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How is one to make sense of state formation as a predominantly violent process? More concretely, how is one, as an anthropologist, to understand one’s interlocutors’ repeated insistence on life being a sustained period of suffering ( <i>sofrimento</i> )? One point at which to start is with the most recent large-scale period of violence, namely the Mozambican civil war (1976–92). During this phase of violent upheaval, the traditional field was implicated in complex ways and its reality as a domain of the potential was actualized in various manners vis-à-vis state dynamics and war machine dynamics. By describing the civil war as

DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv8bt1ff.12