Just out of Reach

Autor: Jason Sumich, Bjørn Enge Bertelsen
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Current Anthropology
ISSN: 1537-5382
0011-3204
DOI: 10.1086/714268
Popis: The leader of Mozambique’s Renamo party, Afonso Dhlakama, died on May 3, 2018. His death both necessitates an ethnographic, regionally comparative rethinking of the analytical approach to the dominant Mozambican political parties (Frelimo and Renamo) as diametrically opposed formations from independence onward and invites a more general reconsideration of anthropological approaches to politics and the trajectory of African postcolonial states. Based on long-term fieldwork in Chimoio, Maputo, and Nampula, we analyze and compare articulations of political subjectivity and launch a novel reading of Mozambique’s political dynamics, arguing how the erstwhile bifurcated political order is structured by a singular, imminent political ontology. Rather than analyzing politics by privileging institutions, identities, or movements, we contribute to an anthropology that underlines politics as fundamentally shaped by the formation and manipulation of broader systems of meaning, registers, and their spatiotemporal context—aspects that elude analyses on the basis of political discourse or voting patterns. Highlighting the genealogy of this political ontology and emphasizing its generative and imminent nature in terms of forging subjectivity, we explore its enduring yet brittle nature, which includes hegemonic stasis, contestation, and the potential for openings and breakdowns. publishedVersion
Databáze: OpenAIRE