This paper examines the organization of collective labor for irrigation canal maintenance in a High Atlas village, an organization that compensates for the fluctuation of available labor over the domestic cycle of individual households.  Such labor transactions between households are accomplished by employing several different, and seemingly incompatible, cultural logics: a tradition of division by five, an emphasis on the importance of agnatic kin, a belief in the natural authority of elder over younger men, and an ideal equality among all men.  Empirically the groups forged by villagers are fair and unfair according to different specific types of equality under consideration and, especially, the temporal framework employed.  This integration of different forms of inequality and the importance of timeframes to their operation bears on anthropological and economic theory, and the practical aims of development.

Keywords: inequality, Berbers, labor organization, household dynamics, development

Introduction

    The village of Tadrar  is an assemblage of mud and stone houses etched into a mountainside ninety kilometers south of Marrakech.  It sits 1,500 meters above sea level in a valley carved by a small river, the Agoundis.  All 212 residents of Tadrar speak Berber,  most of them exclusively, and they support themselves growing barley, almonds and walnuts in more than a thousand small, steeply terraced plots.  These small plots are irrigated by an elaborate canal system that draws water from far up the valley and distributes it via seven main canals with innumerable offshoots and ditches.  As of 1998 the canals were constructed purely of rock, mud and a few logs; the engineering is impressive.  Using nothing but hand tools and gravity villagers effectively transport a continuous supply of water across several kilometers of precipitous mountain while the river that sustains the operation surges from a trickle in the late summer to a torrent in the early spring.
This paper focuses on the organization of collective labor by which this canal network is maintained, an organization known locally as the khams, from the Arabic for ‘five’.  In the simplest terms this involves dividing the adult men of the village into five work groups.  These five khams work groups are isomorphic with –but not the same as—the three ighsan of the village, Berber for ‘bones’ or lineages.  The social operation that animates the khams is thus the ‘arranging of the bones’, the transmutation of three lineages (comprised of twenty-seven independent households) into five working khamas, or fifths.

    Such arranging solves several practical problems.  First and most fundamentally, households must be assembled into larger units because they cannot contribute to the communal labor pool at the same rate over the course of their lifetimes.  The organization of households into larger groups allows for families at the peak of their productive power to compensate for relatives at more vulnerable points in the domestic cycle.  Lineages –the primary, locally sensible way to reckon relatives-- cannot be used for this amalgamation because they are too unequal demographically.  The largest lineage contains more than four times as many households as the smallest, and thus a rearranging of the ‘bones’ is necessary to create viable work groups that are seen to be balanced or ‘fair’.   Both household and khams organization facilitates the transfer of labor across time spans longer than any individual maintenance project, or, indeed, any individual life.  The organization of these transfers depends on a matrix of practical and cultural logics that integrate various temporal patterns and social levels of inequality.

    Theoretically the khams division provides us with a lens through which to view two sets of issues of scholarly contention, the vexed but essential integration of equality and inequality (especially across time), and the practical importance of accounting for this (in development schemes, for instance).  As Amartya Sen has argued, questions of equality always concern the equality of some particular thing: equality of some sort is accompanied by inequality of another (1992:viii).  The khams is no exception to this rule, and I will argue that the socially just, integrative functions of the institution are accompanied by a consolidation of power in the hands of the best-situated members of the most fortunate lineage.  The way this is accomplished --the combination of several different logics of equality and inequality-- suggests that the khams is both the product of, and framework for, practice.

    This is of more than academic significance.  Because the khams is now being encouraged as an efficient and equitable system by ‘outside’ actors, there are material and theoretical issues at stake that extend beyond this small corner of Morocco.  The World Bank, the Peace Corps, and Moroccan national agencies are working with the people of Tadrar on projects ranging from school construction to the creation of a potable water system.  In these projects the outside agencies generally provide most of the money and supplies, while the people of Tadrar provide the labor.  Not surprisingly, villagers use the khams divisions to allocate responsibilities for this labor.  Such interventions amplify the local effects of the khams, skew its long-term function of equalizing some household differences, and lend a transnational dimension to the arranging of the bones.  The khams is a case study that reveals a way that different notions of in/equality are integrated.  It shows how political and economic processes are driven by the temporal rhythms of social life, but are actualized through cultural valuations of different kinds of fairness.  The khams thus affords an opportunity to ventilate academic discussions of inequality with ethnographic data and examine the operation of culture in practical life.

(the body of this article is available upon request from the author)

Implications and Conclusions

Implications

The primary goal of this paper has been to describe the organization of collective labor in Tadrar, but there are some theoretical implications worth examining.  Mostly these coalesce around the two central points I hope to have drawn from the khams organization: 1. the essential integration of equality and inequality (that I have sought to express in shorthand as ‘in/equality’), and 2. the importance of different temporal frames of reference to this integration.  These points initially became clear to me through the influence Amartya Sen’s work.

Sen has argued cogently that ‘every normative theory of social arrangement that has at all stood the test of time seems to demand equality of something –something that is regarded as particularly important in that theory’ (Sen 1992:12).  This has been criticized as a general proposition, but seems to fit the Tadrar data well.   In any case, the economic literature on inequality is vast and cannot be reviewed in the space allowed.   The issue I hope to raise is what anthropology can gain from Sen’s insights, and what the khams ethnography can do for theories of in/equality.

First, we see in Tadrar several different notions of equality enmeshed in a single social arrangement.  It is not the case that a single, culturally accepted notion of equality determines the shape of the system, and in fact the vibrant aspect of the khams stems from the negotiations over which aspects of equality should obtain in a given timeframe or at a particular social level.  The patriarchs involved in the khams are seen to be equal --but manifestly are not-- and the particular social arrangements they form depend on political maneuvers.  The fifths are maintained as ‘balanced’, for instance, but the Ait Ali manage to contend that they should only comprise half a fifth despite their demographic equality to other whole fifths.  Sen’s contention that ‘ethical reasoning, especially about social arrangements, has to be, in some sense, credible from the viewpoint of others’ (ibid.:17) is well taken; legitimacy would seem necessary for political operations to succeed where force is not a viable option.  However, this does not address the combination of different forms of ethical reasoning in a single social formation.  The khams is a social arrangement that makes use of a variety of forms of in/equality.  Theoretical equality between lineages (the boundaries of which are contested) and between individual patriarchs is grafted to acceptable inequalities between older and younger men and between some larger and smaller households.  This suggests the importance of considering how normative theories --in the plural-- are assembled to facilitate social action.

This in turn points to the relationship between ‘normative theories’ and culture.  Lamont et al have shown how North Africans living in France explain racism and their disadvantaged position in French society by employing their own ‘particular universal’ notions of equality (2002:390), notions different than those held by the majority French population.  The implication, however, is that multiculturalism is the root cause of the differences; they are not internal to ‘a’ culture.   The different notions of equality employed in Tadrar are intra-cultural (rather than a case of culture clash) and thus contradict conceptualizations of culture as essential or ‘primordial’ (in Samuel Huntington’s sense ) or as ‘an ethnographic algorithm’ (as Geertz accused Goodenough of believing ).  In other words, ‘It is not the origin of its elements but the way they are synthesized that is the specificity of a culture’ (Friedman 1997:81).  The culturally dependent but active synthesizing of social formations in Tadrar –the politicized arranging of the bones-- should not be mistaken for an integrated cultural form that is ‘enacted rather than acted’ by living people (Roseberry 1989:10).

A second theoretical point involves the importance of time, which seems underemphasized in Sen’s work.  For example, in the conclusion to his treatment of inequality Sen writes, ‘…it is important to come to grips both (1) with the diversity of human beings … and (2) with the plurality of relevant ‘spaces’ in which equality can be judged….  The demands of equality in different spaces do not coincide with each other precisely because human beings are so diverse.  Equality in one space goes with substantial inequalities in others’ (1992: 129).  While accommodating this important point, the example of the khams suggests also the overwhelming importance of time that must be figured into such conceptual ‘spaces’, especially the temporal rhythms of biological and social reproduction.

For instance, central to a notion of equality involving sons working for their fathers is the presumption that the next generation of sons will do the same, in effect demanding at least three generations to articulate the relevant notion of fairness.   Similarly, organizing households into fifths allows families to exchange labor over the organic lifecycle of their households rather than the duration of a project or another fixed temporal unit.  A.F. Robertson has written of ‘rival temporal schemes of evolution and history’ (1996:591) and has suggested that ontogeny –the human lifecycle—is the vital missing link to explaining how culture mediates between biology and history.  This point is central to understanding the khams, where labor dynamics within households drive labor exchanges between households –exchanges that can be culturally construed as ‘fair’ only in certain timeframes, only over decades and even lifetimes.  A weakness of this study of the khams in Tadrar is that I could derive no information on the history of the institution.  A synchronic study (of only fourteen months) can only infer the salience of particular long-term timeframes of fairness and their importance to the social operation of in/equality, but I hope to have drawn this inference convincingly.
Still, whether or not these particular conclusions are correct, temporality is clearly central to the operation of the khams  –and to social theory more generally.  Manuel Castells writes of contemporary struggles for ‘control over time’ and of projects seeking ‘revolutionary temporality’ (1997:124).  Anthony Giddens has argued that people ‘in different cultures experience time differently’ (1987:144), and ‘in the connection between “organization” as a problem of the bracketing of time-space, and “organizations” as specific features of modern culture, we find issues of the foremost importance for the social sciences’ (ibid. 165).  This ‘foremost importance’ involves explaining the way ‘Western’ society is actualized through new productive organizations of space and (especially) time under conditions variously labeled ‘network society’, ‘late modernity’, ‘globalization’, or ‘global capitalism’.  To this end Giddens identifies ‘three interlacing forms of temporality’, including the ‘durée of day-to-day life, expressed in reversible time’,  ‘the durée of the lifespan of the individual’, and ‘the durée of institutions’ or the ‘longue durée of which Braudel speaks’ (1987:144-45).   Castells writes of ‘clock time’, timeless time’, ‘glacial time’ and issues of ‘spatiotemporal evolution’ (1997:126-127), while Bourdieu points out the importance of ‘the rarest and most precious thing of all… namely, time’ to processes of contemporary social distinction (1994:281).  This sociological desire to grasp the ‘new’ sorts of temporal arrangements related to globalized capitalist production would seem likely to benefit from a comparative understanding of time in subsistence economies, or economies less articulated with the global market.  And this may send us back to revamp some prematurely discarded ideas from social anthropology.

To take only a couple of examples, Max Gluckman wrote in 1968 that ‘various institutions have different structural durations, and their “intermesh” has to be analyzed’ (1968:233).  If we burnish Gluckman’s suggestion with more recent concerns over agency, the centrality of gender, and especially power, we have something very close to what I argue about the organization of forms of in/equality through time, and perhaps some purchase on what Giddens means by ‘interlacing forms of temporality’ (1987:144).  Meyer Fortes too made the case for different ‘functions of time’, and he did so in a way that bears comparison to current sociological thinking, citing ‘mere duration’, ‘continuity and discontinuity’, and ‘genetic or growth processes’ as categories of temporal function (Fortes 1970 [1949]:2).  It is not possible here to pursue a full explication of the these issues, but we can make a modest assertion: if the contemporary world system relies either on unprecedented, culturally specific understandings of time or, more fundamentally, new forms of time, it would seem useful to examine such understandings or forms vis-à-vis other contexts.  In the article cited above Giddens avers ‘oral cultures do not monitor the conditions of their own reproduction’ and that ‘tradition, combined with the needs of practical adjustment to the material environment, are the main elements guiding overall system reproduction’ (1987:154).   The Tadrar case suggests something quite different: an intense, reflexive monitoring of at least one sort of institutional arrangement, and the importance of historical contingency, local politics and kinship relations to its reproduction.  The khams material makes a strong case that ‘tradition’ is far too stolid a word to capture the complex, politically vexed and active integration of in/equalities involved in social reproduction.

Finally, the experience of development in Tadrar illustrates that these issues are of more than academic relevance.  The Moroccan government built a school in the village the first year I did fieldwork, 1998.  The groups of men charged with leveling a spot on the mountainside so that the school could be built were organized according to the khams.  The Peace Corps funded a potable water project and purchased pipe used to bring clean drinking water down from a spring several thousand feet above the village.  Again, a form of the khams was used to assemble the groups of laborers who dug the pipe into the rock and helped build the water storage tank.  These sorts of projects were continuing as I completed fieldwork.  Tadrar is located on the borders of the Toubkal National Park, and as the World Bank pursues the Morocco Protected Areas Project more money is coming to be available to improve local conditions, beginning with the canal system.  The money will arrive from outside, but the labor is organized from within.

These outside agents and agencies have their own notions of equality, their own framing of what counts as fair, and their own timeframes of operation.   The Peace Corps volunteer, for example, worked hard to ensure that all the households of the village would be equally served by the new water system.  He sometimes had to put himself in the way of attempts by powerful families to secure advantageous access to the water (attempts they certainly could justify as ‘fair’ in some way), and he sometimes found himself in the middle of disputes.  Eventually, working with the villagers, the volunteer managed to ensure that the seven village taps were located to serve everyone, if not equally then at least, to him, something close to it.  Four years later, in summer 2002, all but two of the taps had been capped and the water piped into private houses –many, but by no means all, of the houses in the village.  One kind of inequality (people living different distances from the spring where water had traditionally been gathered) was replaced by another (people living different distances from the taps), which was again altered to the present unequal situation where some people have private water in their houses and some have to walk and fetch it from a tap.  All this ignores inequalities in the number of daughters available to fetch the water in the first place.

What the volunteer could not foresee or forestall was what the villagers would do with the water system once it was built.  He was also unable to overcome the inequalities intrinsic the labor organization through which the water system was built, one based on the khams.  The khams allotments allowed some men the time to politick about where the main water lines would be located while others were off working on installing the pipe itself.  The installation of these main lines was significant in that one led to an empty hillside owned by the Ait Ben Oushen, an area slated by the villagers (or the majority Ait Ben Oushen, anyway) for future development.  One large house is now built in this area while below it some of the main opponents of the plan still have to fetch water by bucket from a tap several dozen meters from their house.

This does not mean that the Peace Corps volunteer did a bad job; certainly everyone benefits to some degree from the new water system and the villagers are very thankful for it.  The young women have even produced songs of praise about the American ‘bringer of water’.  Still, for our purpose the point is that the cultural ideas of fairness held by the volunteer were unlikely to match that of the villagers of Tadrar, and the volunteer had to fight for some forms of fairness important to him while accepting some local notions of fairness in order for the project to proceed.  Such discrepancies in conceptualizations of fairness would seem to characterize many development projects, or indeed any cross cultural interaction.  We may even see notions of in/equality as the vital core of our cultural beliefs.  The lesson to learn, again, is that we are rarely dealing with a simple case of equality versus inequality, but of different standpoints on what counts as equal, differently integrated forms of in/equality, and different timeframes over which such standpoints make sense.
Ironically, perhaps, such interventions in Tadrar are amplifying some inequalities in the khams and causing it to have more significance under ‘globalization’ than in the ‘traditional’ context.  It should not surprise us that the main person with the time to deal with development agents (and the time to deal with me and my research questions) was from the Ait Ali.  He was among the small subset of men who were candidates to become part time politicians, men at the peak of their household productive potential, who had land to farm and sons to farm it.  As a landed patriarch at the apex of his cycle of domestic production my main informant was fortunate to be largely free from manual labor; he was more fortunate still to be from Ait Ali, whose advantageous khams position freed up yet more time for political work.  Not everyone in a position of political advantage has the ambition to seize it, of course, but my main informant made full use of his time to oversee –and shape—both my research and all development projects undertaken in the village.

In this way state and international interventions in Tadrar have served to strengthen some local social inequalities.  Such interventions operate in a limited temporal frame and are geared towards singular transformation rather than the recurrent management of shared property.   How one would avoid this, how, in Scott’s words, to ‘favor reversibility’ (1998: 345) is unclear, but would certainly depend on understanding the cultural frameworks by which in/equality is integrated into social arrangements, and coming to terms with the timeframes over which these are expressed.  The practical significance of such understanding may provide support for the idea that social anthropology is ‘still worth the trouble’ (Godelier 2000), and may allow us to find ‘new equilibriums’, new configurations of justice, rather than merely lamenting the ‘vulnerability’ of indigenous structures (Berque 1978:175-176).

Conclusions

Because land in Tadrar is scarce, households cannot easily expand and contract their productive property as they grow and decline; instead households must adjust labor/land ratios through social amalgamation and dissolution.  One key modality for this is called the khams.  This socially useful organizing principle is primarily invoked to assemble the labor to maintain the communal irrigation system, but it is also employed to certain other ends.  Simply, in terms of canal maintenance, the khams involves dividing village households into five groups and requiring four adult men from each group to work on a maintenance project until it is complete.  Not so simply, the groups draw on the logic of patrilineal relatedness and the culturally sanctioned authority of older males over their descendents.  Thus the khams is in essence a mode of transacting labor—through time and across household boundaries—that takes advantage of one cultural value (patriarchal authority) to achieve another (equality among household heads).

The fifths are modeled on biological patrilineages (ighsan or bones), a logic of sodality and cooperation that is locally sensible, though the actual composition of the fifths departs from the ideal in intriguing ways.  At several levels these arrangements are ‘fair’, they allocate obligations more or less equally between recognizably similar social units.  In other, and perhaps even more interesting ways, the division is clearly not fair –it favors oldest sons and the wealthiest families and, I argue, helps a few households to consolidate their position at the top of a subtle political and economic hierarchy.  Both the ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ aspects are dependent on the timeframe of the judgment –not merely the social location of the observer, but the temporal frame of the observation.  This suggests that self-reflexive anthropologists need attend not only to the unintended effects we have on what we observe (the social Heisenburg principle) and our partial understandings of what we observe (in both senses of ‘partial’), but also the temporal framework of our assessment.  This last point receives less attention than the first two and, while not explored in depth here, would seem to have implications for economic theory, development practice, and social theory generally.

What is clear is that the present configuration of the khams is more than usually significant because it is being put to work for an array of novel, one-time projects that require a great deal of the villagers’ effort.  This is of more than theoretical interest.  Village projects supported by the Peace Corps, the World Bank and the Moroccan state are now being undertaken using the same khams system employed for canal repair.  Thus we have national and international uses for the khams –and national and international inflections of its transactions of labor.  The arranging of the bones has found new purposes, and curious new forms of significance, in the global village.

Acknowledgements

Fieldwork for this paper was conducted in 1998-99 with support from the Near and Middle East section of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the American Institute of Maghrib Studies (AIMS).  Research would not have been possible without the help of many people, but most especially Abderrahman Ait Ben Oushen and Latifa Asseffar.  Earlier drafts of this paper were helpfully and rigorously vetted by anonymous readers at Ethnos, as well as participants at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin’s Summer Academy 2002, in particular Pascale Ghazaleh, Lucette Valensi, Saskia Walentowitz, and Mandana Limbert.  Elvin Hatch, Ramon Guardans, Richard Chenhall and Mark Schuller also offered advice and encouragement, and Hillary Haldane did this plus helped make my prose readable.  Sandy Robertson provided consistent inspiration, and pointed me towards the core of the argument many years ago.