Individualization and the ethopolitics of conflict in rural Angola

Abstract

In this article, my goal is to contribute to the debate about the relation between sociality and individualization. It is under this perspective that I discuss the subject of conflict as social relationing. Concretely, I explore how everyday experiences of conflict between ‘individuals’ in an Angolan rural village can neutralize contemporary threats of asocialization between those same individuals and, in turn, promote commonality. I refer to this affective agency in present-day rural Angola as the ethopolitics of conflict. Although I approach the two subjects, this article is not specifically about individualization or conflict. Rather, it is about the social terrain where the two intersect.

Keywords:

• Individualization
• conflict
• everyday life
• modernity
• asocialization

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Ndala’s residents for their welcoming response to my presence. I am also thankful to the Chitembo administration. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewer for her/his constructive suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This article constitutes part of the research project ‘The Future Okavango’ (TFO) in the Okavango catchment of Angola, Namibia, and Botswana funded by the German Ministry of Science and Education.

Notes

1. Zygmunt Bauman uses the expression ‘modern living’ as inseparable from individualization: ‘to speak of individualisation or modernity is to speak of the same social condition’ (2001a, p. 124).

2. For the most part, the general literature and global public media identify conflicts in Africa with collective violence. With the exception of studies on witchcraft, intergenerationality, and temporary events (such as the case of burials [Smith, 2004]), conflicts in the African continent are rarely approached from the perspective of non-violent everyday clashes, in particular, those resulting from different personal dispositions by ordinary individuals (cf. Lloyd, 2010, in the Angols’s case, see e.g. de Boeck, 2012; Hodges, 2004; Minter, 1994; Pearce, 2004; Bakonyi & Stuvøy, 2005; Thaler, 2012).

3. As an anthropologist, I remain committed to first-hand research in local rural contexts. It is my belief that it is in rural villages that some of the most revealing changes are occurring in the contemporary world. This article was bred from this conviction and therefore is based on my participant observations and performative understandings in the village of Ndala in Southeast Angola. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in this region from May to July 2011; February, March, and July 2012; May 2013; and October and November 2014. Although I developed research in Ndala during these four years, I resided there only during my set of fieldwork in 2012. In 2011, 2013, and 2014, I was mostly based at the town of Chitembo and in the village of Cusseque (both places are less than 45 km from Ndala) and made periodic visits to Ndala.

4. There is a growing body of literature that approaches individualization in rural Africa (see e.g. Eze, 2008; Gyekye, 1997; Masolo, 2010; Mbodj-Pouye, 2013). Despite this emerging literature, individuality in rural Africa is still largely neglected; or at best, approached as a synonym for despotism, gerontocracy (e.g. Terray, 1975), or sorcery – most of all, as a social threat (e.g. Englund, 1999, p. 149; Geschiere, 1997).

5. The study of historical processes of individualization in rural Angola is well beyond the scope of this article.

6. As in many other settings in Africa, in rural Angola the ascendant generations are conventionally expected to sustain the descendants. In turn, when the progenitors achieve adulthood and productive life, they are morally impelled to ‘repay’ the support they received from their parents or grandparents, who meanwhile have become less capable of working. The perpetuation of this intergenerational cycle is based on the condition of retribution, which in this way socializes life courses. ‘Debt logic’ implies that one’s future is safeguarded through a normative moral debt, which perpetuates hierarchical relations (Marie, 2000, p. 141). Clearly, to raise numerous children within this logic is a dispositive of welfare and works simultaneously as a system of capitalization and social protection.

7. Soba is the term used in Angola for the village’s head. Alberto Limbango is the vice head of Ndala and thus locally known as Alberto o Segundo Soba (Alberto the Second Soba).

8. Funge is by far the most common cooked meal in the village. It consists of piled cassava mixed with hot water and served as a puree.

9. ‘BUE fácil, BUE rápido, BUE moderno’, in original Portuguese. The word ‘bué’ is utilized in colloquial Portuguese and means ‘very much’.

10. For a discussion of the varieties of neoliberal policies, see Harvey, (2005).

11. This is a credit system in which someone advances a specific amount of money to another person with the agreement that they will receive double the loan at a future date.