Aldeia Comunal Ravene : coletivização, transformações sociais e violência cultural em Moçambique, 1976-1992

Abstract

This PhD dissertation intends to study collectivizing processes, social changes, and cultural violence in Mozambique, taking Ravene Communal Village as the beginning and the arriving center of all possible arguments in order to understand the national movement to build common villages. We begin with the following question: How do we build a collective nation from the ground up without resorting to violence? Our assumption in terms of thesis was that FRELIMO has required symbolic and physical violence to realize and go ahead with his projects. From birth in collective life in liberation zones, common villages were mobilized spaces of frelimist rhetoric, especially among rural people organizers immediately post-independence. The new society and new man needed by Frelimo, should be free of tradition's ties, superstitions, witchcraft, obscurantism, and religion, claiming that these things prevent men from changing. The background of these projects was common village life. Throughout this dissertation, we are working with the violence, physical, and symbolic concepts as the main concepts because they cross over into all chapters. We examine the violence from a symbolic standpoint. That is, silent violence, imperceptible, invisible, and camouflaged for its proper victims. I mean that violence is manifest by symbolic ways of communication, knowledge, recognition, unfamiliarity, and fear. To understand the symbolic violence signs, we begin by analyzing land use and past use issues in the Jangamo region, which leads to a difficult discussion of ethnic and religious differences. Then we discuss the place of FRELIMO ideology and the cultural policy that settles on political rhetoric production in those places. Lastly, we analyze vertical and horizontal changes. This thesis was produced not only by reading authors that wrote on society and culture, but also supported by oral sources following the fieldwork in Ravene (Mozambique), from which we conclude that common villages have resulted in cultural violence. Although one new thing found in the fieldwork helps us understand the GD’s vague work, because they were Frelimo represent in the village, they also collaborated with the community on the opposite discourse of fighting local culture. We conclude our discussion with an epilogue in which we consider the possibilities of the commons living without violence.