Beyond equivalence

Abstract

This article examines questions of gift-giving and debt in order to illuminate differences between an enforcement of the law understood as search for equivalences and enactments of justice expressive of more open-ended transactions. These theoretical elaborations are sustained by ethnographic examples taken from local courts in Nampula province in post-war Mozambique. The article shows how a broad range of practices identified as ‘customary’ engage with the space of ‘official law’, in a specific postcolonial juridico-political space which encompasses multiple spheres and a particular circulation of value. In quotidian instances of local conflict resolution aimed at resolving a myriad of violent conflicts, circuits are opened beyond the doctrine of accounting in official law and its ideology of equivalence. These circuits, in their blending of temporalities and normativities, do not form a closed circle of reciprocity, but show how debt is constitutive of social relatedness and enables a re-constitution of local sociability in the aftermath of violence through the circulation of the gift of justice.