Enacting Compassion: Hot/Cold, Illness and Taboos in Northern Mozambique

In northern Mozambique, those who are ‘hot’ have the ability to harm others who are ‘cool’ through missteps in rules governing sexual activity and cooking. Such taboo complexes have been recorded across southern Africa, with analysis focused primarily on the polluting dangers of heat and the importance of metaphysical balance for well-being. My focus on hot/cold proscriptions as a cultural script – simple sentences that lay bare clear dominant social values by capturing group norms and concerns – enables a generative extension of dominant symbolic and structuralist approaches by shifting analysis from the rules themselves to context and practice. Through an analysis of ‘mgosyo’ – hot/cold proscriptions and the illnesses that result from their transgression in the Nyanja (Maravi) lake-shore town of Metangula – I argue that the quotidian nature of the complex forces continuous, active thinking about others in order to maintain social relations, avoid calamity, and claim belonging through the fulfilment of social roles that require compassionate sensibilities. Heavy weight on becoming rather than merely being moral, as an element of constructing and asserting personhood, means that individuals are perpetually obliged to craft their actions in a way that shows consideration for the well-being of others, a feature that implies that standard distinctions between morality and ethics may be based on monadic tenets. The ethnographic fieldwork presented here suggests that the relationship of mgosyo and the underlying value of compassion as essential for leading a moral life may be shifting in the economic, social, and historical context of the 21st century, reflecting transformations in threats to and constitutions of well-being in contemporary Mozambique.