Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy, and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique - Couverture souple

Archambault, Julie Soleil

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 022644757X ISBN 13 : 9780226447575

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2017

Synopsis

Now part and parcel of everyday life almost everywhere, mobile phones have radically transformed how we acquire and exchange information. Many anticipated that in Africa, where most have gone from no phone to mobile phone, improved access to telecommunication would enhance everything from entrepreneurialism to democratization to service delivery, ushering in socio-economic development.

With Mobile Secrets, Julie Soleil Archambault offers a complete rethinking of how we understand uncertainty, truth, and ignorance by revealing how better access to information may in fact be anything but desirable. By engaging with young adults in a Mozambique suburb, Archambault shows how, in their efforts to create fulfilling lives, young men and women rely on mobile communication not only to mitigate everyday uncertainty but also to juggle the demands of intimacy by courting, producing, and sustaining uncertainty. In their hands, the phone has become a necessary tool in a wider arsenal of pretense—a means of creating the open-endedness on which harmonious social relations depend in postwar postsocialist Mozambique. As Mobile Secrets shows, Mozambicans have harnessed the technology not only to acquire information but also to subvert regimes of truth and preserve public secrets, allowing everyone to feign ignorance about the workings of the postwar intimate economy.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Julie Soleil Archambault is assistant professor of anthropology at Concordia University, in Canada.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2017
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 022644757X
• ISBN 13: 9780226447575
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 203
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible