Violent Becomings is a rich, ethnographically grounded study of contested state formation processes in an interconnected rural-urban setting of central Mozambique. With its particular focus on violence and the dynamics of ‘the traditional’, it is undeniably a very important contribution to the anthropology of the postcolonial state. In a clear critique of state-centric approaches, Bjørn Enge Bertelsen shows how the state in ‘the margins’ is an always incomplete, emergent, and contested form of power and mode of organization, while it is also constantly (re)shaped by, and unable to fully tame, non-state orders and forms of sociality. The so-called ‘traditional field’ is seen as a central component of the non-state social orders in Mozambique. A core aim of the book is to investigate why and how processes of state formation have constantly been challenged at multiple societal levels since the precolonial era, through colonial rule, the civil war, and up to the present day. Chapters One and Two provide an original historical reading of the inherent violence of state formation processes – exploring war, territorial expansion, forced labor, and social engineering. Bertelsen shows how those processes not simply challenged, but also altered the ‘traditional field’.
The ‘traditional field ’ is an analytic concept that refers to the English word ‘tradition’, but draws on emic terms used by the local ChiTewe speakers, such as tradicão (Portuguese), tsika (‘tradition’ in ChiTewe), and tchainhu wo atewe (a ChiTewe term that means ‘the way of the maTewe’) (6). Bertelsen does not approach the ‘traditional field’ as static and primordial, but as a changing, heterogeneous, and ever-emergent landscape of social and cosmological potentialities that take shape in relation to, but also rupture, processes of state ordering. Empirically, Bertelsen contends that the traditional field captures the ‘cosmogenetic force of the social’, including uroi (sorcery), spirit possessions, healing, kinship, production and reproduction, and the relationship between territory and ancestors (7).
These different components of the traditional field are analyzed through ethnographic material in Chapters Three through Six, based on fieldwork in the provincial town of Chimoio and a rural village outside of this town. These chapters emphasize the unruly or untamable aspects of ‘the traditional field’, which are juxtaposed to the colonial and postcolonial states’ shifting efforts to establish hierarchically-oriented structures. However, Bertelsen does not reduce the tensions generated by state hierarchies to a simplistic dichotomy between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. Additionally, the book draws on Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's notion of ‘assemblages’ to denote how the traditional field and state forms relate to one another, interpenetrate, and produce conflict. This process is exemplified by the postcolonial state's contested efforts to institutionalize and control traditional healing, as well as by popular understandings that suggest that state elites derive power from sorcery and invisible forces. However, again drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, and highlighting the contradictions of statehood, Bertelsen draws a distinction between, on the one hand, the characteristics of the ‘traditional field’ in Mozambique, which has a ‘deterrorializing, mobile, and horizontal orientation’, and the ‘statist dynamic’ as characterized by territorialization, capture, and vertical orientation, on the other (21). These two orientations constitute conflicting modalities of power, which Bertelesen uses to explain why state efforts to regulate the social are challenged in different spheres of everyday life, such as reproduction, food consumption, burial rituals, and economic exchanges, as well as through people's references to and engagements with spirits. This interaction nonetheless produces instabilities, because state efforts to control and reorder social realities deterritorializes the traditional field, which fractures ancestral relations and ignites sorcery.
Chapter Seven, on ‘multiple sovereignties’, focuses on the urban context of Chimoio town and explores the forms of popular violence, including riots and lynchings of thieves, which increased in Mozambique in the 2000s. The role of ‘the traditional field’ is explored here in relation to law and political authority. Rather than simply highlighting the complementarity of state and non-state orders as does much of the literature on legal pluralism, Bertelsen considers the significance of violence in order-making practices, as well as the existential insecurities produced by overlapping and conflicting authorities. He shows, for instance, how the coexistence of state police officers, civilian community policing actors, and traditional leaders in the town creates uncertainty among city dwellers over who should resolve disputes and crimes. Bertelsen particularly focuses on those uncontrollable forms of sovereign power, which operate outside the law and the bureaucratic hierarchy, yet which each exert the capacity to kill, dominate, and accumulate. These sovereigns include police officers who act outside the law, chiefs, criminal gangs, traditional healers, and the role played by sorcery itself. These multiple sovereignties are part of (trans)forming the state. According to Bertelsen, popular sovereign practices, like lynchings, are born out of uncertainty and serve as a defense of the social, because they target the antisocial (that is, the thieves) and they also critique the state for its repression and incapacity to protect. In this reading, violence is both a challenge to and an assertion of state power.
A notable feature of Violent Becomings is that it illuminates the role of societal forces on their own terms and elucidates a dynamic historical and ethnographic understanding of state formation without being state-centric. However, the book also reveals the difficulty of moving beyond dichotomies. Despite its emphasis on complexity and assemblages, the book frequently falls back on an idealized notion of ‘the traditional field’ (itself a problematic term) while it also ultimately celebrates popular sovereign violence as expressions of benign and benevolent forms of sociality that serve as commentary upon state violence, war, and hierarchical orders. Popular violence is presented as a reaction to antisocial forms that are themselves produced by state interventions. This interpretation of popular violence overlooks people's fear of and uncertainty about (traditional) invisible forces, like sorcery and spirits, and the antisocialities that they produce, which cannot simply be read as reactions to state violence. A more critical approach to what Bertelsen defines as forms of sociality would have strengthened a book that is empirically rich and theoretically strong. Reading this book is highly recommended for anyone interested in state formation, violence, and power.
