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Current frameworks for analyzing conflict in developing nations usually focus on the agendas of national-level parties to conflicts. This article draws heavily on the author’s own ethnographic work in central Mozambique to demonstrate how political alignment during the Mozambican civil conflict (1977-92) was regarded by local actors as a tool for engaging in family- and community-level political struggles. Comparing findings from his own work in the district of Machaze to that of other ethnographic researchers who focused on wartime experiences elsewhere in Mozambique, he shows how the means of violence of national-level parties during the civil conflict were appropriated by local actors in service to local forms of social struggle. He proposes the concept of ‘fragmented war’ to describe such contexts in which national ‘civil wars’ take on a large degree of local character and in which there is considerable variation in that local character as a result of sociocultural and ethnic diversity within a country. The article then documents how wartime migration - as one of the most visible and consequential strategies for reacting to violence - was organized primarily as a response to such micro-level political struggles rather than merely to the state of hostilities between national-level political actors. Different local ‘logics of violence’ thus produced different patterns of wartime displacement throughout Mozambique. Some of the key historical conditions that made wartime violence in Mozambique susceptible to ‘fragmentation’ are reviewed, in order to reflect more broadly on what general conditions might produce ‘fragmentations of violence’ in other war contexts. The article concludes with a discussion of how anthropological approaches can contribute to the demographic analysis of forced migration in culturally diversified war zones.

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This article introduces some of the challenges of doing ethnography in contexts such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea—places where violence and the certainty of uncertainty have become the backdrop for social interaction. It also considers the potential contributions to anthropological theory of such an undertaking. In particular it outlines a fundamental re-orientation towards the concept of "the event." Drawing contrasts with conventional anthropological understandings of how small scenarios (social situations) and paradigmatic social events (rituals) speak to broader processes, this piece argues for an analytical recasting of the "event" as a moment in which cultural creativity is harnessed to the tasks of effecting and legitimizing the social transformations that crises often demand. Such "events" affirm the continuity of social groups even as they participate in the re-organization of social practice and are thus ultimately relevant to any anthropology of actors who confront and seek to effect change.

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