Bodyland Honeybees and the legitimacy of (human) presence in postwar Angola

The Angolan village of Cusseque, established during the country's civil war, lost its military purpose when the conflict ended in 2002. The village's neighbors assumed that Cusseque's remaining residents would leave; most stayed. They have since fought to legitimize their presence. Fieldwork with Cusseque residents helps illuminate why they assert their merging with the land-a merging that I call bodyland-through the agency of honeybees. These men and women exert a compelling body politics, one that is subject to the more-than-human agencies that dissolve the contours of the human. Moreover, Cusseque's residents contribute to anthropological discussions about human-land relations by blending the question of the human with that of the land. They defy pervasive humanist regimes in which the legitimacy of human presence is dissociated from the interdependence between body and land. [human-land relationship, legitimacy, transcorporeality, honey, honeybees, postwar, body politics, Angola]