Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique by Bjørn Enge Bertelsen (review)

In this engaging ethnography, Bjørn Enge Bertelsen reviews the most significant events in Mozambique's history—from the Nguni invasions, to the Portuguese colonization, to the war for independence and the emergence of the postcolonial, civil-war struck state—in order to provide a deep and careful analysis of Mozambique's process of state formation.

The structure of Bertelsen's book is reminiscent of a classic ethnography, in which the anthropologist endeavors to capture all the domains of life in a "community" in a thick volume produced after a long period of deep immersion. Bertelsen implicitly plays with this idea through the titles of his seven chapters: Violence, Territory, Spirit, Body, Sovereignty, Economy, and Law. However, neither is the author's intention to resemble that type of ethnographic structure, nor are his ideas about "community" similar to those that inform such classic scholarship. Like such scholars, the author too has many years of experience living in the field; however, his ethnography privileges specific events over descriptions of daily routines. These events have been selected and thickly described with the intention of supporting the author's main point: the process of Mozambican state formation is constantly in the making. Sometimes, the state powerfully asserts its sovereignty, while at other times it is challenged by what the author calls the "traditional field," or the "experiential dimensions and broad historical trends that crucially shape contemporary and past dynamics of statehood, sociality, and power" (7).

Aware of the problems that can arise from invoking the "traditional" (and the problems, too, that mark assumptions about modernity), Bertelsen argues for tracing the historical trajectories and contingencies of tradition—as Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 90, No. 4, p. 1311–1316, ISSN 0003–5491. © 2017 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of The George Washington University. All rights reserved. tradition means different things to different people and has different implications in different historical periods. Tradition is an open concept, subject to constant change and challenge; and yet, as one of Bertelsen's interlocutors explained to him, it remains the same: "Our tradição is an open tradição. Yet our tradição is always the same. Do you understand?" (18). This sameness over the longue durée is how it penetrates state formation, even while challenging this process.

In his analysis of state formation, Bertelsen critically engages with several strands of scholarship about Africa, from the politics of identity and autochthony (namely Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000; Englund 2006, 2011), to "necropolitics" (namely Mbembe 2001, 2003), to the judicialization of politics (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). He moves away from these analyses, however, through his use of the traditional field as the point of departure for a broader analysis of state formation. In this ethnography, the traditional field is simultaneously an object of study and an analytical tool for critically examining the process of state formation, always in the state of becoming. This permanent becoming is thus built over the productive dialectic (or dynamic friction) between territorialization (stabilization of state power) and deterritorialization forces (destabilization of state power), that cross through all of the chapters.

In his first chapter, Bertelsen describes the violence of the war—first against the Portuguese colonial state and then between the new post-colonial state and the apartheid-supported guerrillas—to make an argument about the permanent tension between forces of territorialization (the Portuguese colonial state, and later the postcolonial state personified in the Frelimo party) and forces of deterritorialization (the anti-colonial guerrilla movements and later, the Renamo guerrillas). In both cases, violence plays an important role, inscribing, erasing, and reinscribing meaning. Contradicting Nordstrom's (1997:35) vision of "un-human" and senseless violence, Bertelsen stresses that war violence is not "randomly performed" (37), nor does it lack purpose. Rather, through its intensity, violence enables productive transformations "where the virtual potentialities of the traditional field are actualized" (50), providing an analytical tool for understanding power formation.

Conflicts over territory are...