The fruit of a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in central Mozambique’s Manica province, Violent Becomings—an exploration of statehood in a region long troubled by political conflict—should by all rights be a thickly descriptive and drama-filled study, illuminating local meanings of the recurrent partisan violence that blazed here again in 2013–2016. Where this is the case, anthropologist Bjørn Bertelsen’s book makes for a compelling read, and provides a window on the fraught experience of state power among residents of Chimoio town and a neighboring rural community the author refers to as Honde. Bertelsen’s longue durée approach to state formation lends his analysis additional heft. Although occasionally straining the limits of his sources, his decision to take the long historical view allows him to examine recent violence through the lens of two centuries of struggle between indigenous chiTewe-speaking peoples and a succession of exogenous state-builders: Nguni invaders (1830–90), Mozambique Company concessionaires (1891–1941), Portuguese colonizers (1942–45), Frelimo revolutionary socialists (1964–92), Renamo insurgents (1976–92), and the “wild” postcolonial sovereignties that have contended for power since the civil war’s end. Thus stitched together, these turbulent histories reveal a deepened genealogy of Mozambican statehood not as a linear, institution-based project imposed from above, but as a messy and multiplicitous work in progress, continually resisted by its would-be subjects. In this treatment, sovereignty itself is an ever-evolving mode of control forged through antagonistic interactions between state structures and what Bertelsen calls the “traditional field.” The latter concept, which seeks to capture what his interlocutors refer to as tradição (“tradition”) or tchianhu wo atewe (“the way of the maTewe”), is an umbrella term for nonstate domains of sociality—kinship, sorcery, chiefship—through which the poor engage with sovereign power, fluid “assemblages” of cultural practice themselves born of trespass, contestation, and change.

The book contains a number of helpful reading aids (explanatory notes on language, detailed glossary, etc.), more than thirty illustrations and figures, and an exhaustive bibliography. The introduction contextualizes the author’s research philosophically and historically, weaving together fieldwork vignettes, critiques of scholarship on the African state, and deep dives into postmodern political theory, particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The often abstruse language of the latter discussions may frustrate some readers, and the bad news is that this language recurs, sometimes repetitively, through the seven themed body chapters of the book. The good news is that when in these chapters the author instead foregrounds oral accounts and fieldwork material, his “new wine in old bottles” approach to political history exposes the dynamic interdependence of state and ordinary life in provocative ways.

In Chapter One (“Violence”), the civil war serves as empirical entry point, presenting local memories of abduction, organized killing, and refugee flight to demonstrate the mutually constitutive logics of Frelimo and Renamo brutality in Manica. Statist aggression and guerrilla “war machine,” similarly aimed at reconstituting the rural social landscape, had also to contend with the responses they provoked, including residents’ reconfiguration of livelihoods and identities into the “urban-rural continuum” of present-day Chimoio-Honde—a space no less modern than traditional, where a school teacher/agronomist doubles as the rainmaker who grants ceremonial entry to strangers, including foreign anthropologists. Unfortunately, Bertelsen’s self-positioning in this chapter falls short of recognizing the ways his own presence may have prompted memories or behaviors of particular kinds, or aroused suspicions that blocked his vision in significant ways.

Chapter Two (“Territory”) traces the roots of present-day tensions between aspirant state and traditional field to Manica’s relatively well-documented precolonial past. Here, the author argues that while early campaigns of spatio-political expansion—the Mwene Mutapa, the Uteve, Nxaba’s famously ruthless Nguni forces—relied on the violent extraction of tribute, labor, and people, their predatory tactics also provoked forms of resistance (“lines of flight”) that denied full sovereignty to the state-builders. In the twentieth century, similarly harsh measures employed to capture space and labor in pursuit of institutional statehood shaped the Mozambique Company and late Portuguese colonial administrations; in the former case, historical continuities were personified by a police force dominated by Nguni soldiers. To the extent that colonial-era state-builders achieved greater success in terms of hierarchized territorial control, they did so through increasingly determined invasions of the traditional field: forced-labor sweeps, systematic tax collection, scorched-earth “pacification” tactics, and land appropriation for settlers. Bertelsen’s claim, not entirely new, that these dynamics supplied the necessary precondition for both the modernizing excesses of Frelimo socialism and Renamo’s tapping of popular discontent over the assault on tradiçāo prepares the reader for the examination of more recent—yet historically resonant—sovereignty contests in the remaining chapters.

In Chapters Three (“Spirit”) and Four (“Body”), the focus shifts to numinous domains of daily life, where maTewe beliefs in the spiritual contingency of social, agricultural, and bodily well-being give rise to potent counterforces to statist ordering—some vengeful and destructive, others protective or therapeutic. These difficult, sometimes meandering chapters benefit from detailed ethnographic portraits of n’anga and Christian profete healers, through whose ritual deployment of past suffering the traditional field, Bertelsen tells us, determinedly fights back. Here, we see both tradição’s adaptive resilience against violence and misfortune and its reordering power as an endogenous form of sovereignty in its own right. The postcolonial state’s battle to coopt and control these irrepressible domains of sociality takes institutional form in AMETRAMO (Association for Traditional Medicine in Mozambique), which the author scrutinizes in Chapter Five (“Sovereignty”) as a lens on the state’s longstanding entanglement with witchcraft (uroi) in the Manica region. The final two chapters turn to other critical battlegrounds between statist dynamics and the traditional field, expanding the analytical scope of recent scholarship on neoliberalism and postcolonial governmentality (e.g., the Comaroffs’ work on occult economies, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ concept of “the heterogenous state”) to include gendered relations of food production and reproductive labor in Honde households (Chapter Six, “Economy”) and popular justice via beating, burning, and lynching in the Chimoio bairros (Chapter Seven, “Law”). In these cases, ritual practice and uroi profoundly shape local suspicions of—and challenges to—state-building processes of commodification, accumulation, and judicial governance.

Although Bertelsen’s engagement with theoretical debates about state power has enabled this innovative rethinking of Manica’s political history, these debates play such a prominent role in his story that the book’s audience and impact will likely be narrower as a result. Just as important, obfuscating language, especially around abstracted oppositions of traditional and state domains (rhizomic vs. arborescent, virtual vs. actual, territorializing vs. deterritorializing), thwarts the author’s stated intent to privilege nonelite meanings of state formation. Despite fascinating glimpses of how ordinary Mozambicans in Chimoio-Honde have understood the dangers—and vulnerabilities—of a centralizing political order, Violent Becomings struggles to narrate the poignantly human experiences at its heart, and ultimately cedes interpretive authority to Western (and Western-trained) scholars.