Introduction: Work and Identity in the Moroccan Atlas
Aim and Scope
This dissertation is about identity, and more specifically the conditions of identity production in Tagharghist, a village in the mountains south of Marrakech, Morocco. The people who live here are part of the larger category of Moroccans called “Berbers” by most Westerners and IshelHin by themselves. The term “Berber” has mainly been considered by scholars to denote a linguistic category rather than an ethnic group, at least since the 1950s when the downfall of the French protectorate inspired a sense that the distinction between Berbers and Arabs was a product of the colonial imagination, a means to divide and conquer. Post-colonial nationalist scholars were concerned to build a unified, modern Morocco and for them the linguistic and possibly ethnic diversity represented by “the Berber question” was perceived as a threat. More recently the Amazigh (Berber) rights movement has challenged the elision of Arab/Berber distinctions and the notion that the French invented them. Amazigh activists consider state policies of Arabic-only classrooms and a law that makes non-Arab names illegal for newborns to be part of an orchestrated government repression of Berber language and culture. Such activists counter the “Arab Morocco” vision with what they see as a unified Amazigh language, history, and culture that extends across North Africa and back to the dawn of recorded history. From this viewpoint Arabs are but recent arrivals and should be considered with other invaders, from Phoenicians, Romans and Vandals to the Portuguese, Spanish and French. For Amazigh activists, Berbers are Imazighen: members of a broad, unified cultural and linguistic community.
Thus there is a clear disagreement between Amazigh activists and most non-Amazigh Moroccan scholars about Berber identity. What the two groups have in common, however, is that they are urban, literate and familiar with broader discourses of nationalism, post-colonialism, cultural self-determination, human rights, and so forth. My research concerns people who are but objects in this debate: rural, illiterate IshelHin. The guiding question of the research is how these impoverished mountain farmers see themselves and their relevant social world, what matters to them in terms of political, ethnic or other identity. My conclusion is that the extreme positions in the contest over Amazigh and Moroccan identity do not fit the situation in Tagharghist. The villagers are neither simply Moroccan nor essentially Amazigh in the terms outlined by activists. Speaking Tashelhit, the variety of Berber (or Tamazight) prevalent in Southern Morocco, does matter to some people in some situations. Most of the time it does not. In this dissertation, then, I try to outline the social contexts through which people make sense of their lives in Tagharghist, and then show why forms of identity articulated by Amazigh activists and Moroccanist scholars only partly fit these local notions. I focus on three main frameworks: geography, history and power (or space, time and power, as I refer to them below). I see the specificities of these domains as fundamental to social life in Tagharghist, and thus to local processes of identity formation.
Most scholars would classify the people of Tagharghist either as poor (Moroccan) farmers or as Berbers. My primary contention is that in order to understand either poverty or Berberness, we need to understand the relation between the two. By this I mean we need enter into the subjective experience of being poor and Berber, we must look at how notions of poverty and Berberness emerge from within people's lives rather than how we might categorize them from without. In Tagharghist, poverty is not an absence of work. It has nothing at all to do with poverty as it is often experienced in urban Morocco, as unemployment. In fact, the problem in Tagharghist would better be termed super-employment, the continuous inescapable need to expend great physical effort to stay alive. Poverty in this sense is generative, a motivation to labor rather than an absence of opportunity to work. Sometime similar might be said about being Berber. From outside we might see in Tagharghist a pristine Berber culture or society, which, depending on our theoretical taste, might be expressed as an elegantly ramifying kinship logic or a vibrant set of local meanings about everything from masculinity to the authority of the King. These issues are related to work too, however. The logic of kin relations that so fascinates some anthropologists is, in Tagharghist, primarily deployed (consciously and deliberately) to organize necessary communal labor. The Berber cultural consciousness that interests scholars and activists is in Tagharghist born of interactions with non-Berbers. Typically these interactions happen in the context of some power asymmetry (with a state agent or an NGO) during negotiations to get something done (to build a school or reduce pasture use). This is not to say we can or ought to reduce culture to a list of practical functions or poverty to a binary “too much/too little” work. It is to say that by viewing cultural questions from the perspective of what people actually do all day, we may bring fresh perspectives to old concerns.
There are several reasons why such questions are worth investigating. Firstly there is an academic obligation to clarify our view of the contemporary social situation in Morocco. There are striking contradictions in the literature on rural Morocco and one purpose of this document is to provide ethnographic evidence from one time and place that bears on larger academic debates about language, power and identity in Morocco. Second, the question of Berber or Amazigh identity is part of a broad scholarly interest in identity movements worldwide. Clearly we are witnessing a global explosion of identity politics, from Islamic fundamentalism to radical environmentalism. Most such movements produce texts –Web pages, manifestos or newsletters-- that specify who members think they are and what they're about, and the Amazigh rights movement is no exception. My research focuses on people who are not part of such an organized, purposeful movement, but are instead the subjects of it. This provides a counterpoint to much academic work on identity.
Finally, the analysis of social conditions that I provide is meant to be useful in terms of Moroccan and international development schemes. There is a massive World Bank funded project beginning in the area where I did research, but very little available data on the social and political world that this project will impact. The development literature that exists passes quickly over the fact of Berber linguistic distinctiveness and addresses some forms of social inequality while missing others entirely. Amazigh activists are quite correct that the linguistic distinctiveness of Imazighen/Berbers has been largely written out of Moroccan history and society. This has real political economic importance when the state acts to “improve” local conditions. Change is inevitable for this part of the world, and from a village perspective this is welcome. Villagers have no romantic illusions about their lives as subsistence farmers in a high, rugged area and they are guardedly optimistic about the arrival of Peace Corps volunteers, state education, new roads, and other transformations. I hope that this document can help shape this change, that it facilitates useful understanding between the local people who helped me write it and the bureaucrats, officials and agents who may be able to read it.
In the 14th century the scholar Abderrahman Ibn Mohammed Ibn Khaldun wrote that Berbers were “powerful, redoubtable, brave and numerous; a true people like the Arabs, Persians, Greeks and Romans” (quoted in Chaker 1989:5, my translation). Today, however, more than 1,200 years after the first Arab invasions, the nature of these autochthonous, “true people” of North Africa, and the status of the language they speak, is not so clear. While there remain thousands of villages where forms of Berber are the first or only language spoken, and while there are millions more Berber speakers outside of the mountains, scattered from the beaches of Agadir to university lecture halls in Paris and Montreal, the connection between the existence of Tamazight speakers and the more elusive condition of being Amazigh is not at all obvious.
To begin, I suggest that the root of the trouble with this “Berber question” is that Berber speakers are never merely Berbers. Language is not culture and culture, in any case, is not all that matters. There are a great many things that are important to the villagers I portray below, some of which are related to language, Amazigh-ness or “culture,” but many of which are not. Mountain Berbers share a great deal with poor people everywhere, for instance, since poverty seems to entail a certain convergence of concerns around very fundamental questions of staying alive. Beyond this there are more particular concerns that people in Tagharghist share with other rural Moroccans, with all other Moroccans, with other North Africans, and indeed with all Muslims, especially Sunni Muslims. On the most banal level much of what is significant in these villagers' lives is common to all other human beings, but at the same time there are many ways these particularly interrelated, Amazigh human beings are divided amongst themselves –by sex, age, and economic standing, not least. There are also many ways the villagers in this study are different from Berber speakers in other regions of Morocco, and especially urban areas, and there are other ways they can be distinguished from Berbers in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali, and Niger.
What I present, then, is not a “Berber ethnography,” and still less an ethnography of “Berber culture,” but an inquiry into the lives of a particular group of people who speak Tashelhit, one variety of Tamazight, or Berber. My purpose is primarily to outline what these people see as important in their world, and then ask what might be “Berber” about this. This thesis is thus primarily concerned with the conditions in which identity is formed and the things people do to cope with them. In particular I examine the significance of space, time, and power to identity formation, the process by which these villagers discuss and define themselves and their relevant social world. I hope first of all to evoke the geographic, historical and political landscape of Tagharghist. I then suggest how forms of identity are cultivated within this.
My method is necessarily intensive rather than extensive. I am nothing close to a native speaker of Tashelhit and I base most of my arguments on events I observed and things people told me directly about these events. There are undoubtedly important subtleties of which I am totally unaware and I do not emphasize terminology, the ways certain words are sometimes thought to illuminate key aspects of culture or identity. Instead my assertions emerge from the diffuse and inexact process of living among a small group of people, working with them, eating with them, following the events in their lives as they unfolded in slow, daily procession. I collected nitpicky facts about who was related to who, who owned what, who had rights to what water, fields and pastures, who did what jobs, who traveled where, who married who, who worked with who and why. I talked with the people I lived with about their lives, too, usually informally and often in relation to the very strange fact that I was there amongst them. The purpose of what I was doing –the meaning of my work and life—was a curious thing to these villagers and so we shared an interest in figuring out what was important to each other, and we talked a great deal about it. Certainly the oddity of my work caused people to reflect upon theirs. I recorded and translated some of the best of these talks. What I portray here is based upon aspects of my own daily experience in the village of Tagharghist, my recorded observations of what people did and with whom they did it, and some slightly “harder” data on economics, family relations, and marriage patterns. I also use some of the transcriptions from taped interviews in which I asked people to talk specifically about life in the mountains of southern Morocco.
If the general research question covers a lot of ground, the focus is on one small place: the village of Tagharghist in the Agoundis Valley. The people here are almost all monolingual speakers of Tashelhit, the term for the local variety of Tamazight, or Berber. The Arabic for the linguistic category of Tashelhit is Shleuh and the majority of the territory where it is spoken is in the Moroccan South, from Marrakech to the fringes of the Sahara. Based on their use of Tashelhit, the people of Tagharghist usually refer to themselves as IshelHin, which they distinguish from the two other languages with which they're mainly familiar, T'arabt (Arabic, spoken by 'Araben) and Tafransist (French, spoken by Fransawin). The French are often lumped with other Europeans and called irumin, foreigners, and it is sometimes difficult to convince villagers that foreigners speak anything but French. The situation is not so simple as a division of people by what they speak, however. The people of Tagharghist on occasion call themselves 'Araben --Arabs, technically speaking-- in certain situations when they are contrasting themselves as Moroccans or Muslims with Christian foreigners. I explore this further below. There are distinctions among linguistic categories, and a consciousness that people who speak certain languages form different groups, but these are contextual. There is no straightforward, permanent correlation between terminology and identity, language and social category. “Berber” –as language or ethnic group—cannot be taken for granted as a simple social given. A variety of considerations affect the perceived significance of speaking Berber and my focus shall be mostly on these formidable, formative conditions.
It thus bears repeating that the people of Tagharghist should not be taken as a synecdoche for Berbers everywhere. They are not necessarily representative of Berbers in Morocco or even all IshelHin, many of whom today live in large cities, both in Morocco and Europe. As was once typical of anthropology, I present here a detailed study of a very limited place and make my larger assertions from that, working, so to speak, from the ground up. As in all such cases, the further I get from the ground the less sure are my arguments. I believe strongly, for instance, that my presentation of the way households matter and operate in Tagharghist is correct; I am considerably less certain about what this means for the far larger questions of a general Amazigh consciousness or a politics based on it. There is little enough written about these larger issues, however. I engage them because I think have something to say, not because I think I have the final word.
The village of Tagharghist itself is built of mud and rock houses piled one atop another on a mountainside. It looks something like a cubist painter's vision of a huge termite mound, a seemingly single agglomeration stacked precariously above the Agoundis River. In 1999 this hive of a place was home to 212 people organized into twenty-nine households, three nominal ikhsan, and five functional khamas. (See Appendices 1 and 2 for a list of the households and their family affiliations.) The complicated way these different social levels interact forms the core of Chapter Four on Power.
About 90% of the villagers live in Tagharghist more or less full time. “Membership” in households, and thus the village, is determined in the first instance by descent and marriage, but also economically as those who receive sustenance from, and contribute to, any one of the twenty-nine households that comprise “the village.” Tagharghist can be considered a bounded social unit, even if its boundaries are permeable, because it functions as an irrigation collective. Life in these mountains is vitally dependent on irrigation and for this reason the village stands as an institution matched in importance only by the household. As I have suggested, these households are thought to comprise three ikhsan, or “bones,” and these are for some productive purposes divided in to five fifths, or khamas. These might be thought of as lineages though there is less concern with “real” genealogical relatedness than creating functional, socially useful fifths. Two of the five fifths are comprised of the same biological lineage, two others are amalgamations of various residual households, and only the final fifth is indeed an ikhs, a bone, a single named patrilineal group with an identifiable ancestor.
Most households, or tikatin, survive primarily from crops of barley and maize that they raise in the intricately terraced and irrigated fields around the village. People also herd goats and sheep in the mountains above them, or at least some people do. They harvest walnuts and almonds that they sell at market and many women keep a cow penned below their house for milk and have a few chickens running around for eggs. The village sits more than 5,000 feet above sea level and summers are hot and long and dry; winters are cold and generally clear, though there is occasionally considerable snow. Population is rising and increasingly daughters and sons are sent out of the mountains to work as nannies, waiters, and miners, or as laborers on the big capitalist farms of the plains. Sometimes these migrants hive off from their parent households and make their own way in the world, either in the city or by establishing their own absentee households in the village. Other times they contribute their earnings to their natal tikatin and continue to function as part of them.
In addition to rising population and migration other changes are afoot. A dirt road was constructed between my first visit in 1995 and my second in 1998, allowing trucks into the upper part of the Agoundis Valley for the first time. A government school was built while I was doing fieldwork. A long-moribund national park in the area became active not long before I arrived, and in particular seemed concerned with pastures the people of Tagharghist sometimes use. A host of development projects are still underway, sponsored by organizations ranging from the Moroccan state to the Peace Corps and World Bank. Whatever I might have to say about what it means to live in Tagharghist is thus a statement about what it is coming to mean. Circumstances are in considerable flux and one challenge of the inquiry lies precisely here. There is no essential and timeless meaning to Berberness that I can relate, nor do I believe in the possibility of one that could be extricated from the many other things that matter to self and group identity.
For the people of Tagharghist a consciousness of “being Berber” is one small part of being human, along with being poor, Moroccan and Muslim, male or female, having rights to certain fields and orchards, living in a particular house, having a given position in a family, traveling certain paths, visiting specific family connections in other villages and cities, using certain pastures, having a set of friends, and so forth. In Tagharghist various forms of identity emerge from a dense social matrix that must be maintained and mobilized to insure survival in a world of hard physical labor and terrible poverty. It is this labor --and the poverty of which it is born –that dominates the way time is spent, space is used, and power is expressed. For this reason I pursue the question of what it means to be poor and Berber through the lens of daily practice, or work. My purpose is not to forward a sociological argument about the meaning of work, only to show how we might better understand the experiences of rural poverty and contemporary Berberness in one place by viewing them through the lens of daily practice.
Theoretical Entanglements
Addressing the relationship between labor and identity among Berber speakers requires engagement with a range of theoretical issues that cannot be thoroughly addressed here. In any case, I consider my primary task to be ethnographic rather than theoretical. I concentrate more on revealing the subjectively important dimensions of everyday life in the mountains than on examining the relevance of these dimensions for different scholarly projects. This is not to say that I had no scholarly project of my own in mind, and it bears explaining what this was and how it influenced the depiction I present.
Most importantly, I have a longstanding interest in labor. This takes the form of a broad conviction of the importance of work to social life rather than a precise formulation of the sociological implications of labor, or even what sorts of work are important for what kinds of people. I accept the basic position that as humans we produce the social, physical and cultural world we live in, and that the production of these domains is intertwined and interrelated. This intertwining production is very difficult to unravel, of course, but the fact of its existence seems to me essentially incontrovertible. It seems equally clear that within this overall social/physical/cultural production people do vastly different sorts of work. Dramatic differences in what we do (and inequalities in who does what for whom) are a hallmark of my own society. If I expected to find something different in the mountains of Morocco, I was disappointed. Thus the basic set of understandings I took to the mountains included the idea that what people do is important to who they are, and that different forms of inequality bear strongly on what people do. I took to the field a conviction that little of cultural or social significance could be grasped without consideration of the work of everyday life.
The identity part of the equation was and is more vexing. I do not assume, as some theorists seem to, that everyone has a “primary identity” that structures all others. Perhaps this is true for some people, especially activists committed to some cause or another, or ethnic groups or nations at war. These seem to me situations in which the rich and shifting complexity of social identity collapses into rigid terms of opposition, but this strikes me as the exception rather than the rule. Usually, how people see themselves depends on a great number of things, what they are doing, who they are talking to, how they imagine their interlocutors see them and the world. This is worth noting in terms of “reflexivity.” Surely some measure of the view I got from Tagharghist is bound up in the particular person I am and the kinds of questions that interested me. Clearly I am not alone in this, and as I detail some of the positions taken on who Berbers are I want to be clear that I am not trying to say that I have the single correct interpretation of Berber life while other ethnographers and activists somehow got it all wrong. What I do contend is that my set of biases –towards understanding life in terms of labor and inequality—brings a different vision of contemporary Berber life into the realm of scholarly discourse, into what Geertz calls “the consultable record” (1973:30).
Berber speakers are estimated to make up 40% of the Moroccan population, so the question of their place in Moroccan society is of practical and political concern, especially as rural Berber speakers are increasingly educated in Arabic and migrate to urban areas. In such conditions notions of “tradition” and “culture” assume new, and newly meaningful, forms. As I have noted, literate Amazigh scholars and activists are now disseminating strikingly modern notions of their identity. These notions are modern in their expression (Websites, cultural organizations, Internet discussion groups, radio programs), their location (cyberspace and urban centers rather than villages and small towns) and in their forms. The modern, activist form of Amazigh identity is explicitly culturalist, involving a meaningful essence seen to infuse all Imazighen everywhere and to stretch back to the very origins of North African history. Such activists argue forcefully that not only is there is salience to the notion of Berbers qua Berbers, but that this distinct, enduring Berber culture is under threat. As professor Salem Chaker writes, “C'est qu'être Berbère aujourd'hui -et vouloir le rester- est necessairement un acte militant, culturel, éventuellement scientific, toujours politique” (Chaker 1989:7). For scholars such as Chaker, to be Berber in North Africa is itself a political act.
But North African states and their Arabist ideologues are not the only problem for this vision of a unified Berber culture. Some Western scholars, most famously Ernest Gellner, seem to contradict the claims made by Chaker. In a very influential volume on Arab/Berber relations in North Africa, Gellner writes “the Berber sees himself as a member of this or that tribe, within an Islamically-conceived and permeated world --and not as a member of a linguistically defined ethnic group” (Gellner 1972:13, emphasis original). The difference between Gellner's statement and an activist vision of a unified, essential Amazigh identity is clear. Abdellah Hammoudi contends, “Today's use of Amazigh resonates with the vibration of a radical freedom” (1997:115); Gellner writes “Arab and Berber are not corporate groups; they are simply linguistic classifications” (1969:73). Gellner's work on Berber tribal life does provide a view of Berbers as culturally inclined towards equality and liberty, but he also portrays Berber society as fragmented and pre-modern, isolated from the Moroccan state and nation. This complicates activist efforts to develop broad Berber/Amazigh consciousness necessary to fight for cultural and linguistic rights. The question of the nature of Berber identity thus couples arcane debates in social theory to real political concerns.
In terms of social theory, what Gellner makes clear in his study of the nature of Berber society is that it is “segmentary.” The important entity is the tribe rather than the language, at least to the extent that a segmentary society can be said to have any stable social “entities” within it at all. Indeed, a pillar of Gellner's thesis is that such segments are ephemeral; they emerge only in response to particular threats at particular political “levels.” His main theoretical thrust is that tribes contain –or did contain-- nested, isomorphic segments balanced against each other. Tribes themselves can combine to form larger entities that mirror the organization of the component units.
Such an notion builds explicitly on Emile Durkheim's notion of “mechanical solidarity” where, as Gellner puts it, “similarity is not merely lateral but also vertical: it is not simply that groups resemble their neighbors at the same level of size, but it is also the case that groups resemble, organizationally, the sub-groups of which they are composed, and the larger groups of which they are members. This is totally unlike the organizational principle on which our own society is based” (1987:31). Gellner draws his idea that such segments coalesce and fragment in response to changes in the balance of power from the work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard. Importantly, Gellner does not argue that patrilineal genealogical relatedness was amongst the elements in that mattered in Berber social organization, but that it constituted the only principle of any significance. He writes, “A group is sub-divided into sub-groups: they in turn sub-divide, and so forth. This principle of division and sub-division generates all the groupings which are to be found in the society. In other words, there are no cross-cutting groups and criteria” (1969:42, emphasis added). While he noted the difference between lay and saintly lineages (the “saints” referred to in his famous title), there are no other significant social entities in Gellner's formulation.
Durkheim himself initially drew from the early ethnography on Algerian Berbers, especially Kabyles, to develop the thesis of mechanical solidarity. In De la division de Travail social Durkheim defines the ideal terms of mechanical solidarity among extinct societies, then gives Berbers as a living example of such a social type. He writes, “Thus, among the Kabyles the political unity is the clan, constituted in the form of a village (djemmaa or thaddart); several djemmaa form a tribe (arch'), and several tribes for the confederation (thak'ebilt), the highest political society that the Kabyles know. The same is true among the Hebrews.... These societies are such typical examples of mechanical solidarity that their principal physiological characteristics come from it” (Durkheim 1964 [1893]: 178). The significant theoretical issue is that all of Durkheim's and Gellner's levels or forms of “political unity” are homologous.
In terms of contemporary Tagharghist Gellner and Durkheim are plainly wrong. The village is in no way an undifferentiated “clan.” Heterogeneously constituted households comprise five equally heterogeneous “fifths.” These appear to be structurally similar but are in fact very different from one another, and are constructed differently depending on the purposes to which they are put. The internal organization of the fifths does not resemble the households of which they are made or the village that they in turn comprise. The larger political units in which Tagharghist figures are also complex, “organic” in their structure, and bear no homologous relation to the organization of the village, the fifths, or the households. It would seem to me unlikely that settled farmers of the High Atlas would ever have had the same kind of social organization as pastoralists from the Middle Atlas because the organizational principle in question is being put to different uses. That is, patrilineal genealogical relatedness is a useful conceptual tool to organize political associations among moving populations of shepherds, and as I will show it is a useful way of organizing irrigation amongst settled patrilineally related farmers. However, being settled, farmers also have villages, spatially determined social units of great importance. This is why I tend to agree with the French colonial emphasis on the importance of village councils, and more generally why I view “crosscutting” social ties as being extremely important in Tagharghist. I seek to show the practical uses of genealogical relatedness and its place in the larger social world rather than trying to reduce the social world to any one organizational structure or principle.
This does not mean that in other times and places Berber societies could not have been organized differently. I am suspicious that the political organization of Gellner's Moroccan Berber pastoralists in 1969 should have resembled the organization of huge villages of settled farmers in Algeria a hundred years earlier, but my main concern is with Tagharghist in 2000. However, Hugh Roberts has argued trenchantly that Durkheim got it wrong in the first place, seriously skewing the original Kabyle ethnography to fit his thesis (Roberts 1993). Roberts's penetrating essay also demonstrates the ways in which Gellner misrepresented French ethnography to support his scheme, ignoring contradictory evidence from some authors and ignoring other authors altogether. In more empirical terms, Henry Munson has pointed out the irrelevance of Gellner's segmentary model for the Moroccan Rif, in the north of the country (Munson 1989, 1991) and in the very area Gellner did his fieldwork (Munson 1993). While scholars such as Wolfgang Kraus make the case that in the area of the Atlas where Gellner worked there is today a sense of “segmentary identity,” it is unclear what this has to do with contemporary political organization (Kraus 1998). Kraus asserts the essential continuity of pre-colonial political forms, but he does not cite Roberts or address his reading of the ethnographic record, a record that suggests to me that as a model for Berber society “segmentation” has been fatally overextended. Moreover Kraus, like Gellner, ignores the diversity of institutional structures in Berber society in favor of an ideal model for how society might be constructed in a state-less political vacuum. The material presented here does not discount the relevance of “segments” to Berber society or patrilines to identity. It does suggest that in order to understand such notions we need attend to what people do with them, to look at their actual manifestations and various uses rather than formal properties.
Gellner's comment above that Berber society is “totally unlike” our own is from my perspective a kind of Orientalist illusion, a fixation on a “balanced” society rather than a balanced account of the untidy nature of real society. Durkheim's suggestion that Kabyles and Hebrews derive their “principal physiological characteristics” from their putatively simple, mechanical societies would seem even more dubious. My point is not to impugn social theorists who are not alive to defend themselves, but to illustrate that academic ideas do sometimes have real influence. Today most influential scholars in Morocco ignore Gellner's work on Berbers entirely. This is unfortunate in my view because Gellner is not all wrong. The role of kinship in politics continues to be important, but makes little sense when divorced from the context of material life and the constraints on its operation (whether these be village assemblies or national bureaucracies).
In the first years after Gellner's Saints of the Atlas was published “interpretivist” theorists influenced by hermeneutic approaches to culture objected to Gellner's focus on “structure” rather than “meaning.” These attacks were spearheaded in Clifford Geertz's review of Gellner's book (Geertz 1971) and were repeated among scholars influenced by Geertz or sympathetic to his position. Ten years later Clifford and Hildred Geertz and Lawrence Rosen collaborated on Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society, which may be seen as a compelling rebuttal to Gellner's vision of Moroccan society. This book is a rich sociological study of the town of Sefrou combined with an actor-centered approach to what social forms meant to different people and the ways individuals manipulated them. However, Meaning and Order is concerned mostly with Arabic speakers in an urban area and this somewhat blunted its ability to challenge Gellner, who was able to maintain a kind of ethnographic authority over depictions of life in largely Berber mountain areas. As time passed, some scholars continued to support aspects of Gellner's thesis, at least in some contexts (Favret 1972, Hart 1989, 1981, Kraus 1998), some took intermediate positions between Gellner and Geertz (Caton 1987, Dresch 1986, Combs-Schilling 1985) while others have directly challenged Gellner on empirical and other grounds (Munson 1989, 1993, 1997; Hammoudi 1980; Roberts 1993; Seddon 1981:272). It must be said that many scholars have come to find the whole debate rather tedious. Michael Gilsenan has commented that followers of Geertz and Gellner posited versions of Moroccan society that seemed to be formed on entirely “different planets” (Gilsenan 1992:280). For my purposes the issue is that with certain modifications the Geertzian planet has remained in the Moroccan solar system, while Berbers seem to have drifted into space along with Gellner, the primary anthropological champion of their distinctiveness.
Today Moroccanist anthropology and sociology generally sit well within the Geertzian, and more broadly Weberian framework, with considerable recent influence by the work of Michel Foucault. This academic work is notable for an emphasis on the state, religion, and national character, the primacy of politics over economics, and the operations of royal charismatic leadership in a modern national culture. Most research is concerned at least implicitly with Arabic speakers and “Moroccanness” as expressed in urban areas or at least medium sized towns. Main themes include the relationship between discursive forms and state power, ritual and religious legitimacy, post-colonialism and national identity, gender, and the enduring potency of Alaoui royal power within these domains. Exemplifying these trends is an important edited book published in 1999 under the aegis of the Harvard Maghribi Studies Program, In the Shadow of the Sultan (Bourqia and Miller 1999). The subtitle, “Culture, Power and Politics in Morocco” is reminiscent of Gellner's Culture, Identity, and Politics (1987), but the similarity in labels masks a radical difference in approach.
The introduction of the Harvard volume suggests that we appreciate the “ethnographic detail” of Robert Montagne's studies of High Atlas Berbers but “remain alert” to his colonialist project (Bourqia and Miller 1999: 3), and that “recent scholarly studies touch on some of the most sensitive areas of social and political concern, such as slavery, gender relations, ethnic and minority relations...”(ibid: 4). Given these concerns what is striking is that there is only one indexed reference to “Berbers” in twelve chapters and no reference at all to the terms Amazigh or Imazighen. Two full chapters --two thirds of the section on “Peripheries”-- focus on Jews, who would seem to comprise the “sensitive... ethnic and minority relations” referred to. The general word for Berber language, Tamazight, fails to appear anywhere in the volume, though Tashelhit is included on the one page that specifically references Berbers. Tashelhit is also included in the glossary. Even the largely Berber speaking regions of the Rif and Atlas Mountains are absent from the index, as is any article exploring the importance of rural areas in general. Perhaps most revealing, the reference to an entry in the index labeled, “power –role of language in,” does not mention any language other than Arabic being spoken in Morocco. Abdellah Hammoudi, whose contribution is in part based on fieldwork among Berbers very near where I worked, clearly considers Berber language incidental to his argument. We only find out that Hammoudi is working with Imazighen well on in the description when he writes, “The sacrifice of the two victims was the climax of the feast, called tfaska in Berber, which was the language of my hosts (ibid: 156). Perhaps this is why “Berber” appears in at least four places in the book but “Berbers” only once in the index: the fact of the existence of Tamazight is not significant to any point made by any of the authors in the collection. Ernest Gellner, who had a massive influence in Middle Eastern Studies and social theory generally, but who tended to ignore all Moroccans but Berbers, warrants two citations in the index, one less than Theodor Adorno.
In fairness to Professor Hammoudi it is quite likely that there is nothing characteristically Berber or Amazigh about the feast and the masquerade he describes. In the Agoundis, a few valleys away from where Hammoudi worked, this yearly event happens very differently than he relates, a fact which would seem to undermine any essentially Berber quality one might posit for the ritual and masquerade. There is in fact nothing specifically wrong with respect to any of the work by the scholars in “Shadow of the Sultan,” but as a whole the book well illustrates the preeminence of the national frame of reference in Moroccanist scholarship, and the predominant view of Moroccan society as lacking certain dimensions of linguistic diversity or a socially significant rural component. This particular book reflects a trend in Moroccan scholarship generally: the fact that 40% of the population speaks Tamazight is seen to be irrelevant to the “culture, power and politics” of the country. The fact that 50% of the population is rural does not seem to matter much either. This academic perspective is of special concern in political terms because so many Berber speakers live in rural areas, and rural areas have the worst socioeconomic conditions in Morocco.
In my view at least part of the problem with the invisibility of Imazighen in Morocco is the link to rural poverty. The failure to conceive of the overlap between Berber speaking areas and materially impoverished areas stymies development efforts. World Bank data shows that the number of Moroccans living on less than a dollar a day, what the Bank calls “below the absolute poverty line,” has increased 50% since 1991 to nearly a fifth of the national population. Statistics on the relationship between linguistic groups and poverty are unavailable, and even the number of Berber speakers is controversial, as Salem Chaker has pointed out. But in Morocco the “absolutely” impoverished population is by all admissions disproportionately found in the countryside and particularly the mountains, where Berber speakers are also disproportionately found. An issue like education –fundamental to both World Bank attempts to ameliorate rural poverty and a major hope of people in Tagharghist—would seem obviously tied to the question of how to teach rural Berber speaking children an urban Arabic curriculum. However, a Bank report on Moroccan education estimates that while 52% of the country lives in rural areas, only 10% of the education budget was spent in those rural areas during the 1980s. As I will show, the unfortunate teachers who are sent to the countryside tend to be monolingual Arabic speakers, a situation that virtually ensures frustration among teachers and students alike. The financial disparity between rural and urban areas is unfair to all rural people. Combining this with what would seem a misguided educational policy of sending Arabic speakers to Berber areas particularly disadvantages rural people who happen to be Berber speakers.
As of April 2000 the World Bank had nineteen projects active in Morocco with a total investment of a billion US dollars. One searches the project reports on Morocco –even reports on linguistically salient projects like rural education—and finds no reference to Berber speaking Moroccans at all. If Moroccanist scholars ignore or ascribe no significance to the fact of that many Moroccans speak Berber, it is hardly surprising that agencies like the World Bank leave such people out of development considerations. As Remy Leveau has pointed out, “Morocco has a 60% illiteracy rate and in 1998 it ranked 125th in the world on the United Nations Human Development Index. It comes a long way behind Algeria and Tunisia, and even behind Egypt and Syria, looking at the statistics for schooling, health care and per capita GDP” (1998). If the overall ranking is 125th, certainly the situation in the countryside, where only 10% of the education budget is spent, must be that much worse. It seems inconceivable that this is entirely unrelated to the fact that Morocco is linguistically heterogeneous. Efforts to change the rural economic situation surely need to account for the fact that the Moroccan mountains remain overwhelmingly Amazigh.
If Berber studies are generally invisible within Moroccan studies, scholars who do acknowledge the existence of Berbers sometimes make one of the same errors as Gellner: ignoring the significance of the state, the larger economy, and the national culture, the very themes that preoccupy most influential Moroccanists. David Hart, for instance, is probably the most important ethnographer of Berber people alive today, and arguably one of the most important ever, but he is rarely cited in what might be considered the main body of Moroccanist scholarship. Part of the reason, I believe, is that Hart is often looking implicitly –and sometimes explicitly-- backward, at the way Berber society used to operate rather than the way it does now (Hart 1976, 1981, 1996, 2000). Today there is simply no question that whatever “tribal” or characteristically Berber ways of doing things exist, these articulate with a larger political, cultural and economic field. If the widely cited and generally urban-focused scholars concern themselves with “Moroccans” at large, those who do work in rural Berber areas tend to give too little emphasis to the fact that these areas exist in a wider Moroccan framework.
Work by Ali Amahan (1998), Hassan Rachik (1990, 1992, 1993), Jim Miller (1984), and Mohammed Mahdi (1999) does address localized political operations and the fact of Berber linguistic distinctiveness. Less consistently, however, does this work grapple with the impact of changes in the national economy, the enduring influence of colonialism, and especially the postcolonial salience of the central government in Berber speaking areas. This work deserves a wider audience and has probably not been adequately or responsibly cited because most of it is published in French within Morocco and has had a difficult time finding its way into the wider currents of anthropological and Moroccanist scholarship, at least in the English speaking world. It may also fall outside the interests of the urban Moroccan intelligentsia. All studies concerning Imazighen suffer from a legacy of Moroccan nationalist backlash to French colonial “Berberphilia.” Indeed, for many years to acknowledge any distinction between Arabs and Berbers in Morocco was to risk associating oneself with the French colonial attempt to divide the nation between Berbers and Arabs. Berber studies have today managed to slough much of their colonialist stigma, but the urge to avoid political confrontation sometimes leads to the portrayal of Berber culture as innocuous and apolitical “folklore.” As Micaela di Leonardo has written, “The real key to the perception of cultural difference is politics” (1997:64). The conceptual separation of Berbers and the rest of the country obscures the significance of Berber language, and the real nature of the Moroccan nation in which Berbers live. Berber language and identity must be understood in the relation between local social forms and the larger economy, national culture, and the central state.
In this thesis I do not propose that Berbers are fundamentally different from other Moroccans or that people living in the mountains are immune to wider Moroccan social forces and politics. I believe that to address the question “who are the Berbers” requires an inquiry into what specifically matters to mountain farmers and how Berberness might fit into this. A priori assumptions that being Berber is either totally irrelevant or all-important do not help us specify what significance Berber language (and culture) really has for people. From what I can tell the concerns of subsistence farmers -- in this case Tashelhit speaking, very poor subsistence farmers-- seem far less exotic than some theorists would have it. They are relatively unmoved by baraka-suffused holy lineages, segmentary affinities, the affairs of the royal household, or post-colonial subject positions. They are extremely attuned to the weight of family obligations, the health and welfare of their children, new sorts of educational opportunities, migration for jobs, dependency on erratic weather patterns, and, especially, the brutal regime of rural poverty. The main theme of this work is thus that the people of Tagharghist view themselves in ways that are embedded in relations of power particularly grounded a spatial and temporal context. Power (and powerlessness) are not merely artifacts of the state, but are deeply connected to the economy, to land ownership in the mountains and to a larger capitalist order where very nearly the only thing mountain people have to sell is their “unskilled” labor. If these broader regimes of power are extensive, they are nonetheless exercised in the Agoundis Valley through local, durable and surprisingly complex institutions like households, lineage organizations and villages. Within these, power is discursively sanctioned and in limited ways contested, which is to say that central to the negotiation of power and the generation of identity are a set of understood meanings about the relevance of person's gender, age, position within the household and larger village, and political economic standing. It is through this combined material and ideational world that identity is formed.
In Tagharghist there is not, as some writers have claimed for Berbers elsewhere, a conscious, centrally significant Amazigh or broadly Berber ethnic sentiment. Neither is there a pertinent “tribal” identity, as has been argued for other areas of the Moroccan countryside and for the North African mountains generally. And while the state is important, this is so in ways that are different from the cities, and, I presume, other rural areas. Throughout this thesis I will maintain that the things that matter to people in Tagharghist emerge from and are expressed through their quotidian existence as cultivators. As this existence changes –whether by broad political and economic transformations or the ineluctable modality of human life cycles—notions of identity change too. These different processes impinge on the conceptualization of self and group, and thus such conceptions are not primordial, fast-frozen and homogeneous, but historical, (partly) negotiable, and heterogeneous. To speak of identity, then, is to speak of process rather than state, and more specifically of the way different social, biological and cultural processes articulate with one another. There are patterns to this articulation and these are what I shall endeavor to reveal.
I will use the specificities of Tagharghist to show that reified notions of “tribal” and “cultural” identity are off the mark, as are simplistic visions of what it means to be poor. Life in Tagharghist is possible through complex labor transactions, a moving exchange of work, goods, love, respect, rights to property, and ideas –all rendered sensible by a fragmented and unevenly employed set of cultural ideals. As subjectively experienced, local identity is built pragmatically through many of the same processes villagers use to keep themselves alive. While I aim to evoke local notions of space, time, power and identity, I try and do so with regard to the fact that these domains exist in relation to practice, to labor. I attempt to deconstruct generalized depictions of what it means to be Amazigh/Berber and focus on the specific conditions of identity formation and a few specific instances where being AshelHi or speaking Tashelhit matters. I end the thesis by suggesting –or allowing a few eloquent villagers to suggest—that the commonplace practices of daily labor are far more salient to the ways people see themselves than scholars seem to appreciate.
Ethnographically I intend this to be mildly innovative in that I do not posit a single, enduring and generic “culture,” but a dynamic, contested and broadly interconnected social reality that includes material exigencies, ideological formations, and particular deployments and manipulations of these. I shall be less interested in classifying the relationships among the forces involved than revealing how and why people put such forces to work. As curious as the claim might seem, I intend this exercise to be practically and politically useful to the people who collaborated in its creation, the people of Tagharghist and the villages and valleys around it. As Martha Mundy has commented, “If anthropology has any raison d'être in the late twentieth century, it is to allow us to confront the written schemas of the intellectuals with the richer and untidy welter of living practice”(Mundy 1995:5). Intellectuals who have written on Morocco would seem in need of such confrontation, both those who would ignore the distinctiveness of Berber language and life, and those who would portray these lives as isolated from the larger sociopolitical order.
Thesis Overview
The body of this thesis is divided into four main sections: Space, Time, Power, and Identity. The first three parts might be thought of as the media through which identity forms, or as “contexts,” though in the sense of formative conditions rather than a static backdrop. Together these phenomena, normally studied under headings of geography, history and politics, form a kind of “capacity” for identity formation --both in the sense of “capability” and in the sense of a “bounded container.” Without taking narrative invention too far, my purpose is to reveal the dimensions of space, time, and power in Tagharghist as something like landscapes: irregular, locally specific conceptual and material domains. Together these three chapters form a more complicated landscape, a multidimensional capacity for identity formation in which particularly dis/empowered individuals attempt to make sense of their lives. I believe that this broad set of contexts is necessary to make sense of the very specific domains in which Berber language matters to identity formation. The lives of villagers may contain a great deal that is implicitly Amazigh, a “secret essence” or “entire inner existence” that I cannot hope to relate (Montagne 1973:85). But consciousness of being Berber is a specifiable phenomenon --one that is best revealed in relation to the material and social conditions in which it is formed and to which it is related.
Chapter Two: Space
Despite commonsense ways of coping with it, and the fact that we generally ignore it, space is never merely there. “The experience of space is always shot through with temporalities... [it is] created, reproduced and transformed in relation to previously constructed spaces provided and established from the past. Spaces are intimately related to the formation of biographies and social relationships” (Tilley 1994:11). In the context of Tagharghist I argue that the spatial environment is socially manipulated and practically used, at once natural and cultural, material and ideal. In addition to being a human product, the notional places evoked in space seem curiously animated with an ability to act on the people who created them or, in other ways, on their descendents. There is a complex dialectic between place and people, and in the most straightforward way that I can I attempt to relate how villagers work in space, and how space works on mountain villagers. Mountains themselves, of course, defy easy Cartesian coordinates since points may be far “closer” or “further” on the ground than would ever be guessed from their position on a map. Beyond this, the social environment infuses the spatial environment, illuminating it, transforming the wrinkled surface of rock and rivers into a pulsing network of nodes and paths, destinations and deserts, productive fields and nurturing hearths. Meaning is built into place and rebuilt in it, from natal kitchens to broad political boundaries, from shepherds' huts to canals and fields that must be built and rebuilt, adjusted and attended through the many centuries of their operation.
The places that matter in Tagharghist are named with bewildering specificity and to comprehend fully how such names do social work could be more than a dissertation in itself. I am forced here into a kind of shorthand. I note the nodes I know of and try to evoke a sense of how moving between them is similar and different, for different people and for different sorts of people. Places within the village are connected to places in the productive hinterland, as well as to other villages, to other valleys, and to cities far away. There is not one version of space in the village, but at least one per person, all winding about each other to reveal channels and convergences in some places, thin idiosyncratic connections in others. These convergences are often gendered, not least because all men in Tagharghist were born there and many of the women were not. Women thus form the essential base of inter-village networks, the means for both social and physical “movement.” I will suggest that space is conceptualized, produced and used through dendritic networks that wind out from social “nodes” and that people travel pathways that transect the socially empty space between nodes. Villagers build and maintain such intersections and networks because they facilitate movement, and movement matters to being in Tagharghist, economically, socially, culturally and politically.
Chapter Three: Time
Chapter Three addresses the category of time, the dimension in which things in space happen and another significant context of identity formation. There are innumerable ways in which time matters to people in Tagharghist, from the rhythm of heartbeats and the trajectory of human lives to the eternity of all-powerful God and the afterlife He has provided. While the temporalities of daily life are crucial –irrigation cycles and preparing meals, prayer time, harvest time, time for the herds to migrate-- these are not the main focus of this chapter. Such temporal rhythms strike me as so embedded in power relations that I have chosen to deal with them in Chapter Four on “Power.” Here in Chapter Three I seek instead to unfold the dimension of historical time, to portray what can be known of “history” in an out-of-the-way place and its relevance for the present. I am concerned to show that Tagharghist has not always been as it is now, that (post)modern subsistence farmers are not “contemporary ancestors,” and that the present incursion of state control, global capitalism and development is hardly the first radical transformation the people of the mountains have weathered. It is worth remembering that history does not just happen, but is built. The work of remembering the past is dependent upon the work of village life more generally, and it is important to note that many temporal rhythms are elided in the construction of time as a linear narrative of powerful men and important events.
I begin as far back as I can, with the first references to this area, and the oldest memories, in the early 12th century. At this time the entire North African political scene was about to be transformed by the exhortations of an obscure Berber religious reformer, the Mahdi, or “rightly guided,” Ibn Tumart. Fleeing from the authorities of the day in Marrakech, Ibn Tumart made his capital at Tin Mal, only a few kilometers from the base of the valley where Tagharghist sits today. After the time of the Mahdi there is a murky period in local history, but the early 19th century comes alive as the time of “tribal” government. In the years before 1850 the villages of the High Atlas were split into two grand opposed moieties called lfuf, a form of political organization much discussed by French ethnographers. Around the middle of the 19th century this form of organization came to an end with the rise of Si Mohammed n Ait Lahcen of Tagoundaft, a village a few miles above Tin Mal, ancient capital of Ibn Tumart. Through bravado, brilliance and treachery Si Mohammed managed to dominate the opposing leff, the Ait Atman. He destroyed the balance between the moieties, and placed his own league, the Ait Iraten, fully in charge of the entire watershed and some of the territory around it. He became known as simply “Goundafi,” the “one from Tagoundaft,” a term which then finds its way into French reports and later ethnographies as the native “tribe” of this area. .
Goundafi ruled with an iron hand, extracting what he could from his subjects to fund military forays into the plains to the north and south, and his continual feuds with his powerful neighboring mountain qaid-s, Glaoui to his east and Mtouggi to his west. The village of Tagharghist sits very near the eastern border with Glaoua territory. Tagharghist was for some of this period the primary outpost of Goundafi power in the Agoundis River Valley and contemporary landholdings and political alliances are related to this fact.
In the 20th century the French invaders saw clearly the difficulty of controlling the mountains and sagely determined to leave power more or less in the hands of the “lords of the Atlas.” Colonizers more easily deal with dictators than democracies and “pacification” in the realm of the Goundafi was not the protracted, bloody affair it was in other, more diffusely governed Berber areas. In the watershed of which Tagharghist is a part, colonization meant that the qaid Tayeb Goundafi, son of Mohammed, owed his nominal fealty to French rather than Arabic speaking outsiders. In fact, Goundafi became even more powerful under the French. Colonel Justinard, who commanded with him in the Anti Atlas, wrote the history of “the Great Berber Chief Goundafi” (1951). This “great chief” was made Grand Officier de la Legion d'Honneur for his services to France (Landau 1969:165).
If Goundafi impressed the French, the French themselves did not fail to leave their mark on the consciousness of people in Tagharghist. These newly arrived Christians built an administrative post right next to the fortress constructed by Goundafi at Talat n Yaqoub, and villagers today remember the significance of “the French qaid” who ruled along side Goundafi. They remember, for one thing, discovering that prisons could be built above ground with bars rather than the massive enclosed pits utilized by the old qaid, where prisoners would be lowered through a hole in the roof into conditions of rather too imaginable horror. Villagers recall the forced labor and extortionate taxation of the French, the mining opportunities they brought and the danger and arduousness of work in the mines. They recall this time as significant for the installation of roads, the introduction of a new vocabulary for democracy (a concept familiar to them from their own village jama'a), and a powerful, wealthy Christian presence that served to foreground Muslim identity and practice. National independence in 1956 wrought yet more changes, with the French qaid being replaced by an Arabic speaking one. This was part of the process whereby the so-called “Neo-Makhzen” extended its grip on the Berber countryside in the name of the King (Ben Kaddour 1972). Since independence the role of the central state in mountain areas has increased. Scholarly work in rural Morocco must deal with the operations of this state and the ways in which this is different than in urban areas and the plains.
The present does not escape the past. The old moieties, the leff divisions, find echoes in a regional bifurcation between political parties. The most powerful local official is still the qaid, though he is now a monolingual Arab appointed from the central government rather than a local Berber who seized power for himself. Roads are still seen as a good thing, a means to a better life, and Christians are still morally dubious, often foolish, unbelievably rich and mysteriously powerful. Families that rose to power as lieutenants of the Goundafi still hold the lands they acquired through their service or, more charitably, at the time of their service. Other families still resent it. Marriages continue to connect people between political nodes that mattered in former circumstances, and social connections still carry people to places that seem insignificant if one considers only the contemporary configuration of social life. The present became so through a tortuously path, and notions of continuity and chan
Aim and Scope
This dissertation is about identity, and more specifically the conditions of identity production in Tagharghist, a village in the mountains south of Marrakech, Morocco. The people who live here are part of the larger category of Moroccans called “Berbers” by most Westerners and IshelHin by themselves. The term “Berber” has mainly been considered by scholars to denote a linguistic category rather than an ethnic group, at least since the 1950s when the downfall of the French protectorate inspired a sense that the distinction between Berbers and Arabs was a product of the colonial imagination, a means to divide and conquer. Post-colonial nationalist scholars were concerned to build a unified, modern Morocco and for them the linguistic and possibly ethnic diversity represented by “the Berber question” was perceived as a threat. More recently the Amazigh (Berber) rights movement has challenged the elision of Arab/Berber distinctions and the notion that the French invented them. Amazigh activists consider state policies of Arabic-only classrooms and a law that makes non-Arab names illegal for newborns to be part of an orchestrated government repression of Berber language and culture. Such activists counter the “Arab Morocco” vision with what they see as a unified Amazigh language, history, and culture that extends across North Africa and back to the dawn of recorded history. From this viewpoint Arabs are but recent arrivals and should be considered with other invaders, from Phoenicians, Romans and Vandals to the Portuguese, Spanish and French. For Amazigh activists, Berbers are Imazighen: members of a broad, unified cultural and linguistic community.
Thus there is a clear disagreement between Amazigh activists and most non-Amazigh Moroccan scholars about Berber identity. What the two groups have in common, however, is that they are urban, literate and familiar with broader discourses of nationalism, post-colonialism, cultural self-determination, human rights, and so forth. My research concerns people who are but objects in this debate: rural, illiterate IshelHin. The guiding question of the research is how these impoverished mountain farmers see themselves and their relevant social world, what matters to them in terms of political, ethnic or other identity. My conclusion is that the extreme positions in the contest over Amazigh and Moroccan identity do not fit the situation in Tagharghist. The villagers are neither simply Moroccan nor essentially Amazigh in the terms outlined by activists. Speaking Tashelhit, the variety of Berber (or Tamazight) prevalent in Southern Morocco, does matter to some people in some situations. Most of the time it does not. In this dissertation, then, I try to outline the social contexts through which people make sense of their lives in Tagharghist, and then show why forms of identity articulated by Amazigh activists and Moroccanist scholars only partly fit these local notions. I focus on three main frameworks: geography, history and power (or space, time and power, as I refer to them below). I see the specificities of these domains as fundamental to social life in Tagharghist, and thus to local processes of identity formation.
Most scholars would classify the people of Tagharghist either as poor (Moroccan) farmers or as Berbers. My primary contention is that in order to understand either poverty or Berberness, we need to understand the relation between the two. By this I mean we need enter into the subjective experience of being poor and Berber, we must look at how notions of poverty and Berberness emerge from within people's lives rather than how we might categorize them from without. In Tagharghist, poverty is not an absence of work. It has nothing at all to do with poverty as it is often experienced in urban Morocco, as unemployment. In fact, the problem in Tagharghist would better be termed super-employment, the continuous inescapable need to expend great physical effort to stay alive. Poverty in this sense is generative, a motivation to labor rather than an absence of opportunity to work. Sometime similar might be said about being Berber. From outside we might see in Tagharghist a pristine Berber culture or society, which, depending on our theoretical taste, might be expressed as an elegantly ramifying kinship logic or a vibrant set of local meanings about everything from masculinity to the authority of the King. These issues are related to work too, however. The logic of kin relations that so fascinates some anthropologists is, in Tagharghist, primarily deployed (consciously and deliberately) to organize necessary communal labor. The Berber cultural consciousness that interests scholars and activists is in Tagharghist born of interactions with non-Berbers. Typically these interactions happen in the context of some power asymmetry (with a state agent or an NGO) during negotiations to get something done (to build a school or reduce pasture use). This is not to say we can or ought to reduce culture to a list of practical functions or poverty to a binary “too much/too little” work. It is to say that by viewing cultural questions from the perspective of what people actually do all day, we may bring fresh perspectives to old concerns.
There are several reasons why such questions are worth investigating. Firstly there is an academic obligation to clarify our view of the contemporary social situation in Morocco. There are striking contradictions in the literature on rural Morocco and one purpose of this document is to provide ethnographic evidence from one time and place that bears on larger academic debates about language, power and identity in Morocco. Second, the question of Berber or Amazigh identity is part of a broad scholarly interest in identity movements worldwide. Clearly we are witnessing a global explosion of identity politics, from Islamic fundamentalism to radical environmentalism. Most such movements produce texts –Web pages, manifestos or newsletters-- that specify who members think they are and what they're about, and the Amazigh rights movement is no exception. My research focuses on people who are not part of such an organized, purposeful movement, but are instead the subjects of it. This provides a counterpoint to much academic work on identity.
Finally, the analysis of social conditions that I provide is meant to be useful in terms of Moroccan and international development schemes. There is a massive World Bank funded project beginning in the area where I did research, but very little available data on the social and political world that this project will impact. The development literature that exists passes quickly over the fact of Berber linguistic distinctiveness and addresses some forms of social inequality while missing others entirely. Amazigh activists are quite correct that the linguistic distinctiveness of Imazighen/Berbers has been largely written out of Moroccan history and society. This has real political economic importance when the state acts to “improve” local conditions. Change is inevitable for this part of the world, and from a village perspective this is welcome. Villagers have no romantic illusions about their lives as subsistence farmers in a high, rugged area and they are guardedly optimistic about the arrival of Peace Corps volunteers, state education, new roads, and other transformations. I hope that this document can help shape this change, that it facilitates useful understanding between the local people who helped me write it and the bureaucrats, officials and agents who may be able to read it.
In the 14th century the scholar Abderrahman Ibn Mohammed Ibn Khaldun wrote that Berbers were “powerful, redoubtable, brave and numerous; a true people like the Arabs, Persians, Greeks and Romans” (quoted in Chaker 1989:5, my translation). Today, however, more than 1,200 years after the first Arab invasions, the nature of these autochthonous, “true people” of North Africa, and the status of the language they speak, is not so clear. While there remain thousands of villages where forms of Berber are the first or only language spoken, and while there are millions more Berber speakers outside of the mountains, scattered from the beaches of Agadir to university lecture halls in Paris and Montreal, the connection between the existence of Tamazight speakers and the more elusive condition of being Amazigh is not at all obvious.
To begin, I suggest that the root of the trouble with this “Berber question” is that Berber speakers are never merely Berbers. Language is not culture and culture, in any case, is not all that matters. There are a great many things that are important to the villagers I portray below, some of which are related to language, Amazigh-ness or “culture,” but many of which are not. Mountain Berbers share a great deal with poor people everywhere, for instance, since poverty seems to entail a certain convergence of concerns around very fundamental questions of staying alive. Beyond this there are more particular concerns that people in Tagharghist share with other rural Moroccans, with all other Moroccans, with other North Africans, and indeed with all Muslims, especially Sunni Muslims. On the most banal level much of what is significant in these villagers' lives is common to all other human beings, but at the same time there are many ways these particularly interrelated, Amazigh human beings are divided amongst themselves –by sex, age, and economic standing, not least. There are also many ways the villagers in this study are different from Berber speakers in other regions of Morocco, and especially urban areas, and there are other ways they can be distinguished from Berbers in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali, and Niger.
What I present, then, is not a “Berber ethnography,” and still less an ethnography of “Berber culture,” but an inquiry into the lives of a particular group of people who speak Tashelhit, one variety of Tamazight, or Berber. My purpose is primarily to outline what these people see as important in their world, and then ask what might be “Berber” about this. This thesis is thus primarily concerned with the conditions in which identity is formed and the things people do to cope with them. In particular I examine the significance of space, time, and power to identity formation, the process by which these villagers discuss and define themselves and their relevant social world. I hope first of all to evoke the geographic, historical and political landscape of Tagharghist. I then suggest how forms of identity are cultivated within this.
My method is necessarily intensive rather than extensive. I am nothing close to a native speaker of Tashelhit and I base most of my arguments on events I observed and things people told me directly about these events. There are undoubtedly important subtleties of which I am totally unaware and I do not emphasize terminology, the ways certain words are sometimes thought to illuminate key aspects of culture or identity. Instead my assertions emerge from the diffuse and inexact process of living among a small group of people, working with them, eating with them, following the events in their lives as they unfolded in slow, daily procession. I collected nitpicky facts about who was related to who, who owned what, who had rights to what water, fields and pastures, who did what jobs, who traveled where, who married who, who worked with who and why. I talked with the people I lived with about their lives, too, usually informally and often in relation to the very strange fact that I was there amongst them. The purpose of what I was doing –the meaning of my work and life—was a curious thing to these villagers and so we shared an interest in figuring out what was important to each other, and we talked a great deal about it. Certainly the oddity of my work caused people to reflect upon theirs. I recorded and translated some of the best of these talks. What I portray here is based upon aspects of my own daily experience in the village of Tagharghist, my recorded observations of what people did and with whom they did it, and some slightly “harder” data on economics, family relations, and marriage patterns. I also use some of the transcriptions from taped interviews in which I asked people to talk specifically about life in the mountains of southern Morocco.
If the general research question covers a lot of ground, the focus is on one small place: the village of Tagharghist in the Agoundis Valley. The people here are almost all monolingual speakers of Tashelhit, the term for the local variety of Tamazight, or Berber. The Arabic for the linguistic category of Tashelhit is Shleuh and the majority of the territory where it is spoken is in the Moroccan South, from Marrakech to the fringes of the Sahara. Based on their use of Tashelhit, the people of Tagharghist usually refer to themselves as IshelHin, which they distinguish from the two other languages with which they're mainly familiar, T'arabt (Arabic, spoken by 'Araben) and Tafransist (French, spoken by Fransawin). The French are often lumped with other Europeans and called irumin, foreigners, and it is sometimes difficult to convince villagers that foreigners speak anything but French. The situation is not so simple as a division of people by what they speak, however. The people of Tagharghist on occasion call themselves 'Araben --Arabs, technically speaking-- in certain situations when they are contrasting themselves as Moroccans or Muslims with Christian foreigners. I explore this further below. There are distinctions among linguistic categories, and a consciousness that people who speak certain languages form different groups, but these are contextual. There is no straightforward, permanent correlation between terminology and identity, language and social category. “Berber” –as language or ethnic group—cannot be taken for granted as a simple social given. A variety of considerations affect the perceived significance of speaking Berber and my focus shall be mostly on these formidable, formative conditions.
It thus bears repeating that the people of Tagharghist should not be taken as a synecdoche for Berbers everywhere. They are not necessarily representative of Berbers in Morocco or even all IshelHin, many of whom today live in large cities, both in Morocco and Europe. As was once typical of anthropology, I present here a detailed study of a very limited place and make my larger assertions from that, working, so to speak, from the ground up. As in all such cases, the further I get from the ground the less sure are my arguments. I believe strongly, for instance, that my presentation of the way households matter and operate in Tagharghist is correct; I am considerably less certain about what this means for the far larger questions of a general Amazigh consciousness or a politics based on it. There is little enough written about these larger issues, however. I engage them because I think have something to say, not because I think I have the final word.
The village of Tagharghist itself is built of mud and rock houses piled one atop another on a mountainside. It looks something like a cubist painter's vision of a huge termite mound, a seemingly single agglomeration stacked precariously above the Agoundis River. In 1999 this hive of a place was home to 212 people organized into twenty-nine households, three nominal ikhsan, and five functional khamas. (See Appendices 1 and 2 for a list of the households and their family affiliations.) The complicated way these different social levels interact forms the core of Chapter Four on Power.
About 90% of the villagers live in Tagharghist more or less full time. “Membership” in households, and thus the village, is determined in the first instance by descent and marriage, but also economically as those who receive sustenance from, and contribute to, any one of the twenty-nine households that comprise “the village.” Tagharghist can be considered a bounded social unit, even if its boundaries are permeable, because it functions as an irrigation collective. Life in these mountains is vitally dependent on irrigation and for this reason the village stands as an institution matched in importance only by the household. As I have suggested, these households are thought to comprise three ikhsan, or “bones,” and these are for some productive purposes divided in to five fifths, or khamas. These might be thought of as lineages though there is less concern with “real” genealogical relatedness than creating functional, socially useful fifths. Two of the five fifths are comprised of the same biological lineage, two others are amalgamations of various residual households, and only the final fifth is indeed an ikhs, a bone, a single named patrilineal group with an identifiable ancestor.
Most households, or tikatin, survive primarily from crops of barley and maize that they raise in the intricately terraced and irrigated fields around the village. People also herd goats and sheep in the mountains above them, or at least some people do. They harvest walnuts and almonds that they sell at market and many women keep a cow penned below their house for milk and have a few chickens running around for eggs. The village sits more than 5,000 feet above sea level and summers are hot and long and dry; winters are cold and generally clear, though there is occasionally considerable snow. Population is rising and increasingly daughters and sons are sent out of the mountains to work as nannies, waiters, and miners, or as laborers on the big capitalist farms of the plains. Sometimes these migrants hive off from their parent households and make their own way in the world, either in the city or by establishing their own absentee households in the village. Other times they contribute their earnings to their natal tikatin and continue to function as part of them.
In addition to rising population and migration other changes are afoot. A dirt road was constructed between my first visit in 1995 and my second in 1998, allowing trucks into the upper part of the Agoundis Valley for the first time. A government school was built while I was doing fieldwork. A long-moribund national park in the area became active not long before I arrived, and in particular seemed concerned with pastures the people of Tagharghist sometimes use. A host of development projects are still underway, sponsored by organizations ranging from the Moroccan state to the Peace Corps and World Bank. Whatever I might have to say about what it means to live in Tagharghist is thus a statement about what it is coming to mean. Circumstances are in considerable flux and one challenge of the inquiry lies precisely here. There is no essential and timeless meaning to Berberness that I can relate, nor do I believe in the possibility of one that could be extricated from the many other things that matter to self and group identity.
For the people of Tagharghist a consciousness of “being Berber” is one small part of being human, along with being poor, Moroccan and Muslim, male or female, having rights to certain fields and orchards, living in a particular house, having a given position in a family, traveling certain paths, visiting specific family connections in other villages and cities, using certain pastures, having a set of friends, and so forth. In Tagharghist various forms of identity emerge from a dense social matrix that must be maintained and mobilized to insure survival in a world of hard physical labor and terrible poverty. It is this labor --and the poverty of which it is born –that dominates the way time is spent, space is used, and power is expressed. For this reason I pursue the question of what it means to be poor and Berber through the lens of daily practice, or work. My purpose is not to forward a sociological argument about the meaning of work, only to show how we might better understand the experiences of rural poverty and contemporary Berberness in one place by viewing them through the lens of daily practice.
Theoretical Entanglements
Addressing the relationship between labor and identity among Berber speakers requires engagement with a range of theoretical issues that cannot be thoroughly addressed here. In any case, I consider my primary task to be ethnographic rather than theoretical. I concentrate more on revealing the subjectively important dimensions of everyday life in the mountains than on examining the relevance of these dimensions for different scholarly projects. This is not to say that I had no scholarly project of my own in mind, and it bears explaining what this was and how it influenced the depiction I present.
Most importantly, I have a longstanding interest in labor. This takes the form of a broad conviction of the importance of work to social life rather than a precise formulation of the sociological implications of labor, or even what sorts of work are important for what kinds of people. I accept the basic position that as humans we produce the social, physical and cultural world we live in, and that the production of these domains is intertwined and interrelated. This intertwining production is very difficult to unravel, of course, but the fact of its existence seems to me essentially incontrovertible. It seems equally clear that within this overall social/physical/cultural production people do vastly different sorts of work. Dramatic differences in what we do (and inequalities in who does what for whom) are a hallmark of my own society. If I expected to find something different in the mountains of Morocco, I was disappointed. Thus the basic set of understandings I took to the mountains included the idea that what people do is important to who they are, and that different forms of inequality bear strongly on what people do. I took to the field a conviction that little of cultural or social significance could be grasped without consideration of the work of everyday life.
The identity part of the equation was and is more vexing. I do not assume, as some theorists seem to, that everyone has a “primary identity” that structures all others. Perhaps this is true for some people, especially activists committed to some cause or another, or ethnic groups or nations at war. These seem to me situations in which the rich and shifting complexity of social identity collapses into rigid terms of opposition, but this strikes me as the exception rather than the rule. Usually, how people see themselves depends on a great number of things, what they are doing, who they are talking to, how they imagine their interlocutors see them and the world. This is worth noting in terms of “reflexivity.” Surely some measure of the view I got from Tagharghist is bound up in the particular person I am and the kinds of questions that interested me. Clearly I am not alone in this, and as I detail some of the positions taken on who Berbers are I want to be clear that I am not trying to say that I have the single correct interpretation of Berber life while other ethnographers and activists somehow got it all wrong. What I do contend is that my set of biases –towards understanding life in terms of labor and inequality—brings a different vision of contemporary Berber life into the realm of scholarly discourse, into what Geertz calls “the consultable record” (1973:30).
Berber speakers are estimated to make up 40% of the Moroccan population, so the question of their place in Moroccan society is of practical and political concern, especially as rural Berber speakers are increasingly educated in Arabic and migrate to urban areas. In such conditions notions of “tradition” and “culture” assume new, and newly meaningful, forms. As I have noted, literate Amazigh scholars and activists are now disseminating strikingly modern notions of their identity. These notions are modern in their expression (Websites, cultural organizations, Internet discussion groups, radio programs), their location (cyberspace and urban centers rather than villages and small towns) and in their forms. The modern, activist form of Amazigh identity is explicitly culturalist, involving a meaningful essence seen to infuse all Imazighen everywhere and to stretch back to the very origins of North African history. Such activists argue forcefully that not only is there is salience to the notion of Berbers qua Berbers, but that this distinct, enduring Berber culture is under threat. As professor Salem Chaker writes, “C'est qu'être Berbère aujourd'hui -et vouloir le rester- est necessairement un acte militant, culturel, éventuellement scientific, toujours politique” (Chaker 1989:7). For scholars such as Chaker, to be Berber in North Africa is itself a political act.
But North African states and their Arabist ideologues are not the only problem for this vision of a unified Berber culture. Some Western scholars, most famously Ernest Gellner, seem to contradict the claims made by Chaker. In a very influential volume on Arab/Berber relations in North Africa, Gellner writes “the Berber sees himself as a member of this or that tribe, within an Islamically-conceived and permeated world --and not as a member of a linguistically defined ethnic group” (Gellner 1972:13, emphasis original). The difference between Gellner's statement and an activist vision of a unified, essential Amazigh identity is clear. Abdellah Hammoudi contends, “Today's use of Amazigh resonates with the vibration of a radical freedom” (1997:115); Gellner writes “Arab and Berber are not corporate groups; they are simply linguistic classifications” (1969:73). Gellner's work on Berber tribal life does provide a view of Berbers as culturally inclined towards equality and liberty, but he also portrays Berber society as fragmented and pre-modern, isolated from the Moroccan state and nation. This complicates activist efforts to develop broad Berber/Amazigh consciousness necessary to fight for cultural and linguistic rights. The question of the nature of Berber identity thus couples arcane debates in social theory to real political concerns.
In terms of social theory, what Gellner makes clear in his study of the nature of Berber society is that it is “segmentary.” The important entity is the tribe rather than the language, at least to the extent that a segmentary society can be said to have any stable social “entities” within it at all. Indeed, a pillar of Gellner's thesis is that such segments are ephemeral; they emerge only in response to particular threats at particular political “levels.” His main theoretical thrust is that tribes contain –or did contain-- nested, isomorphic segments balanced against each other. Tribes themselves can combine to form larger entities that mirror the organization of the component units.
Such an notion builds explicitly on Emile Durkheim's notion of “mechanical solidarity” where, as Gellner puts it, “similarity is not merely lateral but also vertical: it is not simply that groups resemble their neighbors at the same level of size, but it is also the case that groups resemble, organizationally, the sub-groups of which they are composed, and the larger groups of which they are members. This is totally unlike the organizational principle on which our own society is based” (1987:31). Gellner draws his idea that such segments coalesce and fragment in response to changes in the balance of power from the work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard. Importantly, Gellner does not argue that patrilineal genealogical relatedness was amongst the elements in that mattered in Berber social organization, but that it constituted the only principle of any significance. He writes, “A group is sub-divided into sub-groups: they in turn sub-divide, and so forth. This principle of division and sub-division generates all the groupings which are to be found in the society. In other words, there are no cross-cutting groups and criteria” (1969:42, emphasis added). While he noted the difference between lay and saintly lineages (the “saints” referred to in his famous title), there are no other significant social entities in Gellner's formulation.
Durkheim himself initially drew from the early ethnography on Algerian Berbers, especially Kabyles, to develop the thesis of mechanical solidarity. In De la division de Travail social Durkheim defines the ideal terms of mechanical solidarity among extinct societies, then gives Berbers as a living example of such a social type. He writes, “Thus, among the Kabyles the political unity is the clan, constituted in the form of a village (djemmaa or thaddart); several djemmaa form a tribe (arch'), and several tribes for the confederation (thak'ebilt), the highest political society that the Kabyles know. The same is true among the Hebrews.... These societies are such typical examples of mechanical solidarity that their principal physiological characteristics come from it” (Durkheim 1964 [1893]: 178). The significant theoretical issue is that all of Durkheim's and Gellner's levels or forms of “political unity” are homologous.
In terms of contemporary Tagharghist Gellner and Durkheim are plainly wrong. The village is in no way an undifferentiated “clan.” Heterogeneously constituted households comprise five equally heterogeneous “fifths.” These appear to be structurally similar but are in fact very different from one another, and are constructed differently depending on the purposes to which they are put. The internal organization of the fifths does not resemble the households of which they are made or the village that they in turn comprise. The larger political units in which Tagharghist figures are also complex, “organic” in their structure, and bear no homologous relation to the organization of the village, the fifths, or the households. It would seem to me unlikely that settled farmers of the High Atlas would ever have had the same kind of social organization as pastoralists from the Middle Atlas because the organizational principle in question is being put to different uses. That is, patrilineal genealogical relatedness is a useful conceptual tool to organize political associations among moving populations of shepherds, and as I will show it is a useful way of organizing irrigation amongst settled patrilineally related farmers. However, being settled, farmers also have villages, spatially determined social units of great importance. This is why I tend to agree with the French colonial emphasis on the importance of village councils, and more generally why I view “crosscutting” social ties as being extremely important in Tagharghist. I seek to show the practical uses of genealogical relatedness and its place in the larger social world rather than trying to reduce the social world to any one organizational structure or principle.
This does not mean that in other times and places Berber societies could not have been organized differently. I am suspicious that the political organization of Gellner's Moroccan Berber pastoralists in 1969 should have resembled the organization of huge villages of settled farmers in Algeria a hundred years earlier, but my main concern is with Tagharghist in 2000. However, Hugh Roberts has argued trenchantly that Durkheim got it wrong in the first place, seriously skewing the original Kabyle ethnography to fit his thesis (Roberts 1993). Roberts's penetrating essay also demonstrates the ways in which Gellner misrepresented French ethnography to support his scheme, ignoring contradictory evidence from some authors and ignoring other authors altogether. In more empirical terms, Henry Munson has pointed out the irrelevance of Gellner's segmentary model for the Moroccan Rif, in the north of the country (Munson 1989, 1991) and in the very area Gellner did his fieldwork (Munson 1993). While scholars such as Wolfgang Kraus make the case that in the area of the Atlas where Gellner worked there is today a sense of “segmentary identity,” it is unclear what this has to do with contemporary political organization (Kraus 1998). Kraus asserts the essential continuity of pre-colonial political forms, but he does not cite Roberts or address his reading of the ethnographic record, a record that suggests to me that as a model for Berber society “segmentation” has been fatally overextended. Moreover Kraus, like Gellner, ignores the diversity of institutional structures in Berber society in favor of an ideal model for how society might be constructed in a state-less political vacuum. The material presented here does not discount the relevance of “segments” to Berber society or patrilines to identity. It does suggest that in order to understand such notions we need attend to what people do with them, to look at their actual manifestations and various uses rather than formal properties.
Gellner's comment above that Berber society is “totally unlike” our own is from my perspective a kind of Orientalist illusion, a fixation on a “balanced” society rather than a balanced account of the untidy nature of real society. Durkheim's suggestion that Kabyles and Hebrews derive their “principal physiological characteristics” from their putatively simple, mechanical societies would seem even more dubious. My point is not to impugn social theorists who are not alive to defend themselves, but to illustrate that academic ideas do sometimes have real influence. Today most influential scholars in Morocco ignore Gellner's work on Berbers entirely. This is unfortunate in my view because Gellner is not all wrong. The role of kinship in politics continues to be important, but makes little sense when divorced from the context of material life and the constraints on its operation (whether these be village assemblies or national bureaucracies).
In the first years after Gellner's Saints of the Atlas was published “interpretivist” theorists influenced by hermeneutic approaches to culture objected to Gellner's focus on “structure” rather than “meaning.” These attacks were spearheaded in Clifford Geertz's review of Gellner's book (Geertz 1971) and were repeated among scholars influenced by Geertz or sympathetic to his position. Ten years later Clifford and Hildred Geertz and Lawrence Rosen collaborated on Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society, which may be seen as a compelling rebuttal to Gellner's vision of Moroccan society. This book is a rich sociological study of the town of Sefrou combined with an actor-centered approach to what social forms meant to different people and the ways individuals manipulated them. However, Meaning and Order is concerned mostly with Arabic speakers in an urban area and this somewhat blunted its ability to challenge Gellner, who was able to maintain a kind of ethnographic authority over depictions of life in largely Berber mountain areas. As time passed, some scholars continued to support aspects of Gellner's thesis, at least in some contexts (Favret 1972, Hart 1989, 1981, Kraus 1998), some took intermediate positions between Gellner and Geertz (Caton 1987, Dresch 1986, Combs-Schilling 1985) while others have directly challenged Gellner on empirical and other grounds (Munson 1989, 1993, 1997; Hammoudi 1980; Roberts 1993; Seddon 1981:272). It must be said that many scholars have come to find the whole debate rather tedious. Michael Gilsenan has commented that followers of Geertz and Gellner posited versions of Moroccan society that seemed to be formed on entirely “different planets” (Gilsenan 1992:280). For my purposes the issue is that with certain modifications the Geertzian planet has remained in the Moroccan solar system, while Berbers seem to have drifted into space along with Gellner, the primary anthropological champion of their distinctiveness.
Today Moroccanist anthropology and sociology generally sit well within the Geertzian, and more broadly Weberian framework, with considerable recent influence by the work of Michel Foucault. This academic work is notable for an emphasis on the state, religion, and national character, the primacy of politics over economics, and the operations of royal charismatic leadership in a modern national culture. Most research is concerned at least implicitly with Arabic speakers and “Moroccanness” as expressed in urban areas or at least medium sized towns. Main themes include the relationship between discursive forms and state power, ritual and religious legitimacy, post-colonialism and national identity, gender, and the enduring potency of Alaoui royal power within these domains. Exemplifying these trends is an important edited book published in 1999 under the aegis of the Harvard Maghribi Studies Program, In the Shadow of the Sultan (Bourqia and Miller 1999). The subtitle, “Culture, Power and Politics in Morocco” is reminiscent of Gellner's Culture, Identity, and Politics (1987), but the similarity in labels masks a radical difference in approach.
The introduction of the Harvard volume suggests that we appreciate the “ethnographic detail” of Robert Montagne's studies of High Atlas Berbers but “remain alert” to his colonialist project (Bourqia and Miller 1999: 3), and that “recent scholarly studies touch on some of the most sensitive areas of social and political concern, such as slavery, gender relations, ethnic and minority relations...”(ibid: 4). Given these concerns what is striking is that there is only one indexed reference to “Berbers” in twelve chapters and no reference at all to the terms Amazigh or Imazighen. Two full chapters --two thirds of the section on “Peripheries”-- focus on Jews, who would seem to comprise the “sensitive... ethnic and minority relations” referred to. The general word for Berber language, Tamazight, fails to appear anywhere in the volume, though Tashelhit is included on the one page that specifically references Berbers. Tashelhit is also included in the glossary. Even the largely Berber speaking regions of the Rif and Atlas Mountains are absent from the index, as is any article exploring the importance of rural areas in general. Perhaps most revealing, the reference to an entry in the index labeled, “power –role of language in,” does not mention any language other than Arabic being spoken in Morocco. Abdellah Hammoudi, whose contribution is in part based on fieldwork among Berbers very near where I worked, clearly considers Berber language incidental to his argument. We only find out that Hammoudi is working with Imazighen well on in the description when he writes, “The sacrifice of the two victims was the climax of the feast, called tfaska in Berber, which was the language of my hosts (ibid: 156). Perhaps this is why “Berber” appears in at least four places in the book but “Berbers” only once in the index: the fact of the existence of Tamazight is not significant to any point made by any of the authors in the collection. Ernest Gellner, who had a massive influence in Middle Eastern Studies and social theory generally, but who tended to ignore all Moroccans but Berbers, warrants two citations in the index, one less than Theodor Adorno.
In fairness to Professor Hammoudi it is quite likely that there is nothing characteristically Berber or Amazigh about the feast and the masquerade he describes. In the Agoundis, a few valleys away from where Hammoudi worked, this yearly event happens very differently than he relates, a fact which would seem to undermine any essentially Berber quality one might posit for the ritual and masquerade. There is in fact nothing specifically wrong with respect to any of the work by the scholars in “Shadow of the Sultan,” but as a whole the book well illustrates the preeminence of the national frame of reference in Moroccanist scholarship, and the predominant view of Moroccan society as lacking certain dimensions of linguistic diversity or a socially significant rural component. This particular book reflects a trend in Moroccan scholarship generally: the fact that 40% of the population speaks Tamazight is seen to be irrelevant to the “culture, power and politics” of the country. The fact that 50% of the population is rural does not seem to matter much either. This academic perspective is of special concern in political terms because so many Berber speakers live in rural areas, and rural areas have the worst socioeconomic conditions in Morocco.
In my view at least part of the problem with the invisibility of Imazighen in Morocco is the link to rural poverty. The failure to conceive of the overlap between Berber speaking areas and materially impoverished areas stymies development efforts. World Bank data shows that the number of Moroccans living on less than a dollar a day, what the Bank calls “below the absolute poverty line,” has increased 50% since 1991 to nearly a fifth of the national population. Statistics on the relationship between linguistic groups and poverty are unavailable, and even the number of Berber speakers is controversial, as Salem Chaker has pointed out. But in Morocco the “absolutely” impoverished population is by all admissions disproportionately found in the countryside and particularly the mountains, where Berber speakers are also disproportionately found. An issue like education –fundamental to both World Bank attempts to ameliorate rural poverty and a major hope of people in Tagharghist—would seem obviously tied to the question of how to teach rural Berber speaking children an urban Arabic curriculum. However, a Bank report on Moroccan education estimates that while 52% of the country lives in rural areas, only 10% of the education budget was spent in those rural areas during the 1980s. As I will show, the unfortunate teachers who are sent to the countryside tend to be monolingual Arabic speakers, a situation that virtually ensures frustration among teachers and students alike. The financial disparity between rural and urban areas is unfair to all rural people. Combining this with what would seem a misguided educational policy of sending Arabic speakers to Berber areas particularly disadvantages rural people who happen to be Berber speakers.
As of April 2000 the World Bank had nineteen projects active in Morocco with a total investment of a billion US dollars. One searches the project reports on Morocco –even reports on linguistically salient projects like rural education—and finds no reference to Berber speaking Moroccans at all. If Moroccanist scholars ignore or ascribe no significance to the fact of that many Moroccans speak Berber, it is hardly surprising that agencies like the World Bank leave such people out of development considerations. As Remy Leveau has pointed out, “Morocco has a 60% illiteracy rate and in 1998 it ranked 125th in the world on the United Nations Human Development Index. It comes a long way behind Algeria and Tunisia, and even behind Egypt and Syria, looking at the statistics for schooling, health care and per capita GDP” (1998). If the overall ranking is 125th, certainly the situation in the countryside, where only 10% of the education budget is spent, must be that much worse. It seems inconceivable that this is entirely unrelated to the fact that Morocco is linguistically heterogeneous. Efforts to change the rural economic situation surely need to account for the fact that the Moroccan mountains remain overwhelmingly Amazigh.
If Berber studies are generally invisible within Moroccan studies, scholars who do acknowledge the existence of Berbers sometimes make one of the same errors as Gellner: ignoring the significance of the state, the larger economy, and the national culture, the very themes that preoccupy most influential Moroccanists. David Hart, for instance, is probably the most important ethnographer of Berber people alive today, and arguably one of the most important ever, but he is rarely cited in what might be considered the main body of Moroccanist scholarship. Part of the reason, I believe, is that Hart is often looking implicitly –and sometimes explicitly-- backward, at the way Berber society used to operate rather than the way it does now (Hart 1976, 1981, 1996, 2000). Today there is simply no question that whatever “tribal” or characteristically Berber ways of doing things exist, these articulate with a larger political, cultural and economic field. If the widely cited and generally urban-focused scholars concern themselves with “Moroccans” at large, those who do work in rural Berber areas tend to give too little emphasis to the fact that these areas exist in a wider Moroccan framework.
Work by Ali Amahan (1998), Hassan Rachik (1990, 1992, 1993), Jim Miller (1984), and Mohammed Mahdi (1999) does address localized political operations and the fact of Berber linguistic distinctiveness. Less consistently, however, does this work grapple with the impact of changes in the national economy, the enduring influence of colonialism, and especially the postcolonial salience of the central government in Berber speaking areas. This work deserves a wider audience and has probably not been adequately or responsibly cited because most of it is published in French within Morocco and has had a difficult time finding its way into the wider currents of anthropological and Moroccanist scholarship, at least in the English speaking world. It may also fall outside the interests of the urban Moroccan intelligentsia. All studies concerning Imazighen suffer from a legacy of Moroccan nationalist backlash to French colonial “Berberphilia.” Indeed, for many years to acknowledge any distinction between Arabs and Berbers in Morocco was to risk associating oneself with the French colonial attempt to divide the nation between Berbers and Arabs. Berber studies have today managed to slough much of their colonialist stigma, but the urge to avoid political confrontation sometimes leads to the portrayal of Berber culture as innocuous and apolitical “folklore.” As Micaela di Leonardo has written, “The real key to the perception of cultural difference is politics” (1997:64). The conceptual separation of Berbers and the rest of the country obscures the significance of Berber language, and the real nature of the Moroccan nation in which Berbers live. Berber language and identity must be understood in the relation between local social forms and the larger economy, national culture, and the central state.
In this thesis I do not propose that Berbers are fundamentally different from other Moroccans or that people living in the mountains are immune to wider Moroccan social forces and politics. I believe that to address the question “who are the Berbers” requires an inquiry into what specifically matters to mountain farmers and how Berberness might fit into this. A priori assumptions that being Berber is either totally irrelevant or all-important do not help us specify what significance Berber language (and culture) really has for people. From what I can tell the concerns of subsistence farmers -- in this case Tashelhit speaking, very poor subsistence farmers-- seem far less exotic than some theorists would have it. They are relatively unmoved by baraka-suffused holy lineages, segmentary affinities, the affairs of the royal household, or post-colonial subject positions. They are extremely attuned to the weight of family obligations, the health and welfare of their children, new sorts of educational opportunities, migration for jobs, dependency on erratic weather patterns, and, especially, the brutal regime of rural poverty. The main theme of this work is thus that the people of Tagharghist view themselves in ways that are embedded in relations of power particularly grounded a spatial and temporal context. Power (and powerlessness) are not merely artifacts of the state, but are deeply connected to the economy, to land ownership in the mountains and to a larger capitalist order where very nearly the only thing mountain people have to sell is their “unskilled” labor. If these broader regimes of power are extensive, they are nonetheless exercised in the Agoundis Valley through local, durable and surprisingly complex institutions like households, lineage organizations and villages. Within these, power is discursively sanctioned and in limited ways contested, which is to say that central to the negotiation of power and the generation of identity are a set of understood meanings about the relevance of person's gender, age, position within the household and larger village, and political economic standing. It is through this combined material and ideational world that identity is formed.
In Tagharghist there is not, as some writers have claimed for Berbers elsewhere, a conscious, centrally significant Amazigh or broadly Berber ethnic sentiment. Neither is there a pertinent “tribal” identity, as has been argued for other areas of the Moroccan countryside and for the North African mountains generally. And while the state is important, this is so in ways that are different from the cities, and, I presume, other rural areas. Throughout this thesis I will maintain that the things that matter to people in Tagharghist emerge from and are expressed through their quotidian existence as cultivators. As this existence changes –whether by broad political and economic transformations or the ineluctable modality of human life cycles—notions of identity change too. These different processes impinge on the conceptualization of self and group, and thus such conceptions are not primordial, fast-frozen and homogeneous, but historical, (partly) negotiable, and heterogeneous. To speak of identity, then, is to speak of process rather than state, and more specifically of the way different social, biological and cultural processes articulate with one another. There are patterns to this articulation and these are what I shall endeavor to reveal.
I will use the specificities of Tagharghist to show that reified notions of “tribal” and “cultural” identity are off the mark, as are simplistic visions of what it means to be poor. Life in Tagharghist is possible through complex labor transactions, a moving exchange of work, goods, love, respect, rights to property, and ideas –all rendered sensible by a fragmented and unevenly employed set of cultural ideals. As subjectively experienced, local identity is built pragmatically through many of the same processes villagers use to keep themselves alive. While I aim to evoke local notions of space, time, power and identity, I try and do so with regard to the fact that these domains exist in relation to practice, to labor. I attempt to deconstruct generalized depictions of what it means to be Amazigh/Berber and focus on the specific conditions of identity formation and a few specific instances where being AshelHi or speaking Tashelhit matters. I end the thesis by suggesting –or allowing a few eloquent villagers to suggest—that the commonplace practices of daily labor are far more salient to the ways people see themselves than scholars seem to appreciate.
Ethnographically I intend this to be mildly innovative in that I do not posit a single, enduring and generic “culture,” but a dynamic, contested and broadly interconnected social reality that includes material exigencies, ideological formations, and particular deployments and manipulations of these. I shall be less interested in classifying the relationships among the forces involved than revealing how and why people put such forces to work. As curious as the claim might seem, I intend this exercise to be practically and politically useful to the people who collaborated in its creation, the people of Tagharghist and the villages and valleys around it. As Martha Mundy has commented, “If anthropology has any raison d'être in the late twentieth century, it is to allow us to confront the written schemas of the intellectuals with the richer and untidy welter of living practice”(Mundy 1995:5). Intellectuals who have written on Morocco would seem in need of such confrontation, both those who would ignore the distinctiveness of Berber language and life, and those who would portray these lives as isolated from the larger sociopolitical order.
Thesis Overview
The body of this thesis is divided into four main sections: Space, Time, Power, and Identity. The first three parts might be thought of as the media through which identity forms, or as “contexts,” though in the sense of formative conditions rather than a static backdrop. Together these phenomena, normally studied under headings of geography, history and politics, form a kind of “capacity” for identity formation --both in the sense of “capability” and in the sense of a “bounded container.” Without taking narrative invention too far, my purpose is to reveal the dimensions of space, time, and power in Tagharghist as something like landscapes: irregular, locally specific conceptual and material domains. Together these three chapters form a more complicated landscape, a multidimensional capacity for identity formation in which particularly dis/empowered individuals attempt to make sense of their lives. I believe that this broad set of contexts is necessary to make sense of the very specific domains in which Berber language matters to identity formation. The lives of villagers may contain a great deal that is implicitly Amazigh, a “secret essence” or “entire inner existence” that I cannot hope to relate (Montagne 1973:85). But consciousness of being Berber is a specifiable phenomenon --one that is best revealed in relation to the material and social conditions in which it is formed and to which it is related.
Chapter Two: Space
Despite commonsense ways of coping with it, and the fact that we generally ignore it, space is never merely there. “The experience of space is always shot through with temporalities... [it is] created, reproduced and transformed in relation to previously constructed spaces provided and established from the past. Spaces are intimately related to the formation of biographies and social relationships” (Tilley 1994:11). In the context of Tagharghist I argue that the spatial environment is socially manipulated and practically used, at once natural and cultural, material and ideal. In addition to being a human product, the notional places evoked in space seem curiously animated with an ability to act on the people who created them or, in other ways, on their descendents. There is a complex dialectic between place and people, and in the most straightforward way that I can I attempt to relate how villagers work in space, and how space works on mountain villagers. Mountains themselves, of course, defy easy Cartesian coordinates since points may be far “closer” or “further” on the ground than would ever be guessed from their position on a map. Beyond this, the social environment infuses the spatial environment, illuminating it, transforming the wrinkled surface of rock and rivers into a pulsing network of nodes and paths, destinations and deserts, productive fields and nurturing hearths. Meaning is built into place and rebuilt in it, from natal kitchens to broad political boundaries, from shepherds' huts to canals and fields that must be built and rebuilt, adjusted and attended through the many centuries of their operation.
The places that matter in Tagharghist are named with bewildering specificity and to comprehend fully how such names do social work could be more than a dissertation in itself. I am forced here into a kind of shorthand. I note the nodes I know of and try to evoke a sense of how moving between them is similar and different, for different people and for different sorts of people. Places within the village are connected to places in the productive hinterland, as well as to other villages, to other valleys, and to cities far away. There is not one version of space in the village, but at least one per person, all winding about each other to reveal channels and convergences in some places, thin idiosyncratic connections in others. These convergences are often gendered, not least because all men in Tagharghist were born there and many of the women were not. Women thus form the essential base of inter-village networks, the means for both social and physical “movement.” I will suggest that space is conceptualized, produced and used through dendritic networks that wind out from social “nodes” and that people travel pathways that transect the socially empty space between nodes. Villagers build and maintain such intersections and networks because they facilitate movement, and movement matters to being in Tagharghist, economically, socially, culturally and politically.
Chapter Three: Time
Chapter Three addresses the category of time, the dimension in which things in space happen and another significant context of identity formation. There are innumerable ways in which time matters to people in Tagharghist, from the rhythm of heartbeats and the trajectory of human lives to the eternity of all-powerful God and the afterlife He has provided. While the temporalities of daily life are crucial –irrigation cycles and preparing meals, prayer time, harvest time, time for the herds to migrate-- these are not the main focus of this chapter. Such temporal rhythms strike me as so embedded in power relations that I have chosen to deal with them in Chapter Four on “Power.” Here in Chapter Three I seek instead to unfold the dimension of historical time, to portray what can be known of “history” in an out-of-the-way place and its relevance for the present. I am concerned to show that Tagharghist has not always been as it is now, that (post)modern subsistence farmers are not “contemporary ancestors,” and that the present incursion of state control, global capitalism and development is hardly the first radical transformation the people of the mountains have weathered. It is worth remembering that history does not just happen, but is built. The work of remembering the past is dependent upon the work of village life more generally, and it is important to note that many temporal rhythms are elided in the construction of time as a linear narrative of powerful men and important events.
I begin as far back as I can, with the first references to this area, and the oldest memories, in the early 12th century. At this time the entire North African political scene was about to be transformed by the exhortations of an obscure Berber religious reformer, the Mahdi, or “rightly guided,” Ibn Tumart. Fleeing from the authorities of the day in Marrakech, Ibn Tumart made his capital at Tin Mal, only a few kilometers from the base of the valley where Tagharghist sits today. After the time of the Mahdi there is a murky period in local history, but the early 19th century comes alive as the time of “tribal” government. In the years before 1850 the villages of the High Atlas were split into two grand opposed moieties called lfuf, a form of political organization much discussed by French ethnographers. Around the middle of the 19th century this form of organization came to an end with the rise of Si Mohammed n Ait Lahcen of Tagoundaft, a village a few miles above Tin Mal, ancient capital of Ibn Tumart. Through bravado, brilliance and treachery Si Mohammed managed to dominate the opposing leff, the Ait Atman. He destroyed the balance between the moieties, and placed his own league, the Ait Iraten, fully in charge of the entire watershed and some of the territory around it. He became known as simply “Goundafi,” the “one from Tagoundaft,” a term which then finds its way into French reports and later ethnographies as the native “tribe” of this area. .
Goundafi ruled with an iron hand, extracting what he could from his subjects to fund military forays into the plains to the north and south, and his continual feuds with his powerful neighboring mountain qaid-s, Glaoui to his east and Mtouggi to his west. The village of Tagharghist sits very near the eastern border with Glaoua territory. Tagharghist was for some of this period the primary outpost of Goundafi power in the Agoundis River Valley and contemporary landholdings and political alliances are related to this fact.
In the 20th century the French invaders saw clearly the difficulty of controlling the mountains and sagely determined to leave power more or less in the hands of the “lords of the Atlas.” Colonizers more easily deal with dictators than democracies and “pacification” in the realm of the Goundafi was not the protracted, bloody affair it was in other, more diffusely governed Berber areas. In the watershed of which Tagharghist is a part, colonization meant that the qaid Tayeb Goundafi, son of Mohammed, owed his nominal fealty to French rather than Arabic speaking outsiders. In fact, Goundafi became even more powerful under the French. Colonel Justinard, who commanded with him in the Anti Atlas, wrote the history of “the Great Berber Chief Goundafi” (1951). This “great chief” was made Grand Officier de la Legion d'Honneur for his services to France (Landau 1969:165).
If Goundafi impressed the French, the French themselves did not fail to leave their mark on the consciousness of people in Tagharghist. These newly arrived Christians built an administrative post right next to the fortress constructed by Goundafi at Talat n Yaqoub, and villagers today remember the significance of “the French qaid” who ruled along side Goundafi. They remember, for one thing, discovering that prisons could be built above ground with bars rather than the massive enclosed pits utilized by the old qaid, where prisoners would be lowered through a hole in the roof into conditions of rather too imaginable horror. Villagers recall the forced labor and extortionate taxation of the French, the mining opportunities they brought and the danger and arduousness of work in the mines. They recall this time as significant for the installation of roads, the introduction of a new vocabulary for democracy (a concept familiar to them from their own village jama'a), and a powerful, wealthy Christian presence that served to foreground Muslim identity and practice. National independence in 1956 wrought yet more changes, with the French qaid being replaced by an Arabic speaking one. This was part of the process whereby the so-called “Neo-Makhzen” extended its grip on the Berber countryside in the name of the King (Ben Kaddour 1972). Since independence the role of the central state in mountain areas has increased. Scholarly work in rural Morocco must deal with the operations of this state and the ways in which this is different than in urban areas and the plains.
The present does not escape the past. The old moieties, the leff divisions, find echoes in a regional bifurcation between political parties. The most powerful local official is still the qaid, though he is now a monolingual Arab appointed from the central government rather than a local Berber who seized power for himself. Roads are still seen as a good thing, a means to a better life, and Christians are still morally dubious, often foolish, unbelievably rich and mysteriously powerful. Families that rose to power as lieutenants of the Goundafi still hold the lands they acquired through their service or, more charitably, at the time of their service. Other families still resent it. Marriages continue to connect people between political nodes that mattered in former circumstances, and social connections still carry people to places that seem insignificant if one considers only the contemporary configuration of social life. The present became so through a tortuously path, and notions of continuity and chan
