Suchergebnisse

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 explores how telecommunication opens up new virtual spaces of sociality in which people can imagine and enact alternate lives. As Mobile Secrets shows, new technologies have not only facilitated access to information in Mozambique, but they have also helped mute social conflicts, allowing everyone to feign ignorance about the workings of the postwar intimate economy

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 explores how telecommunication opens up new virtual spaces of sociality in which people can imagine and enact alternate lives. As Mobile Secrets shows, new technologies have not only facilitated access to information in Mozambique, but they have also helped mute social conflicts, allowing everyone to feign ignorance about the workings of the postwar intimate economy.

C'est à travers un examen historique de la place de l'objet au sein des études africanistes de la parenté que cet article propose d'aborder certaines transformations tant théoriques qu'empiriques survenues au fil des années. L'article soutient que les études africanistes de la parenté se sont penchées sérieusement sur le rapport aux objets bien avant le « materiality turn » et que cet avant-gardisme s'explique, du moins en partie, par une réalité ethnographique, à savoir le rôle fondamental que jouent depuis longtemps les objets dans la production et la négociation des relations de parenté en Afrique. Les études africanistes « classiques » préfigurent donc en quelque sorte une orientation théorique future sur la matérialité. Suite à un aperçu historique de cet important champ d'étude, j'examine deux « objets de parenté » choisis pour leur rôle transformateur dans la constitution et la redéfinition des rapports de parenté : les téléphones portables et le ciment. Alors que les objets eux-mêmes changent, leur rôle dans la construction des relations de parenté demeure cardinal. En effet, si les sociétés africaines ont longtemps préféré convertir les objets en relations sociales, les objets en sont d'autant plus valorisés socialement.

AbstractAs 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.

Cet article analyse les relations entre la présumée success story du Mozambique et la prolifération, ces dernières années, de la téléphonie mobile. Celle-ci est considérée ici comme un révélateur de la dynamique des transformations en cours dans le pays, en particulier les disparités croissantes et les mutations dans les modes d'accumulation et de redistribution de la richesse. En s'appuyant sur des recherches menées à Inhambane, dans le sud du Mozambique, il s'agit d'examiner quelques-unes des incidences des télécommunications sur la socialité et de démontrer que les pratiques de téléphonie mobile non seulement reflètent et reproduisent les hiérarchies sociales, mais participent également à la négociation des inégalités 1 .

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