or older women. In this essay, I engage with the growing posthumanist literature on multispecies ethnography and explore what it would entail to take the love of plants seriously. I ask whether the statement “my plants are my lovers” should be taken metaphorically or literally. I situate human-plant relations in Inhambane against the backdrop of the region’s particular social and his...
New Media & Society, 2011
In Southern Mozambique, most people have a story about themselves or a couple they know who split... more In Southern Mozambique, most people have a story about themselves or a couple they know who split up ‘because of the phone’ ( por causa do telefone). Although some stories are more dramatic than others, the kinds of misunderstandings they represent are described as the mobile’s biggest drawback. Based on research on mobile phone use among young adults in the city of Inhambane, the article focuses on instances when connections backfire and when mobile phone communication generates conflict. It examines the ways in which mobile communication participates in the circulation of and access to information: not necessarily the kind of ‘useful information’ referred to by endorsers of the ‘ICT for Development’ perspective, but rather information that is meant to remain secret. The aim is to provide an alternative perspective on the transformative potential of mobile communication in the hopes of enhancing our understanding of the impacts of the spread of the technology.
American Ethnologist, 2013
Cell phones play a conspicuous role in the way young people in Inhambane, Mozambique, juggle visi... more Cell phones play a conspicuous role in the way young people in Inhambane, Mozambique, juggle visibility and invisibility in their everyday lives. By opening up new social spaces within which individuals can engage in various pursuits with some degree of discretion, cell phone communication helps redress socioeconomic inequalities while preserving an unpleasant public secret about the workings of Mozambique's postwar economy: that young women are encouraged to exchange sexual favors for material gain. Drawing on the literature on secrecy and building on the local notion of "visão," I propose an extended use of the idea of "social navigation" that captures concerns about appearances and the reproduction of wider epistemologies of ignorance. [cell phones, Mozambique, youth, secrecy, social navigation, intimate economy, respect, appearances]
Africa, 2012
ABSTRACTThis article examines the ways in which young men in the city of Inhambane, southern Moza... more ABSTRACTThis article examines the ways in which young men in the city of Inhambane, southern Mozambique, harness communication to express and address experiences of constrained physical and social mobility. It starts with an analysis of a highly valued form of oral communication –bater papo– that youth, especially young men, engage in on a daily basis before turning to mobile phone use. Tying these different forms of communication together is a profound desire to claim membership of, and to participate in, a world that remains elusive for most. However, if mobile phone communication builds on pre-existent forms of communication, it takes on particular aesthetic qualities that speak of, rather than resolve, exclusion. The article argues that, while helping bridge distances in significant ways, mobile phone communication nonetheless, and somewhat ironically, also betrays young men's immobility.
Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa
In Moments of Freedom, Johannes Fabian (1998) writes, If freedom is conceived not just as free wi... more In Moments of Freedom, Johannes Fabian (1998) writes, If freedom is conceived not just as free will plus the absence of domination and constraint, but as the potential to transform thoughts, emotions, and experiences into creations that can be communicated and shared, and if ‘potential’, unless it is just another abstract condition like absence of constraint, is recognized by its realizations, then it follows that there can never be freedom as a state of grace, permanent and continuous. As a quality of the process of human self-realization, freedom cannot be anything but contestatory and discontinuous or precarious. Freedom, in dialectical parlance, comes in moments (21).
American Ethnologist, 2022
In Mozambique, class and gender have long produced sweating bodies entangled in hierarchies of ca... more In Mozambique, class and gender have long produced
sweating bodies entangled in hierarchies of care and labor.
Today, the growing popularity of fitness is complicating the
cultural politics of bodily substances, especially sweat.
Challenging ideals of feminine propriety, new ways of
sweating are fostering health-conscious subjectivities and
encouraging alternative ways of becoming and relating. As
a bodily “thing,” sweat sits somewhat uncomfortably within
posthumanist and neomaterialist efforts at decentering the
human. But our understanding of matter’s potentiality can
be refined by an ethnography that apprehends sweat as a
material-semiotic thing, one that operates simultaneously
as matter and as an index of transformation. [anthropology
of sweat, fitness, workout ethic, bodily substances,
materiality, semiotics, health-conscious subjectivities,
excretion, Mozambique]
Journal of Southern African Studies
Sub-Saharan Africa is no longer an outlier in the global 'fitness revolution'. In cities across t... more Sub-Saharan Africa is no longer an outlier in the global 'fitness revolution'. In cities across the continent, a growing number of people are adopting a more active lifestyle. In Mozambiquewhere only a few years ago, gyms and joggers were few and far between, and not many people would have considered working out at all, let alone in publicexercising is now remarkably popular. Based on ethnographic research carried out in various fitness sites in Maputo, this article examines the new urban rhythms and temporal orientations fostered by the growing popularity of fitness in the region and extends genealogies of the self-improving subject by situating the pursuit of fitness in relation to successive colonial and post-colonial regimes that promoted various forms of bodywork as part of broader ethical projects of the self. I argue that, while it might be tempting to dismiss the growing popularity of fitness as the mere encroachment of neoliberal ideals of the selfimproving subject, doing so would not only gloss over significant historical continuities but risk overshadowing the ways in which the pursuit of fitness is enhancing the quality of life of many. In recognising the ethical value that these projects have for those who pursue them, the article sheds light on the appeal of fitness in a specific space-time, while moving away from what are often contemptuous assessments of this global trend. I show how, as an aspirational pursuit that operates at the intersections of health and beauty, fitness creates a particular orientation towards the future that borrows from socialist registers of discipline and struggle while, in turn, highlighting the continued relevance of such registers within contemporary imaginaries. At a time when global health priorities are shifting, ethnographic accounts like the one presented here are needed to help to complicate understandings of the articulation between health and moral imaginaries of self-improvement.
Politique africaine, 2021
C’est a travers un examen historique de la place de l’objet au sein des etudes africanistes de la... more C’est a travers un examen historique de la place de l’objet au sein des etudes africanistes de la parente que cet article propose d’aborder certaines transformations tant theoriques qu’empiriques survenues au fil des annees. L’article soutient que les etudes africanistes de la parente se sont penchees serieusement sur le rapport aux objets bien avant le « materiality turn » et que cet avant-gardisme s’explique, du moins en partie, par une realite ethnographique, a savoir le role fondamental que jouent depuis longtemps les objets dans la production et la negociation des relations de parente en Afrique. Les etudes africanistes « classiques » prefigurent donc en quelque sorte une orientation theorique future sur la materialite. Suite a un apercu historique de cet important champ d’etude, j’examine deux « objets de parente » choisis pour leur role transformateur dans la constitution et la redefinition des rapports de parente : les telephones portables et le ciment. Alors que les objets ...
Politique africaine, 2021
It is through a historical examination of the place of the object within Africanist kinship studi... more It is through a historical examination of the place of the object within Africanist kinship studies that this article proposes to address certain transformations, both theoretical and empirical, that have occurred over the years. The article maintains that Africanist kinship studies took a serious look at the relationships people have with objects long before the “materiality turn” and that this can be explained, at least in part, by the role that objects have long played in the production and negotiation of kinship relations “on the ground” across Africa. “Classical” Africanist studies therefore prefigure, in a way, a future theoretical orientation on materiality. Following a historical overview of this important field of study, I examine two “kinship objects” chosen for their transformative role in the constitution and redefinition of kinship relationships: cellphones and cement. Although the objects themselves have changed, their role in the construction of kinship relationships ...
Critique of Anthropology, 2021
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308275X20941573 In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa,... more https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308275X20941573
In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa, piles of fresh concrete blocks vividly convey a sense of the momentous transformation under way in a place where building is now described as being ‘in fashion’. Exuding promises of a better future, this fresh concrete is emerging amidst the ruins of a not so distant violent past, in a country where the built environment has been scarred by decades of war, economic decline, neglect and vegetalization. If ruins are reminders of what once was or of what could have been, what do they become in a context of growing prosperity? The contrast between fresh and rotting concrete seemed to beg for anthropological attention, to call for an approach that would simultaneously capture the poetics and politics of concrete throughout its life and even longer afterlife. What my ethnography revealed, however, was that unlike the fresh concrete, which inspired songs and made people fall in love, the decaying concrete scattered across the suburb often inspired little more than indifference. By examining how Mozambicans remember the past and project themselves into the future through their engagement with the built environment, I propose to approach indifference neither as refusal to engage, nor simply as silence, and certainly not as political illiteracy, but rather as an affective experience in its own right that speaks of a particular orientation towards the future.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X20941573
“Nowadays, relationships are more commercialised”, explained Antonio, a 22 year-old Mozambican wh... more “Nowadays, relationships are more commercialised”, explained Antonio, a 22 year-old Mozambican who had recently broken up with his girlfriend, “if you don't phone back when a girl sends you a bip, she'll run to another guy.” As he recalled the events that lead to their break-up, Antonio used mobile phone etiquette as an idiom to express his understanding of contemporary gender relations. In Mozambique, many people have passed “from no phone to [mobile] phone” (Orlove 2005: 699) and the recent integration of telecommunication into everyday life has opened up new spaces and possibilities. Despite generating great enthusiasm, however, the phone is also understood to challenge power relations between men and women, as well as between generations. Indeed, although few would do without their phone, many are rather ambivalent in their evaluation of this new technology. In this chapter, I look into the integration of mobile phones into courtship practices amongst young adults in Inhambane, Southern Mozambique. I argue that while reproducing gendered ideals, mobile phone etiquette acts as a new register to express and address the reconfiguration of gender relations and the redrawing of ideas of masculinity already underway.
Anthropologie et Sociétés
As the world’s most used material, after water, cement is particularly good to think with. And as... more As the world’s most used material, after water, cement is particularly good to think with. And as I show below, it may also be good to ‘become with’, especially across the Global South, where demand is soaring. In Africa, the continent with the fastest-growing cement consumption at the moment,demand is expected to rise by 50 per cent over the next couple of years. The cement industry even refers to sub-Saharan Africa as ‘the last cement frontier’, and speaks of cement as the continent’s ‘new oil’. Fueling this consumption, alongside the spectacular projects of futuristic satellite cities, shopping malls, tower blocks, and ring roads, are the millions of small domestic construction projects increasingly visible on the landscape, especially the peri-urban landscape. Although Mozambicans have long engaged with concrete as a politically and affectively charged material, this engagement now increasingly starts at the level of the bag of cement, as young people acquire cement to make their own concrete blocks, and eventually to build their own houses. Inspired by this ethnographic observation, this article is analytically driven by a wider interest in transformation. Based on research in a Mozambican suburb under expansion, it examines, through an analysis of changing domestic building practices, how the hope of achieving something – in a word, aspiration – congeals and materializes. Drawing on the literature on affect and materiality, I show how cement and concrete – as materials that young Mozambicans dream about, invest in, and play with – participate in shaping aspiration. In the end, I argue that the transformative outcome is very much the contingent result of an encounter, at a specific historical moment, between particular subjectivities and the materiality of cement and concrete.
Portuguese version of "Cruising through uncertainty", American Ethnologist (2013), translated by ... more Portuguese version of "Cruising through uncertainty", American Ethnologist (2013), translated by Inácio Dias de Andrade
In just over a decade, mobile phones have become part of everyday life almost everywhere, radical... more In just over a decade, mobile phones have become part of everyday life almost everywhere, radically transforming how we access and exchange information. Many have argued that in Africa, where most have gone from no phone to mobile phone, this improved access to technology and information will usher in socio-economic development, changing everything from health services to electoral participation to engagement with the global economy. Julie Soleil Archambault reveals how better access to information is not necessarily a good thing, and offers a complete rethinking of how we understand uncertainty, truth, and ignorance. By engaging with young adults in a Mozambique suburb who have adopted mobile phones in their daily lives, Archambault shows that they have become necessary tools for pretense and falsification, allowing youths not only to mitigate but also court, produce, and sustain uncertainty in their efforts to create fulfilling lives in the harsh world of postwar Mozambique. She e...