Violence

War, State, and Anthropology in MozambiqueHow is one to make sense of state formation as a predominantly violent process?More concretely, how is one, as an anthropologist, to understand one' s interlocutors' repeated insistence on life being a sustained period of suffering (sofrimento)?One point at which to start is with the most recent large-scale period of violence, namely the Mozambican civil war (1976-92).During this phase of violent upheaval, the traditional fi eld was implicated in complex ways and its reality as a domain of the potential was actualized in various manners vis-à-vis state dynamics and war machine dynamics.By describing the civil war as it was experienced and as it unfolded in Honde and Chimoio, this chapter gradually zooms in on and historically contextualizes what I term the rural-urban continuum of fi eldwork sites.In introducing the fi eldwork sites, I will also emphasize how Honde and Chimoio must not be seen as pristine localities into which one enters but rather physical sites in which social confi gurations, practices, memberships, and the fi eld of the traditional have been continuously and violently altered by ongoing processes of state formation-most recently and most dramatically by the civil war. Independence and Civil WarThe space on the East African coast that gradually became Mozambique was under Portuguese colonial rule for almost fi ve hundred years until its 1975 independence.The process of colonization and state formation

Geography · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Computer Science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories