Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at women’s efforts to produce marital ties and a home in a periurban neighbourhood of Maputo as a lens to explore hierarchy and difference in dividuation processes.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on established theories of personhood in African contexts and specifically, on Roger Bastide’s account of difference as a necessary element for the emergence of the social person (1973), this paper explores processes of dividuation, in Maputo, Mozambique. People, I claim, along with Bastide, are produced out of the plurality of elements that constitute them, and always in fusion with their own alterity.

Exploring the lives of young women, residents of a periurban neighbourhood, this paper analyses the making of personhood through the process of becoming legitimate wives and making a home. Focusing on the domestic relationships that women strive to establish and maintain, the paper shows how these depend on balancing appropriate distances and respecting predefined hierarchies, while weaving ties of unequal co-dependence: women strive to find their place among their in-laws, and strengthen their relationship with their partners by being subservient, patient and enduring. In return, they expect to be respected and financially supported, and to be properly wedded and housed. These morally-determined exchanges compose a fabric of hierarchical ties, which I call tilted, that come to compose women’s personhood. Their social person is never detached from these relationships but, on the contrary, is inherently defined by them.

This ethnographic context affords insights into processes of dividuation that are gendered and inherently unequal. The relationships that compose the person, I argue, are always tilted, whether they are between or within genders. This implies an accounting for questions of power and status differentials in our theorising of dividuation.