This thesis has involved an ethnographic enquiry into the lives of the people of Tagharghist, a Tashelhit (Berber) speaking village in the High Atlas Mountains south of Marrakech.  It is based on “participant observation,” an opaque “method” that boils down to “living with people,” particularly “living with people notably different than you.”  This method has generally been understood to mean that the researcher passes time on the subjects’ terms, speaking their language, walking their land, eating their food.  Since the early part of the 20th century, when this became the sine qua non of sociocultural anthropology, the point of this curious practice has been to grasp the “native’s point of view” (Malinowski 1984 [1922]: 24).
The villagers whose view I attempt to grasp make their living farming barley.  They grow this, as well as almonds, walnuts, olives and vegetables in steeply terraced and carefully irrigated fields; they emigrate for wage labor, and tend herds of goats and sheep.  The people of Tagharghist live without electricity, without speaking the national language, without (until very recently) a passable road or a school.  They cook mostly with wood that women gather, and the village cows survive because women haul huge loads of fodder to them, either from the fields near the river or from the mountains.  Mules and donkeys are used to help plow, but it is through arduous, continuous and intricately organized human labor that life is possible here.  The arduousness of this labor and the implications of its organization are what I take to be central in understanding their lives.  While my main question has involved identity, what it means to be Berber in one area of contemporary Morocco, I pursue this from the perspective of what people do to live there.  What they do, mostly, is work.

I am not the first to value labor, or to think work might be significant to the subjective perceptions of the people who do it.  Studs Terkel provided me with early inspiration in his powerful Working (1972), a book of interviews with North Americans about their jobs and how they feel about them.  Terkel quotes William Faulkner in the epigraph, “You can’t eat for eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours a day –all you can do for eight hours is work.  Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.”  This is of fundamental, if obvious, importance.  Work is what occurs in society most of the time people are not sleeping, and for that reason alone should be a central object of anthropological concern.  In Tagharghist, where constant physical labor so precariously maintains people’s survival, the significance of work is that much greater.

The philosopher Paul Schrecker has aimed to make “work” the centerpiece of a theory of history, based on the assertion that “Unceasing work is necessary to create and support a state of precarious, time and again collapsing, harmony.  This work fills, or rather is, the history of civilization” (1948:133).   Schrecker divides work into various “fields,” such as religion, economics, and politics, and he maintains that in a given society one field tends to dominate at any given time.  In these terms, it is the economic field that dominates in Tagharghist, and is what requires most of the “unceasing work.”  To accomplish this work other fields provide “norms” or generative models that people employ, but most of the time these are, in Schrecker’s terms, “subordinate determinations.”  In this sense too work produces everything, our human misery, history and civilization, our babies and our buildings.  Labor is latent in everything human.

However, despite attention to the conflict between “norms,” this model undervalues the role of inequality.  The fact is that labor is never simply done, but transacted.  Across generations, between sexes, or from one social class to another: labor by someone is almost always for someone else, at least in part, and in this sense labor forms the vital core of sociality itself.  This social aspect of labor, and the importance of asymmetry to it, inspires the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu to open his massively influential Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) with a quote from Karl Marx, the arch theorist of economic inequality. Bourdieu chooses for the theme of his work the quote, “The principal defect of all materialism up to now –including that of Feuerbach—is that the external object, reality, the sensible world, is grasped in the form of an object or an intuition; but not as concrete human activity, as practice, in a subjective way” (emphasis original).  It is worth noting that by “practice” Bourdieu does not mean only transactions that bridge ideal and material realms, the relation between honor and field ownership, for instance.  The sensible world itself is “concrete human activity” and if Bourdieu sometimes seems to veer too near to a Durkheimian “harmony” of relations, it is worth remembering that he takes his term “practice” from Marx.

For my purposes the importance here is less a general theory of labor than the call to subjectively understand particular realms of practice.  This demands anthropological work.  From Malinowski onwards anthropology has focused at least in part on the subjective experience of other people –their reality, whoever they are.  We have perhaps devoted too much time to ritual labor and other bounded events, and not enough to the messy business of daily life.   Even so “idealist” a theorist as Clifford Geertz has written “The danger that cultural analysis, in search of all-too-deep-lying turtles, will lose touch with the hard surfaces of life –with the political, economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained –and with the biological and physical necessities on which those surfaces rest, is an ever-present one.  The only defense against it, and against, thus, turning cultural analysis into a kind of sociological aestheticism, is to train such analysis on such realities and such necessities in the first place” (Geertz 1973: 30).

This is what I have attempted to do.  I do not offer a new theory of labor or even a sophisticated rendering of its theoretical significance.  I do not attempt to sketch a correlation between certain kinds of labor and particular kinds of people.   I do not even provide a particularly rich inventory of the work that people in Tagharghist actually do.  Rather, I use work (or labor or practice, if you like) as a point of entry, a lens through which to view an ineluctably cultural issue: the question of Berber identity.  I have tried to investigate how being Berber is significant within a part of Berber speaking society (rather than in urban Morocco where Arabic and French are dominant), and I have tried to frame this within the “political, economic, stratificatory realities” in which men --and women, importantly-- are everywhere contained.  This approach delivers a different reading of the situation than French ethnographers interested in social control, than anthropologists interested too exclusively in social organization or culture, or activists attempting to forge a broad Amazigh political consciousness.  I do not claim my interpretation to be uniquely correct, but suggest that framing the issue of identity in terms of labor yields fresh insights into old questions.  I have tried to lay this out in four main domains.

    First, to ground the study I examine the significance of spatial understandings to the people of Tagharghist.  I try to show how going certain places to do certain things renders space intelligible, and how the practical knowledge of space is a form of knowing yourself socially.  I describe the places that matter to villagers but I aver that they come to matter because they are necessary locales for and results of various kinds of labor.  If it seems that every rock, canal, field, tree, and path is named, this is because these are the materials of existence, the places people work and the places they work on.  Inevitably such places come to work on the people who build them.  This is the dialectic that Bourdieu and others illuminate, the way societal structures (and space, in this instance) become structured, and how they in turn structure habitus.  This comes down (somewhat mysteriously, admittedly) to “practice;” the social order is reproduced through work.  There is room here for agency, at least in the case of Tagharghist.  Careful thought is given to the work in and on space, calculations necessary because here the work of social order is simultaneously the work of staying alive.  Habitus alone cannot be counted on to insure material survival.

The chapter on Time presents a slightly different relation to work.  As I relate it, time is condensed to history: the past events and people resonant in Tagharghist today, at least among the men who consider it their work to know such things.   My purpose in this chapter is to place Tagharghist in a larger historical context; to rescue it from the impression of a being a “timeless” place divorced from history.  I contend, however, that history itself is a product of labor, and the episodes of history represent very limited visible peaks of huge mountains of coordinated work.  From the rise of Almohad dynasty in the 12th century to the pilgrimage taken by the founder of the Haj Ouahman lineage in the 20th, the labor of many villagers has been coalesced into the necessary power that some men (far more than women) make into a local form of official history.  Political work –and the history it en/genders—is possible because other sorts of labor occur in the background.  I thus attempt to place Tagharghist in a historical framework without forgetting the work that went into it.

Power, the next chapter, is plainly and directly about work: the way labor is divided, disciplined, organized and compelled.  I do not believe that there is a single mode or idiom of power in Tagharghist, but many.  Thus I note how a logic of patrilineal kinship noted by Gellner (1969) –and thought to be quintessentially Berber-- is put to work for intra-village collective labor rather than broad military or other political negotiations.   But I also note how Abdellah Hammoudi’s “master and disciple” paradigm --which is seen to be part of general Moroccan consciousness-- comes to order many things in Tagharghist, from family dynamics to local relations with government agents (1997, 1999).  I demonstrate that the “negotiation for reality” that Rosen observes is not so much drowned by ascribed social identities, as shaped by the social materials people have to work with over a lifetime (1984).  All this is to say that work is a very useful point of entry into power and identity.  People work for and with other people and the asymmetries involved bear on processes of individuation and group formation –the core issues of identity.

Finally I address Identity directly, and the question of a pan-Berber Amazigh consciousness in the mountains.  My argument is that the situations that lead to self-conscious Berber (or AshelHi) identity are those where locals confront outsiders, speakers of Arabic and/or French, usually, but also English and German.  Inevitably these confrontations occur in charged political economic contexts (development projects, education policy, pasture and forest oversight) and thus involve negotiations about who should do what for whom, and why.  They concern, in the broadest sense, work.  Henry Munson Jr. notes a distinction in Morocco between “spontaneous innate fundamentalism of traditional Muslims and the self-conscious ideological fundamentalism of political activists” (1993b: 181)  that is of use here.  Urban Amazigh activists and rural farmers both have some sort of Berber identity in the same way that farmers and urban fundamentalists both know themselves to be Muslims.  It should not be surprising that Berber or Muslim identity means different things in the mountains than they do in the cities, however.  Multilingual Moroccan cities and monolingual farming communities evince fairly different political economic conditions, different daily labor practices, and different available media for and modes of expression.

Much of what people said to me about identity in Tagharghist focused explicitly on labor, on the difficulty of staying alive in the mountains, and not on Berberness at all.  Surely this is due in part to the fact that I was the one asking the questions –and my own work of “writing a book about life in the mountains” was so bizarre as to invite comparison with their work.  Perhaps if a Berber-speaking scholar were to ask questions about the importance of speaking or being Berber they would receive different answers than I outline here.  This would illuminate the partiality (in both senses) of any ethnographic study, but would not seriously undermine the importance I claim for labor in the village of Tagharghist. Berber/ Amazigh / AshelHi culture is differently constructed in different situations, and as expressed by and to different people.  In all situations the “thinkable” emerges from specific historical, political and economic conditions, including, in Tagharghist, the dimensions of space, time and power I have tried to outline.

    I will end with a few words on the relevance of this study to anthropology.  In addition to the Berber issue, my discussion over these last several hundred pages has involved the experience of poverty.   In Tagharghist poverty is an imported idea, a relative position more than a state, something that is learned by traveling to the city, watching migrants return, dealing with government agents, talking to scholars and development workers.  Poverty in the Moroccan mountains is an experience of lack, certainly: lack of food, medicine, warm clothing, a watertight house, roads, electricity, running water, toilets, toys, furniture, and other things the people of Tagharghist know urban people have.  However, poverty here is also a richness of activity, a superabundance (rather than a lack) of work.  Poverty in this sense is generative; it enjoins action, shapes decisions, motivates practice.  Poverty operates in a way similar to fashionable notions of "discourse" that do not strictly determine but nonetheless manage to shape behavior.  I have tried here to reveal the sensuous specificity of something rather startlingly general.  Most of the world is very poor, and not in the way we see poor people in the US or Europe.  Poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America is often like the poverty of Tagharghist: a powerful stimulation to work a great deal of the time.

As I write the United States is bombing what is left of Afghanistan and even the hawks admit that we cannot find much left to destroy.  Columbia is at war with itself, with US money on both sides.  The Palestinians have lost nearly everything they had even a few years ago.  The Rwandans are in no better shape, nor are many Mexicans, Indonesians, Uzbeks, Kurds, Burmese… the list is depressingly long.  These people have fascinating cultures, certainly, but if we as anthropologists become transfixed by this and portray cultural vibrancy without mention of the dirt and sweat and blood through which it is built, we are, in my view, missing our calling.  If we in anthropology are to remain intellectually vital, if we are to deserve our funding and our place in the academy, we must not lose sight of what is vital to our subjects, and if this is partly cultural, it is never purely so.  The links are what matter, the conditions in which cultural understandings emerge (or don’t).

This seems to me crucial for our discipline.  Much has been written about anthropology’s loss of purpose, how our postmodern condition has deprived us of savages to study.  The assertion that our world has become “decentered, fragmented, compressed, flexible, refractive, postmodern” (Fox 1991) has meant to some that we have lost the traditional urge to explain an Other by which to define ourselves.  Modernism, we are told, and all of its attendant metanarratives, are dead.   This seems to me somewhat beside the point.  Whatever narratives are involved, poverty and labor remain bodily experiences of great force and some variation.  However imperfectly we go about it, if anthropology abandons the instinct to go out there to try and understand people’s lives, we risk intellectual implosion and utter irrelevance.  We risk mistaking ourselves for all-that-matters and solipsism for wisdom.  To say this is not to dismiss the study of diversity in the First World, and certainly not the movement of bodies that chase capital across national, cultural, and social boundaries to end up in our backyards.  But the loss of what we imagined as bounded and locatable cultures elsewhere should not cause us to abdicate our responsibility to know more of the world than our backyards.  It is, after all, one world: one built through systemic inequalities we enjoy, one drained to provide the wealth and power that allows for universities with anthropology departments.

We cannot undo the excesses or misuses of anthropology in the past.  We can endeavor to do better, to provide an intimate portrait of humanity that is deeper than journalism, more immediate than history, more global than sociology, more solid than culture studies.  This begins, in my view, with an understanding of the material differences in our lives.  It starts with an effort at empathy, an ethnographic attempt to grasp what it feels like to try and farm a mountainside, to feed a baby on nothing but barley, to have to leave home and seek work in a city where you don’t speak the language.  Some who gaze up at the mountains from the vantage of Marrakech or Paris will see pristine Berber culture.  Others will see poor farmers, unfortunate victims of poverty.  My case has been that neither of these views really captures the subjective experience of life in the mountains.  In Tagharghist Berberness and poverty are not reified abstractions but socially dense, richly understood and corporally felt processes enmeshed in the labor of daily life.  This is not to deny the terrible rates of unemployment in Morocco and elsewhere, but to suggest that lack of work is a different kind of poverty than an excess of it.  In this sense the people of Tagharghist have much to teach us  --about being poor, for one thing, and about being Berber in Morocco today.

Top