Ambivalent Participation: Sex, Power, and the Anthropologist in Mozambique

Abstract

Participation in young peoples' sexual cultures in Maputo, Mozambique led to reflections about the field dynamics of power, participation, desire, and discomfort. Structural inequalities of race, gender, and educational status resulted in informants seeing me as a morally righteous person to whom they could not give open accounts about sexual practice. Attempting to overcome these barriers, I participated in excessive nightlife activities, and as a consequence they began viewing me as a more accepting and reliable person. Although breaking down these barriers provided invaluable insight into their sexual culture, it also caused anxiety and troubling desires vis-à-vis informants. I discuss how anthropologists, through fieldwork are transformed from powerful seducers of informants to objects of informants' seduction. This creates dilemmas for the anthropologist whose fieldwork depends on informants' continued participation. I show how negotiating the risks of participation may simultaneously satisfy the desire for knowledge and curb erotic desires.

Keywords:

• desire
• fieldwork
• Mozambique
• participation
• power

Notes

All names used in the article are pseudonyms.

A local Bantu language spoken by the majority of the population in Maputo.

Oral sex was a common sexual activity among informants, both man to woman and woman to man. The latter form of oral sex was called broche.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Groes-Green

Christian Groes-Green holds a PhD in public health from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Since 2007 he has conducted extensive fieldwork in urban Mozambique. In 2008 he was a visiting fellow at Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York. He is co-editor of the book Studying Intimate Matters (forthcoming).