Orgies of the moment: Bataille’s anthropology of transgression and the defiance of danger in post-socialist Mozambique

Abstract

In this article I explore socially marginalized young men’s excessive acts of violence, drug use, death race and unsafe sex against the background of George Bataille’s anthropology of transgression. When young men in the Mozambican capital engage in dangerous sex or violent riots, the findings indicate, it is less a sign of ignorance about HIV or indifference towards the rule of law than an expression of living in a ‘state of emergency’ where transgressive defiance of danger and death become attractive. Everyday transgressions of young men who call themselves moluwene (wild, unruly) are moulded in narratives and acts which at once oppose a smouldering socialist ideology of education and a neoliberal regime exiling marginalized young men from the realms of work and consumption to permanent unemployment, poverty and orgies of the moment.

Journeys of patronage: moral economies of transactional sex, kinship, and female migration fromMozambique toEurope

“…Despite this disempowerment, men do envision alternative livelihoods in the informal economy. As scholars have shown, even in African contexts where young men's lives are characterized by poverty and uncertainty, masculine performances and fantasies of invincibility and consumption provide creative and morally founded critiques of exclusion (Groes‐Green ; Mains ; Weiss ). While poor unemployed young men scrape by, enter the informal economy of petty crime, or become street vendors in the city (see Agadjanian ), young women, by contrast, seem to stand a better chance of social mobility and generating incomes for their families by utilizing their resources in the thriving sexual economy.…”

‘Travelling While Sitting Down’: Mobile Phones, Mobility and the Communication Landscape in Inhambane, Mozambique

“…These expressions underscore a felt awareness of the way in which ‘mobility … has been unequally disseminated’ (McIntosh 2010: 344). In southern Mozambique, economic disparity is experienced as particularly painful given the legacy of socialism with its emphasis on equality and, more recently, post-war neo-liberalization and its promises of social mobility (Groes-Green 2010: 393; Sumich 2008: 122–3). If narratives of stasis emerge from the specificities of Mozambique's post-war, post-socialist economy, they also speak of much broader shared experiences.…”

A Definition for Wildness

“…Then, wildness leads to animalistic behavior and is to be shunned. Examples abound, fictional and nonfictional, where living in wildness without restraint causes social breakdown (Ballard, 1999;Brand & Smith, 2000;Golding, 1954;Groes-Green, 2010). The fear of wildness sometimes led white colonialists to commit extreme cruelties against the Indians they considered the epitome of the ''wild man'' (Taussig, 1987).…”