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

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.

• Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital
• Things Fall Apart
• Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City
• Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography)
• To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job: Masculinity, Money, and Intimacy in Nigeria
• The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society (Henry Louis Morgan Lecture Series)
• Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai
• The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (California Series in Public Anthropology)
• The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice
• Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic