Trançando conexões em Moçambique: uma etnografia com mulheres de Maputo e suas apropriações das tecnologias digitais

Abstract

The present research is an ethnographic study with women from the city of Maputo, about their appropriation of digital technologies. As a general objective, I seek to analyze how Mozambican women, residing in the city of Maputo, appropriate digital technologies, in order to identify how access to smartphones, the internet, applications and social media is configured based on their practices. of consumption and their routines. In addition, the specific objectives of the thesis are: to investigate the strategies of appropriation of technologies that are triggered by women in the field of research; analyze specific aspects of the interlocutors' lives, to examine how the different digital platforms integrate their daily lives; and understand whether the female gender regulates certain uses and ways of communicating in social media and apps. As a theoretical reference, the research approaches, mainly, studies on ethnography, on gender, sexuality and family; studies related to the consumption of technologies, internet, smartphones, social media and applications; studies on religion and others; always associating global research with research carried out in Mozambique and on the African continent. This thesis uses the braids of Mozambican women as a narrative to explain the development of the research: from knowing the braids, starting the braid at the root, reaching the ends. Throughout the research, which began with face-to-face fieldwork in August 2019, and went on to a second moment of ethnography for the internet (HINE, 2015), between 2020 and 2023, participant observation, observation in social media and in-depth interviews (in person and through Google Meet and WhatsApp platforms). Among different braids and connections, digital technologies are integrated into the daily life of the research interlocutors, proving to be fundamental for the expansion of their sociability, maintenance of their family relationships, for the experience of their identities and sexualities, for the propagation of their faith, to carry out their studies, to increase their income and work spaces and to update consumption practices. The survey also shows that there is a gender difference in access to technology; that the female gender regulates certain uses (and non-uses) of smartphones, as well as regulating ways of communicating and being in social media and apps.