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  • Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy, and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique by Julie Soleil Archambault
  • Daniel Jordan Smith
Julie Soleil Archambault, Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy, and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 224 pp.

Anyone who has spent significant time in sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade will have been struck by the dramatic growth in ownership and use of mobile phones. In less than 15 years, Africa has gone from a continent where very few people had access to telecommunications technology to a place where seemingly everyone has a cell phone. Although this spectacular shift has been well documented and many scholars have begun to explore the consequences of widespread access to mobile technology, Julie Soleil Archambault's Mobile Secrets provides, I believe, the first book-length ethnographic account and analysis of this striking phenomenon occurring across Africa.

Much of the scholarly attention to mobile phone technology has focused on its potential to contributions to development—that is, to possibilities for enhanced knowledge regarding markets and prices, improved access to credit and money transfers, more effective dissemination of health information, and so on. While Archambault does not discount these effects, her focus is instead on mobile phones' impact on everyday social life, and particularly on the way that this new technology has become integral to how young people navigate intimacy in contemporary Mozambique.

Based on long-term fieldwork carried out over multiple years on the outskirts of the small city of Inhambane, Archambault provides an ethno-graphically rich, analytically insightful, and highly readable account of the central place of cell phones in young, urban Mozambicans' social lives. Arguing that mobile phones fit within—but also play a key role in enabling [End Page 1169] and extending—what she calls "the politics of pretense," she shows how young people use their phones "as part of an arsenal of pretense designed to cover up some of the contradictions of the postsocialist, postwar economy" (13).

Part of what Mobile Secrets demonstrates is perhaps predictable. When cell phones first emerged, ownership served to mark social and economic status in a world where consumption and display perform an ever more important role not only in demarcating class position, but also in the very fashioning of the self. In Mozambique, as elsewhere, brands, styles, and numbers of phones owned showcased status. But as cell phone ownership has become almost universal (at least in urban settings), ownership is now expected and the nuances of cell phones' association with status have become subtler. While phones are still connected to the presentation of self in urban Mozambique, their ubiquity enabled Archambault to focus on more interesting—and arguably more socially significant—effects of mobile phones in social life.

Archambault's main argument is that mobile phones play a vital role in how young people navigate intimacy. In particular, their most central function is to enable people to "mute and cover up rather than expose and contest social contradictions" (8). Part of what makes Mobile Secrets such a compelling book is that the argument and analysis are multi-faceted and complex. It is not easy to capture its contribution in one sentence or one paragraph. The author does a better job than I can with this: "In Inhambane, everyday life involves seeking a balance between displaying enough without revealing too much, between accessing social status and deflecting envy, and between having a good time and preserving respectability, while embellishing reality, often through concealment" (43). The book demonstrates that mobile phones have become elemental in these dynamics.

While the notion that mobile phones are symbols of conspicuous consumption and social status is well established and predictable, much more novel in Archambault's account is the way that phones allow young people to conceal, to pretend, and to deflect. Following her interlocutors, the author deploys the local Portuguese language term visao, which roughly translates as "seeing" or "vision," to examine how mobile phones are crucial in how young people navigate the complex economy of appearances in their intimate social lives. Visao, Archambault shows, is not only about seeing, but also about playing with the vision of others. [End Page 1170]

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