ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how the precarity of life in Cateme is sustained by the symbolic violence of spatial capitalist abstractions. In Tete, this modality of precarisation manifested through the unstable promise of a “better life” that – only realisable through one’s full participation in the world dominated by exchange value – cannot be achieved in the resettlement site. Cateme merely provides an ideological semblance of “development” in order to legitimise the social devastation caused by extractivism: it does not directly serve the logic of capital accumulation, and its primary function, instead, is to absorb the populations dispossessed by, and not needed for, the mining enclave development. The rural resettlement, whilst socially and politically legitimised as a development opportunity, is thus ultimately shaped as a constitutive underside of the extractivist space. This discussion demonstrates that, subjecting the dispossessed population to the aspirations that cannot be realised within the resettlement site, the promise of a “good life” is a form of symbolic violence that engenders a specific modality of precarisation: it fetishises a “good life” intertwined with continuous circuits of exchange value as the only possibility of a liveable life.
