A lesser human? Utopian registers of urban reconfiguration in Maputo, Mozambique

Abstract

In the age of climate change, human life’s pliability is also re‐shaping anthropological debates. For debates centring on the urban domain, questions revolve around flexibility, adaptability and resilience, while in work drawing on the Anthropocene similar ideas of human beings as subsumable to Gaia are emerging. This article reflects on how these perspectives interweave and imply a paradoxical human figure. On the one hand, they convey a being that simultaneously infuses, consumes and transmogrifies the world. Conversely, the human figure is forged by theoretical and analytical orientations that prescribe that one should abandon such a human‐centric reading of the world. The latter aspect is particularly evident in so‐called ‘resilience governance’ discourses. These discourses presuppose a form of becoming less through reinventing humanity and human life as more adaptable to post‐future horizons of always already collapsed ecologies. Critically tracing this paradox, this article probes the urban Anthropocene and its lesser humans as desirable under the aegis of ‘resilience governance’ in Mozambique, crucially also mapping and analysing the involvement of utopic registers in defiance of such developments.

Permanent Impermanence in the Anthropocene. The emergence of a guest-worker society in a Patagonian Mountain village

“…I have suggested that the concept of permanent impermanence usefully describes the affective state and way of being in the world that results from a particular ordering of im/mobilization patterns along spatial and temporal dimensions. Referring to emergent dynamics of expulsion and exclusion, it signals the production of a new class of guest workers characterized by a heightened plasticity and pliability-a lesser human (Bertelsen, 2021)-in economic systems organized around seasonality or other forms of temporally circumscribed labor and (directly or indirectly) forced migration (e.g. through the denial of access to citizenship or the impossibility of settling down).…”

Forum: ‘Utopian Confluences’

“…Many thanks to Ruy Blanes and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen for their response to my critique (Bråten 2022a) of their special section on 'Utopian Confl uences' (especially, Blanes and Bertelsen 2021;Bertelsen 2021), and to Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale for publishing the exchange. Th e theoretical questions that arise from our diverging stances are, hopefully, of general interest.…”

Civil war and the non‐linearity of time: approaching a Mozambican politics of irreconciliation

“…Such critical discussions about futurelessness as a figuration of (political) time are not, of course, solely the domain of irreconciliation or event studies. Building on Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe's (2017) critique of both capitalism and racism in an age of the Anthropocene (see also Bertelsen 2021) analyses a thoroughly fragmented subject which Mbembe recognizes as becoming globally common. Centrally, his notion of the ‘becoming black of the world’ seems to indicate the cancelling of the future in a world that is blackened, as it were, by the violence of Anthropocenic politics.…”