Urban and Rural: Circulation and Mobility in Families on the Periphery of Maputo.

In the course of her research into livelihood and social reproduction strategies in families living on the periphery of Maputo, the author observed that the circulation of people and goods between the urban and rural environments represented not just a recurrent economic strategy but also a means of preserving and re-creating the ties between different nuclei of the same family. After a brief depiction of the wider context and the changes which the city of Maputo underwent in the closing decades of the 20th century, this article examines the circulation phenomenon through the lives of two families living on the periphery of Maputo. The author contends that although circulation can take diverse forms, not just from family to family but within the same family over the course of time, this diversity in no way detracts from the importance of the ties that are established by circulation or from the different kinds of exchange that such circulation necessarily involves. The phenomenon is therefore a key variable in the analysis of the processes underlying the development of the strategies pursued by families – strategies which, in the specific context, can essentially be characterized as the articulation of many different resources and sources of income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]