Auteur: el keyssa zenia
Date: 2002-03-05 05:20:31
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.
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