Sociocultural Anthropology Colloquium | “Seeking Shade in Sunny Mozambique: Comfort, Care, and Colorism”

“In Mozambique, shade is a precious resource secured through a mix of foresight and improvisation. Shade is also a special topic of conversation. Attending to the material culture of shade and to embodied ways of engaging built and natural environments, I explore how thermal desires and expectations shape social relations in the Mozambican city of Inhambane, while locating shade-seeking practices within hierarchies of care and labor, or what I call the cultural politics of sweat. Thinking with scholars of thermal colonialism, I show how narratives around thermal dis/comfort also reveal, and sometimes obscure, entrenched forms of colorism rooted in colonial imaginaries of the tropics and settler intimacies that continue to produce privilege and exclusion in Mozambique today. Shade-seeking, then, is not simply about keeping cool, though it certainly is about that too.”

Dr. Archambault is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University and co-editor of AFRICA: Journal of the International Institute. Her work is based on ethnographic research in southern Mozambique and focuses on themes of intimacy, suburbanization, affect, and embodiment. Cutting across much of her research is an interest in how materiality and temporality intersect in the crafting of lives worth living. She is the author of “Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique” (2017), and her recent work has been published in American Ethnologist, Journal of Southern African Studies, Critique of Anthropology, and City & Society. She is currently working on a book project on well-being and the cultural politics of sweat in Mozambique.