Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War

by Stephen C. Lubkemann

Fought in the wake of a decade of armed struggle against colonialism, the Mozambican civil war lasted from 1977 to 1992, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives while displacing millions more. As conflicts across the globe span decades and generations, Stephen C. Lubkemann suggests that we need a fresh perspective on war when it becomes the context for normal life rather than an exceptional event that disrupts it. Culture in Chaos calls for a new point of departure in the ethnography of war that investigates how the inhabitants of war zones live under trying new conditions and how culture and social relations are transformed as a result.

Lubkemann focuses on how Ndau social networks were fragmented by wartime displacement and the profound effect this had on gender relations. Demonstrating how wartime migration and post-conflict return were shaped by social struggles and interests that had little to do with the larger political reasons for the war, Lubkemann contests the assumption that wartime migration is always involuntary. His critical reexamination of displacement and his engagement with broader theories of agency and social change will be of interest to anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and demographers, and to anyone who works in a war zone or with refugees and migrants.

Genres: Anthropology, Africa

413 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Dragoș · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Lubkemann’s Culture In Chaos is a fantastic read and an insightful glance into the transformations that the social lives of actors undergo under conditions of prolonged violence. Particularly insightful is the view of war as a series of whimpers instead of a bang: not the violent fracture point of explosions and mass graves, so dear to the 24 hour news cycle, but a gradual increase in ‘structural violence’ as war edges forward and the fact of being at war comes more as a slow revelation than a terrible, sharp shock.

Leaving aside its incredible historical-anthropological perspective on social change under conditions of violence the book is also singularly interesting from a migration scholarship point of view. Lubkemann deconstructs the idea of the involuntarily displaced migrant as a ‘tabula rasa’, a wasted life caught in a conflict’s borderlands, helpless and deprived of agency by the sinister spectre of conflict. Instead he shows us how even under the threat of war migration is a life project, a well calculated process that takes into account the migrant’s goals and desires. More importantly we see the diversity of wartime migration projects. We are introduced to situations of forced migrants returning into ‘danger zones’ from theoretical ‘safe zones’, of families taking precautionary decisions to migrate based on assessments of the climate of factionalism and paranoia. We see short migration projects, either in scope, space or time and elaborate multi-year migration cycles. Lubkemann shows us that forced migration to a militarized village can be more disruptive to lifepath and opportunities than prolonged stays in refugee camps or long term migration to a different country. And he shows us that just like the war is ‘unbounded’ by such things as outbreaks, truces or ceasefires in the mind of the participant (one of Lubkemann’s informants interviewed in 1999 mentioned that he was going back home only when the hondo was over, despite the fact that the actual war had been over for four years then) so too is the migratory project.

Because despite its glances at magic, kinship and violence it is remarkable how much the issue of migration frames the entire book. From archival research of colonial and pre-colonial times to wartime migration the movement of people, self-interested and central to life-projects forms the backdrop to every scene. Migration, perceived as a nebulous, frightening, quintessentially modern project in the ‘West’ is revealed as a longstanding process intrinsic to traditional life projects. Migrant labour is essential to earning money for the bride-price for men, and essential in creating the atmosphere of liberty for the self-affirmation of married women. Migrant labour was a crucial project for colonial authorities in both the country of sending and the country of destination. Migrant labour was essential in creating the material base for the development of the intelligentsia at the core of FRELIMO. Migrant labour (and itinerant trade) was essential for the survival of the rickety RENAMO. Migration and labour and the consumption practices associated with it shapes the colonial and postcolonial history of Mozambique and the maximization of opportunity cost and ease of access to migration are the fundamental concerns of the population studied by Lubkemann, a concern that can be charted back and that confounds both colonial and postcolonial regimes.

A great, thich, well constructed book, Culture in Chaos manages to be both an in-depth analysis of the social condition of war and a formidable testament to the power of migration in influencing both the destinies of states and individual actors.