Auteur: numidia
Date: 2002-03-05 06:30:54
azul
c'est une etude d'un chercheur americain, montrant l'occultation du fait amazigh dans la "communauté" des chercheurs en sciences sociales, croire que c'est(seulement) le fait des arabo-islamists est une erreur, jugez en .
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 @!#$, 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%2
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