Sweeping as a site of temporal brokerage: Linking town and forest in Mozambique

Abstract

Building on 18 months of ethnographic research between 2007 and 2011 in Mozambique, this article explores how sweeping practices elaborate multiple temporalities and thus can serve as powerful sites of “brokerage” where diverse actors and their many agendas meet. Sweeping renders daily activities legible to local residents and illegible to others. Daily sweeping just outside of the home signifies a day’s routine beginning and a family’s availability for receiving visitors. Sweeping also prevents the rapidly growing miombo woodland undergrowth from invading the home space, which partly explains differences in why many local residents see the woodlands as advancing and environmentalists’ argue that the “forest” is disappearing due to illegal logging. Limited understandings of sweeping as banal or wasted time miss the links between many urban-based non-governmental organization and activist practitioners who implement their projects in rural areas. Sweeping blurs and challenges assumed boundaries between urban and rural woodland spaces.