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From racial to linguistic social divisions: Coloniality in contemporary Maputo
Author(s) -
Reite Torun
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of sociolinguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9841
pISSN - 1360-6441
DOI - 10.1111/josl.12455
Subject(s) - sociology , covert , portuguese , power (physics) , period (music) , colonialism , symbolic power , unconscious mind , expression (computer science) , gender studies , anthropology , linguistics , epistemology , aesthetics , history , political science , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , politics , computer science , law , programming language , philosophy
Inspired by Bourdieu's work, this study draws on multidisciplinary datasets to unravel the role of language and symbolic power for retaining social hierarchies and crafting ‘distinctive’ selves in postcolonial times. Showcasing Mozambique's capital city of Maputo, the study relies on censuses from the period 1980 to 2017, historical data, interviews and metadiscursive reflection to problematize how education can serve as an instrument to effectively inscribe a certain social order in people's minds and bodies that can lead to an unconscious acceptance of social differences and hierarchies, to ‘a sense of one's place’. Probing into complex temporal and spatial co‐presences, the paper highlights the role that education has played in promoting ideas central to the divisive dynamics of Portuguese and how social distinctions that were obviously more overtly racial in colonial times have become more covert and have found more fine‐grained linguistic expression and perpetuate conditions of coloniality in contemporaneity.