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Sorcery of Construction and Socialist Modernization: Ways of Understanding Power in Postcolonial Mozambique
Author(s) -
West Harry
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2001.28.1.119
Subject(s) - modernization theory , power (physics) , ambivalence , sociology , colonialism , state (computer science) , socialism , political economy , gender studies , political science , law , politics , communism , psychology , social psychology , physics , algorithm , quantum mechanics , computer science
In this article I examine how rural Mozambicans in the Mueda plateau region experienced the socialist modernization policies of FRELIMO, the anti‐colonial guerrilla movement that eventually took power over the postindependence Mozambican state. In interpreting and engaging with the dramatic transformations brought on by FRELIMO socialism, Muedans often drew on the familiar language of sorcery, notwithstanding FRELIMO attempts to banish sorcery‐related beliefs and practices. While Muedans sometimes resisted the modernization agenda and sometimes embraced it, they could not make systematic instrumental use of sorcery discourse to pursue strategic ends. Rather, sorcery served them more broadly as a social diagnostics of power relations —one that preserved ways of understanding power that are saturated with ambivalence, [power, postcolonial Africa, sorcery, surveillance, guerrilla war, villagization, modernization]