Dragões, régulos e fábricas: espíritos e racionalidade tecnológica na indústria moçambicana

Abstract

In the most state-of-the-art Mozambican industry (the Mozal aluminium smelter), workers are guided by strict technological rationality, but earlier local systems of misfortune domestication, involving spirits and sorcery, are shared or give rise to plausible doubt amongst most of them. Such rationalities coexist in parallel, and apply in separate spheres: either in normal technological operation, or in interpreting accidents which subvert it. For this reason, and because both systems demand similar attitudes to security, they are not contradictory, nor do they adversely affect productivity and security. There is no reason for the hegemony of technological rationality to lead to the abandonment of «traditional» rationalities.