"The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique" by Juan M. Obarrio

Juan M. Obarrio

Deposited 2006

Abstract
This thesis studies the interrelation of several distinct juridical regimes in contemporary Northern Mozambique. It provides a historical and socio-anthropological analysis of questions of law and justice as a means to explore transformations in a postcolonial state engaged in a transition from socialism, cold war geopolitics and massive internal conflict, towards democracy and the rule of law. Overall, it explores the current status of the "precolonial" and "custom" as crucial issues vis-à-vis current technologies of governance. As a product of field research, it constitutes an ethnography of a group of local authorities—mayors, community judges, secretaries of neighborhood, customary chiefs—and their perspectives on and in a period of change and translation, a time of renewal and uncertainty.

The theme of the dissertation is the status of the force of law in an African postcolony. The study explores this concept in two central ways: the sovereign legitimacy of legal norms ("official" or "customary") on the one hand; and the underlying violence that is the backdrop for the actual enforcement of the law, on the other. Issues of temporality and spatiality are examined in relation to the juridical, as a foreign trans-national, politico-economic vector seems to intersect every space of locality, and novel economic trends recast the political scope and historical depth of "tradition".