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Contents of this page:
Introduction: Aim and Scope
Introduction: Theoretical Entanglements
Introduction: Thesis Overview
1. Space
2. Time
3. Power
4. Identity
Introduction: Methods

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 change can only be understood in reference to this.  Contemporary villagers sift the undifferentiated expanse of “previous time” for periods, events, processes and people that are rendered significant through their recall.  The history that is produced from this is as irregular as the mountains themselves.  Like important spatial nodes, some historical intersections matter a great deal more than others, some events provide touchstones and lessons, they continue to shed light as they are meaningfully reconsidered.  The people of Tagharghist are the ancestors of those who fought with Ibn Tumart, who labored under the Goundafi, who built the French roads and dug their mines.  The history of the region is in a real sense village history, they are the people who supplied the bodies, the sweat, and all too often the blood for the “events” that come down to us as significant.

Chapter 4: Power 

Power, the subject of the Chapter Four, emerges from this complicated past.  This is the longest of the three chapters meant as “background” to “Identity,” and is itself divided into three main parts: households, the village, and connections with the “outside.”  My first aim is to show how gerontocracy, patriarchy and material inequality combine to form the basic field within which people labor and develop a sense of social identity.  Then I seek to demonstrate how changing political economic circumstances are altering this field, providing new constraints and opportunities.  The object is to reveal the characteristic inequalities of the social nexus and in particular how they are expressed through labor.  I begin with households.
Others have noted that “a complete analysis of Berber society must begin with a detailed investigation of family structure” (Montagne 1973:27), but this is rarely taken seriously.  I will show that as the basic unit of production and consumption, households condition the operations of the five intermediate “lineage” units in Tagharghist and determine who has the ability to interact with “outside” forces and how they do so.  Such “outside forces,” especially state education, migration for wage labor, and dealings with state agencies, are becoming ever more important in Tagharghist.  The power dynamics of the domestic sphere are replicated and amplified at other social levels, from extended families and lineages on up.  In this sense power does not “begin with the state” but in the family.

The fact that people grow older, have children and die is the “motor” in this sphere, the ultimate underlying provocation that insists people adjust what they’re doing through a lifetime.  This aspect makes each household a process rather than a static condition, something that has been demonstrated for households generally (Robertson 1991).  Simply put, the bodies that constitute society have to be replaced.  How this is accomplished, the particular ways of trading labor and resources across generations, across time, is what characterizes the household order, and the households of Tagharghist have their own modes for accomplishing this.  Exchange is very rarely on a cash basis, and the terms of interaction tend to be life-long or at least long-term.  The old feed the very young until the young can be put to work.  The younger work for the older until eventually control over resources is ceded to the new generation in exchange for continued care of the elderly.  Rights and obligations in this process –and much of the power to manipulate it-- are based on sex, age, marital status, and especially property ownership.  I will show how structured inequalities in these domains make for different ways of experiencing household life, different contexts of identity formation even within a single household.  The way in which individuals participate in the village order or the larger capitalist economy is crucially dependent on their position in the ever-evolving household.

The second part of the chapter concerns the village as a whole; specifically the way lineages are mobilized into five fifths for the purposes of communal labor.  Like households, the method of dividing twenty-nine households into five groups allows labor to be transacted across generations; it makes it possible for households at the peak of their power to assist those in an ascending or declining phase.  As such, these groupings of households ameliorate some sorts of inequality and exacerbate others.  This view of how notions of lineage relatedness do social work amongst rural Berbers contrasts with Gellner’s political model (1969) and with Kraus’s notion of “segmentary identities” (1998).  While I acknowledge the significance of the patrilineal mode of reckoning, I see this logic working as Bourdieu outlines, as part of a “batch of schemes enabling agents to generate an infinity of practices adapted to endlessly changing situations…” (1972:16).

Finally, I turn to connections outside the village.  Preeminently and most enduringly such connections are established by women moving for marriage.  All villagers have two sets of relatives, and since 80% of the women in Tagharghist marry outside the village, many of the villagers’ maternal relatives are from somewhere else.  If a person’s father’s male relatives are crucial to politics and labor within the village (especially for boys), the mother’s relatives are equally important in forming relations to other places, villages nearby and cities far away.  These lateral, feminine connections help weave the patrilineally organized villages of these high mountains into a broad social landscape.  This fact is strikingly underdeveloped in the literature on Moroccan rural social organization.
Beyond this, migration is an important way that villagers interact with the outside world, and state education and development are also creating new “avenues of participation”  for variously positioned villagers.  The context in which identities are formed in Tagharghist is in flux.  New sources and forms of power are influencing the constraints and possibilities inherent in the household and village order.  In most cases, those who have the ability to take advantage of these changes are those already best positioned in their particular household and in village power relations.  Migration and education affect many different villagers in many different ways, but increasing state involvement in the valley tends to afford those already locally powerful a chance to consolidate and expand this power.
I will emphasize that participation in these institutions is constrained but not predetermined, neither automatic nor fully negotiable.  Different statuses and relationships constrain an individual’s social transactions and in all cases gender is preeminent.  Taking labor as preeminent helps keep this fact in the foreground: on a daily basis men do not do what women do.  Women’s participation is always significantly different than that of men, even in the capitalist economy, which is sometimes supposed to render all labor merely labor.  The modes of interaction, the required behavior and comportment, the productive ideologies, and the frames of negotiations in each realm are correspondingly different for women and men.  It would be surprising, then, if the forms of identity that emerged from these processes were identical for both sexes.  Berberness and poverty are gendered.
Also, people do not behave as automatons.  There are defined modes of participation, shifting sets of hierarchical and egalitarian relationships, but individuals make use of these according to their own abilities, position and preferences.  A given socio-political context is only that: a set of things that must be dealt with.  There are contradictions to be found, points of logical, structural and personal vulnerability and the people of Tagharghist are anything but passive.  Men and women, young and old, propertied or not: people make themselves heard and their interests felt.  They are a boisterous, litigious, voluble lot.  Older men had my ear in formal sitting rooms and during meals, but women, girls, boys and younger men emerged from behind rocks and trees any time I left the core of the village.  They were not shy about explaining very different understandings about how the world worked, and should work.  I did not lack advice about foci for “the book about life in the mountains” that I was supposed to be writing.  I have tried to respond to the diversity of this advice, or what might better be called advice on diversity.

Chapter Five: Identity

 Chapter Five returns to the question of identity, a notoriously elusive subject.  The main difficulty concerns the ontological complexity of the issue.  Individuals can hold many different identities simultaneously, some of these are personal and some refer to social groups, and all are defined both through individual imaginings and social agreement.  Power is crucial to who gets to determine the parameters of possible identities and the shape of the relevant discourse, thus identity involves a complicated transaction between variously dis/empowered individuals and particularly constructed social groups.  The epistemological problem of how we can know about something so complex and ethereal only makes writing about identity more difficult.

For these reasons most sociological analyses of identity focus on identity projects rather than identity per se.  That is, scholars are overwhelmingly concerned with discourses of identity, often discourses conveniently inscribed in Web sites, newsletters, in popular music or in manifestos of various kinds.  Such identity projects  are globally important, but their expressions are very different from the forms of identity one finds among subsistence farmers.  Such international, expressive sorts of identity tend to involve “primary identities” that serve to frame other aspects of identity for a given individual.  In Tagharghist, I argue, identity is not expressed in terms of a primary identity, Amazigh or otherwise.  Various sorts of identity coexist in Tagharghist, including national, religious and some sense of AshelHi, or regional Berber identity.  I focus on what is Berber in this, the particular contexts in which being Berber matters.  I end with the observation that labor and poverty are far more important foci for identity than has been generally understood in rural Morocco.

The chapter is divided into three sections.  The first concerns the Amazigh movement.  I quote different activists and scholars and attempt to outline their political concerns in Morocco and the discourses they draw on to demonstrate the relevance of these concerns.  Amazigh scholars and activists tend to discuss Imazighen on a spatial scale (all of North Africa) and within a temporal framework (the entire history of North Africa) that is alien to most subsistence farmers.  Their notion of power is overwhelmingly focused on the state.  The discourses activists draw upon to make their case (post-colonial theory, human rights, cultural self-determination) are also foreign to farmers.  Such activists and scholars come to be activists and scholars in bilingual, bicultural environments where domination by Arabic, French and English language is ubiquitous.  In these generally urban contexts activists reveal new and interesting ways of being Amazigh.  They refute nationalist claims about the irrelevance of Berber language, culture and history by asserting (at times, at least) an essential Amazigh identity connected to linguistic heritage.  However, their refutations are often expressed in French, Arabic, Spanish and English.  They emerge from different sorts of labor than are undertaken in Tagharghist (speaking and writing about Amazigh culture rather than speaking Tashelhit while organizing themselves to stay alive).  Speaking Tamazight may make one Amazigh in some sense, but it does not necessarily make someone feel that being Amazigh is important.  If it did, Tagharghist would be replete with activists.  A comprehensive understanding of Berber identity must include commentary by Amazigh activists and scholars, but their perspective should not be taken for the whole of contemporary Amazigh life.

The next section of Chapter Five focuses on “Berber” identity in Tagharghist, or more specifically local notions of Arabs and IshelHin.  I quote from taped interviews I made with villagers where I tried to provoke them to talk about Arab/AshelHi differences.  While the material is somewhat ambiguous, it seems that although being Amazigh is not a widespread, daily concern of the people of Tagharghist, they do have an idea of themselves as IshelHin.  Villagers lack a clear sense of connection with all Imazighen everywhere, but they nonetheless understand themselves as different from Arabs.  Arab distinctiveness is not always seen as pejorative, and responses to my questions reveal a subtle mix of attitudes about rural and urban people, regional and class differences, and the importance of different urban contexts to Arab/AshelHi relations.  The specifically anti-Arab sentiments I heard concerned Arabs coming into the valley –schoolteachers and state agents—rather than Arabic speakers in general.  These clearly tracked power relations involved in specific forms of political work.

Finally I turn to the more general question of identity in Tagharghist, and the issue of poiesis and poverty.  My contention in this section is that labor is not only fundamental to material survival, but is also a significant domain of identity production.  Intensive irrigated agriculture requires cooperation and, in the context of the High Atlas, constant physical exertion.  The shifting social groups necessary to carry out different projects are materially necessary, but also constitute important loci of local identity.  The labor involved in village life –building houses, carrying wood, fodder, grain and fertilizer from place to place, watering fields—is so all-encompassing and constant that it necessarily forms an important medium through which people express themselves.  This is especially striking among women since they work much harder than men.

My conviction about this sort of identity formation emerged slowly and experientially through informal interactions rather than structured interviews.  To make my case in this chapter, however, I draw less from my experience than I do from interviews.  I asked people to tell me about “life in the mountains” rather than about Arabs or city life, the government or some other very specific thing.  Given this more open line of questioning, people invariably focused on labor.  Surely this had something to do with the fact that I did not have to work as they did.  People asked often about my work, how it was going, what I was doing.  I endured a certain amount of kidding (in both the US and Morocco) over whether what I did amounted to work at all, and so it is not entirely surprising that when I asked about life, I got a story about work.  I do not believe that this renders my portrayal of the relationship between labor and identity false, even if it shows its partiality.  The sort of identity generated in the processes of raising children and preparing food, delivering water to fields and fodder to animals, is not normally inscribed in any sort of discourse.  It would seem to have little political potential that might catch the attention of outsiders.  Daily labor will never be so exciting as saintly baraka, so elusively ominous as epistemes of power, so intricately engaging as theories of stateless societies.  Still, I argue, labor matters to local people materially and affectively, and it matters far more than one would guess by reading the corpus of scholarship on rural Morocco.

Identity is formed within particular frameworks of space, time and power, but people do not passively conjure a sense of themselves in such contexts.  What villagers do in villages is work: all the time, in particular ways and with particular people, under staggeringly difficult conditions.  Within a specific space/time/power nexus, what actually happens in Tagharghist is a necessary articulation of material production and reproduction with the generation of meaning.  Given this articulation, it would seem curious to me if identity were not at least partially expressed through labor, at least in an economy such as Tagharghist.  However dull the drudgery of subsistence farming seems from outside, it remains socially complex; villagers themselves do not discount its importance to who they are.  Laboring is a fundamental aspect of being Amazigh in a place like Tagharghist.

Methods: Infiltration and Intimacy

Professionally what anthropologists do is infiltrate families, dwell in houses that are not our own, poke into business that is not properly ours, and ask questions that despite our best efforts often emerge as scandalous.  In fact, much of the information we want is not amenable to simple questioning and this is why we continue to insist on the importance of “long term” fieldwork.  We need to be in a place to see what happens, or, more correctly, to experience what happens with some sense of immediacy and with some sense of its place in a larger context.  In social and cultural anthropology the anthropologist herself or himself is the primary research tool.  The mechanisms by which we come to “know” things might include maps of land and genealogical relationships, data about property and irrigation schemes, observations about power relations, but these and all other “knowledge” come to us through social interaction.  Socializing is our primary method.  We operate in an alien cultural environment, and nervously navigate unspoken rules of the permissible, the done and the not done, the said and the better off silent.  Though we sometimes have to maneuver people into talking, in the end each of us is as good an anthropologist as we are a listener.  The way we come to be able to listen, the particular people we listen to, and the places we listen to them have much to do with the story we tell about life in a faraway place.

The first thing you need to do anthropology is money.  What is studied or not studies is tied to financial constraints that reflect academic fashion, disciplinary borders, and institutional preferences.  If you are not fortunate enough to have a personal or parental fortune, you need to get cash from somewhere and the organizations that provide it have their own ideas about what should be done with it.  I began my journey into research with a personal loan of $5,000 that I got from a private, university-administered source.  With this I went to Morocco in the summer of 1995, my first summer of graduate school, to do “preliminary research,” a grandiose term for wandering foreign lands desperately seeking a research topic and locale.  I knew that I wanted to work in Morocco from a trip I had made there many years before.  I had met a wonderful collection of Arabs and Berbers on a beach near a village north of Agadir, in the south of Morocco, and this was my first destination when I returned to the country.  This village, however, had succumbed to a boom in tourism.  My friends had moved away.  I had originally been there in winter and the summer found the place swarming with the urban middle class, who lined what had been a lovely, deserted stretch of sand with what now looked to be a roiling human carpet.  The transformation of this area would make a good topic, but it was too personally depressing.  I continued south.
On a bus between Tiznit and Tafraoute in the Anti Atlas mountains, in the stifling heat of August rather too near the edge of the Sahara, I met a man named Lahcen.  He had studied abroad, in Moscow amongst other places, and we could communicate in French.  He invited me back to his natal village, south of Tafraoute near Adrar Mqorn.  He and his mother were extremely kind to me. I stayed in their living room for a week, prone in the heat during midday, venturing out in the mornings to the fortified “old village” on the hill and the nearby ancient mines.  In the evenings I sat at the wall near the path to the well where the men joked and talked.  These IshelHin nearly all worked elsewhere, in cities from Casablanca to Berlin.  They returned to the village infrequently, but maintained it as a sort of cultural base where the old and the impoverished continued to live and where children could be impressed with what was “correct.”  It was, interestingly, a very modern village.  Lahcen made it clear that there were two codes of conduct, one for elsewhere, one for the village.  Women here were completely veiled, shrouded in black, and moved around in ghostly silence.  Mansions were rising on the plain below the abandoned, ancient village, complete with separate quarters –indeed whole separate floors-- for men and women and huge stables for sheep that would never come to live there since the surrounding hills were covered with little but scorched rock.  This cultural outpost nurtured by the robust German economy and the national center of Casablanca could prove an exciting project.   But it was too hot.  It was simply too hot to even breathe, much less conduct research.  It was too hot for Lahcen too, and I convinced him to accompany me to the High Atlas where the altitude promised relief from the molten sun that seemed to pass only yards over our heads.

Lahcen and I got off the bus in Ijoukak, on the road between Taroudant and Marrakech.  I chose the spot.  We had wanted to go to the mountains directly north of Taroudant since I was sure the lack of roads there and the failure of my guidebook to mention the area would save us from confronting the hordes of tourists that invade Morocco in late summer.  We had not been able to secure transport before souq day, though, and didn’t want to wait in the heat.  Lahcen and I bought a few cans of sardines, some loaves of bread and began walking up the dirt road by the river.  We simply wandered.  We had no particular plan and no map of the area off the main road.  When we stopped to rest we would talk about whether to go forward or back.  We kept choosing forward, sleeping in the riverbed at night.  Several times villagers asked us if wanted to stay in their homes, but we always declined.  One of these villagers was Abderrahman Ait Ben Oushen of Tagharghist.  He had a big engaging smile, if a total lack of teeth, and a keen interest in all things foreign.  He told me to come back and stay with him sometime.  I told him I would, and eventually, three years later, I did.  In 1995, though, Lahcen and I continued into the high country, becoming increasingly lost.  We nearly died crossing the Ouanoukrim Massif, or I did with my ridiculously large backpack that contained no food or useful supplies at all.  (It did have a couple of very good ethnographies, which I suppose we could have burned for heat.)  The last time I saw Lahcen was on our way down, below the hiking refuge at Nelter, near Jebel Toubkal.  He left for home.  I left for Marrakech, to get maps and more money.  I ended up very ill in Marrakech and moved north, eventually making it to a hospital in Ceuta, on the Mediterranean coast.  I recovered enough to leave the hospital after a week, but continued on to Spain to fully recuperate.  Lahcen and I exchanged letters for a few years, but lost track of one another.

Back at school I began to read about Morocco more deliberately.  I took a seminar in North African history with Stephen Humphreys, and attempted to pass my qualifying exams in anthropology.  If you want to work in Morocco, you need to show some interest in Arabic, so during the next summer I took an intensive course with money provided by the Islamic and Near Eastern Studies program at UCSB.  I shall forever be grateful for this start.  I had no aptitude for Arabic at all, however, and in the middle of the course one of my dearest friends burst a blood vessel in his brainstem, went into a coma, and a week later died.  My Arabic got even worse after that; I never really caught up to the class after my time at the hospital.  When my third year of graduate school started I continued to take Arabic, surviving only through the saintly forbearance of my instructors.  To stay solvent I was teaching for geographers and historians in the Environmental Studies Department, a delicate task for an anthropology student, and between my teaching duties, attempting to advance to PhD candidacy, and Arabic I was more than frazzled.
By sheer good fortune I was awarded a Foreign Language Area Studies grant for my fourth year.  Dwight Reynolds had secured the funding and he and the rest of the committee agreed to allow me use the money to go to Fez and study Moroccan Arabic.  The money was specifically earmarked for Arabic, though, so I had to swear I would not pursue Berber.  Despite this restriction, I shall forever be grateful for this, too.  I went to Fez, set myself up in a cavernous house in the old town, the medina, and took classes in Moroccan and Modern Standard Arabic at the American Language Institute in Fez.  Happily, Moroccan Arabic came much easier to me than the Modern Standard Arabic I had been studying.  I discovered that I have absolutely no talent for grammar or for anything concerning the structure of language, but I am a decent mimic and am willing to embarrass myself by attempting things I am unsure of.  This last characteristic is very useful to the practical application of foreign languages.  Unhappily, the Moroccan Arabic I was using on a daily basis quickly eradicated what Modern Standard Arabic I had managed to grasp, undoing in a few months three years of patient study.

While in Fez I was awarded research money from the Social Science Research Council and the American Institute of Maghrib Studies.  I had been corresponding with another researcher who worked on Berbers, Katherine Hoffman, who lived in Taroudant.  Katherine had been in Morocco many years.  She spoke both Moroccan Arabic and Tashelhit fluently, and had conducted research into a number of topics, from cultural associations to the use of song in identity formation.  I made a few preliminary trips to meet her and when classes were over in Fez I moved south to Taroudant, into a spare room in Katherine’s house.  It was Katherine who introduced me to Latifa Asseffar, since the two of them had worked together on translations.  Latifa is a native Tashelhit speaker with a degree in English.  She agreed to teach me some Tashelhit using the Peace Corps textbook that the language director in Rabat had kindly given me from the language courses they provide for their volunteers.  Latifa and I worked for ten days but I seemed to be learning nothing.  Latifa assured me that I would make progress once I was in the mountains and had no choice but to learn it, so I packed up and left, retracing the route Lahcen and I had taken years before.  There was a Peace Corps worker, Ryan Russell, who had come to live and work in Tagharghist, and through him I had forewarned people of my arrival.

The first place I stayed in Tagharghist was with Abderrahman.  I reminded him that he had invited me years before, but this was hardly necessary.  Abderrahman was renting a spare house to Ryan, and he was keen to interact with foreigners.  Hamad Lukstaf, who owned a café in Taroudant but was originally from Tagharghist, happened to be staying in the village when I arrived.  He was anxious to rent his house in the village.  So by the second day I had secured a private room in a house for the equivalent of approximately $30 per month.  I did not think I could manage to live in a house with a family.  Things are very communal and crowded in village houses, eating and sleeping tends to occur with the whole family together in a common room.  I needed space and quiet time for at least part of the day to write.  I also felt I needed my own room and some privacy to maintain my sanity.  It was difficult enough to live in a world without restroom facilities or furniture.  I could not also live without a bedroom.
I had brought food with me, though I touched little of it as I ate most of my lunches and breakfasts with Abderrahman.  I was fortunate during this early period to have dinner with a different family every night, and I was thus was able to burden Abderrahman’s wife Khadija slightly less than I would have otherwise.  These dinners proved a crucial opportunity to quickly get to know many of villagers with whom I would not work directly.  It had been my good luck to arrive in the village in the midst of a large potable water project funded by the Peace Corps.  Ryan, the volunteer, had managed to secure funding for cement and pipe and the villagers themselves were paying for a specialist (one of Abderrahman’s in-laws from another village) to oversee the installation of the system.  Tagharghist already had a rotation by which the religious teacher in the mosque ate at a different family’s house each night.  The outside specialist and the Peace Corps volunteer were added to this rotation.  Abderrahman, as liaison, was included.  And I, as a foreigner who in most people’s minds must be associated with the project in some way, was added on to the list of dignitaries.  In this way I spent each night in conversation with a different coterie of important men of the village, and was thus able to explain and re-explain my purposes.  My statement of this boiled down to “writing a book about life in the mountains,” though why anyone would want to do such a thing remained a much-discussed mystery.  As Latifa had predicted, my Tashelhit improved rapidly.  Ryan was there to help me explain crucial parts of what I was up to and Abderrahman spoke enough Moroccan Arabic that he could help explain too.

I contracted with Abderrahman for Tashelhit lessons, paying him approximately $5 an hour.  This was less than I paid Latifa, and was a compromise between what I thought I should pay him and what one would expect for a full day’s labor in the mountains, which at that time was about $3.  I agonized over the price, since I did not want to run out of money and did not want to appear lavishly wealthy, but did want to reasonably compensate people for working with me.  We ran our lessons in different ways.  Sometimes I would read a word from the Peace Corps book and Abderrahman would explain the definition in Tashelhit.  As I got better I could formulate more esoteric questions and began to understand the differences between verbs like “plow” and “sow” using a combination of pantomime and the limited vocabulary in the manual.  Very soon we ceased using any Arabic at all, as this just confused me.  The Tashelhit spoken in the Agoundis has a lot of Arabic vocabulary in it and it did not take too long before it eliminated any ability at all to think in Moroccan Arabic.  It began to seem like I had mental space for only one foreign language at a time, and even this imperfectly.  This was no problem in the village, but I when I traveled outside I confused merchants, police, hotel clerks and others with my incomprehensible combinations of Tashelhit, Moroccan Arabic, French, Modern Standard Arabic, and Spanish.  I managed to keep my English more or less straight.

Some of the first words Abderrahman and I worked on had to do with the names of relatives, father, mother, sister, brother and so on.  Our first project was to make a “map” of the families, and this soon came to substitute for language lessons.  I’d begin by asking Abderrahman a list of words I’d encountered since the last lesson.  He’d explain them, and we’d move on to the genealogy.  Abderrahman was enthusiastic about this project and he would bring other men over and ask me questions about genealogical relationships that I would then answer by consulting my ever-growing charts.  I became a sort of curiosity trotted out for visiting dignitaries, whether local authorities or relatives visiting from the city.  Abderrahman was anxious to show people that what I was doing was not suspicious, illegal, or immoral.  The “family maps” were very useful in this, and also were invaluable in making sense of who worked with whom, and in figuring which children in the hordes swirling around my house belonged to whom.  The village genealogy became a more or less permanent project, something Abderrahman and I continued to work on literally until the day I left, refining it, adding names of deceased ancestors and marriage partners in other villages, ex-spouses and dead children.  I worked on it with other people too, but only to get some of the poorer and more peripheral families correct, and especially relatives who had moved to the cities.
My first friends in the village were the children of the Lukstaf family, the descendants of the brother of my landlord, Mohammed Lukstaf, who lived next door.  Omar Lukstaf, about eight years old, and his little brother Hassan would come and sit in my doorway.  I gave them pens and paper and we drew pictures.  They would tell me the Tashelhit words for the things in the pictures and I would write the words using Arabic characters.  Their parents then invited me to eat at their house, and soon I was there as often as I was at Abderrahman’s.  Another of my neighbors, Fatima Ait Baj and her husband Mohammed Belaid, also frequently invited me to eat and so I settled into a rhythm where I ate with the Lukstafs, with Abderrahman, or with Fatima and Belaid every meal.  I thought a great deal about how to compensate them.  It did not seem correct to merely offer them money.  The appropriate thing to do would be to invite them for a meal, but there was no way I could prepare anything they would be willing to eat.  Ryan was already nervous that the money I was paying Abderrahman would cause jealously or other problems, but I didn’t feel right eating for “free,” as Ryan generally was, since I was not working on a project “for” the village so much as a project “in” the village.  What I noticed was that people valued meat very highly and that they had very little of it.  Any time they served a meal without meat, or at least a dinner, they would apologize profusely, which I found embarrassing.  If people had meat at all, it tended to be about once a week and so this caused lots of apologizing.  So, the first souq day that came around, Wednesday, I walked the 20 kilometers to market and bought three kilograms of beef, as well as some coffee, spices and other small things.  I hauled all this back to Tagharghist and gave a third of it to each of the families who regularly fed me.  This became my pattern.  Some weeks I ate almost all my meals with Abderrahman, some weeks with other people, but still I divided the provisions in more or less equal thirds.  I tried to make the meat something between a gift and a salary and thus keep explicit notions of quid pro quo out of the exchange.  Every time I returned from a trip to Taroudant, or every Wednesday when I was in the village, I brought a minimum of three kilos of meat from market.  Once or twice I was too sick to go, and gave Abderrahman the money and he bought supplies for me.  Several times I wanted to avoid souq and so went on another day of the week to Ijoukak for supplies.  I tried to be discreet, usually giving the supplies to a child of the intended family and telling them to take the bag directly to their mother, or stopping in for tea and then leaving the supplies when I left.  This seemed to work out fairly well.

Within a couple months Abderrahman and I ceased doing language lessons, and so I stopped paying him.  I was sick for a good part of the winter and ended up in the hospital in Madrid, Spain.  When I was relatively healthy again and returned to Tagharghist I paid Abderrahman to help me map the fields.  Usually we worked about half a day and I put him on salary of sorts for what worked out to about $5 a day.  Again, the amount was dictated by local prices and the need to stay within “reasonable” proximity of them.  It seems a pathetically small amount for the crucial role Abderrahman played in my research, but even this was enough to incite jealousy.
The only other person I paid cash was Fatima Ait Baj.  Fatima had offered to do my laundry the very first week after seeing my pathetic attempts to do it myself.   At first she politely refused any money, but I insisted and in the end began paying her the equivalent of $5 per load to do it.  It is hard work to wash clothes by hand, especially in the winter when the river is near freezing and the women build fires and boil the clothes clean.  Washdays I paid Fatima discreetly but directly rather than paying her husband Mohammed; I am not sure that this didn’t cause friction.  Abderrahman warned me not to have Fatima do this work, or indeed to have anything to do with her at all because it would cause trouble with Belaid.  Abderrahman’s son Mohammed warned me separately and even more strongly.  They suggested that the women in Abderrahman’s household could do it instead.  I asked Fatima directly if her working was going to cause problems.  She said, if I remember correctly, that people always talk, “they’re like chickens,” and that I should not pay them any mind.  It was no problem for Belaid, according to her.  She proudly told me that he in fact demanded that she make sure that I, as their neighbor, was provided for.  Belaid too told me repeatedly that he scolded her if she didn’t attend to me, and in one very uncomfortable conversation said he would hit her if she ever let me go hungry.  I hoped he was exaggerating for effect.  Things eventually settled down into stable, unstated understandings.  Abderrahman, the Lukstafs, and Fatima all checked on me every day, or sent children to check on me, to make sure I had eaten.  I mostly provided food in compensation, but continued to pay Fatima for laundry services for the duration of my fieldwork.  No obvious trouble ever came of it.

Aside from this I also bought various small gifts for different people, watch batteries that were only available in Taroudant, picture books, magazines, pens, paper, cassettes, lanterns, cheap watches, small toys, socks, scarves and so forth.  At Christmas I brought back loads of winter clothes my brother had sent from Colorado.  I gave away my own clothes as they became worn and when I left I donated most of what I had accumulated to the mosque.  The villagers then held an auction and used the money to buy new reed mats that they use to kneel on when they pray.  Near the end of the first summer I bought a solar power panel, a large battery, switches, light bulbs and wire to allow the mosque to be electrified.  This was the only way I could think of to compensate the village as a whole for allowing me into their social world.  I chose this method especially because I liked the fqih, the teacher in the mosque.  He was patient and kind with both the girls and the boys and the lights allowed them to more easily do lessons at night in the summer, when it was cooler, and to keep the wooden shutters closed in the winter, when it was too cold to study outside in the sunlight.  I took many rolls of film in the village, and made copies of any picture that had people in them.  This was very popular, but quite difficult too, as I had to make sure not to put two different families in the same picture or they’d fight over it.  At first I made multiple copies, but the negotiations for these became contentious and demands increased beyond one print for every person in the photo.  I finally insisted on one family per shot.  This became easier as I learned which children belonged to which households.  A few times I brought people albums or frames for pictures they seemed particularly fond of.

On the fifteenth day of Ramadan, when all the families contribute money towards the sacrificial slaughter of some sheep, I paid like the other households.  When there was a wedding, I contributed to the arrangements like other households.  I did not spend time in the mosque with the men, nor did I pray with them during the big communal prayers on the ‘Aid al-Adha.  They very kindly invited me, but I did not feel right about it.  In any case it is technically illegal in Morocco for non-Muslims to enter mosques and I only went there when I was looking for somebody or when they were giving me a sort of tour.  I was not ready to make the profession of faith.  I sat behind the men during the main outdoor prayers during the ma’arouf for the local saint, and during the prayers at the one funeral I attended.  I attended several ahouash or drumming and dancing “parties,” but did not drum or dance myself.  I am a terrible dancer in any context and contented myself with the more dignified role of observer.  I was much abused for this since Ryan, the Peace Corps volunteer, had become pretty good at both drumming and dancing.
My other contribution to the village was medicine.  Mostly this was only aspirin, disinfectant and anti-bacterial ointment, though I did spend time discussing sanitation and demonstrating on various wounds how to clean cuts effectively.  Very occasionally I paid for prescription medicines that people needed from the pharmacy at souq, and less occasionally I would read the labels of medicines people had purchased and explain what they were and how they should be taken.  I also translated school report cards.  I sometimes passed clothes or other sundries to the poorest families of the village, especially one woman whose husband was completely landless.  He had gone off to work in the mines and she was left in a single dilapidated room alone with her baby.  Her only relative in the village was a sister who had also married in.  I tried, in short, to spend as much of my research budget as possible in the mountains without upsetting the general economy or starting problems and feuds.  I left Morocco entirely broke, which I figured was the least I could do for the country.

I did not spend all my time in the village.  I came to love many individuals there, but found the general poverty oppressive, and especially the sickness that seemed to stalk people.  From children with constant eye infections, to coughs and cuts and headaches, stomach troubles and diarrhea: it never seemed to end.  As I mentioned, I was sick too.  I spent part of January, all of February, and part of March 1999 in Spain seeing doctors and undergoing tests.  Clara Llamas and her family and Ramon Guardans-Cambo literally kept me alive by getting me through the hospital bureaucracy, which was considerable since I eventually required an operation to biopsy a lymph node in my chest.  They also housed and fed me during this time.  Despite their overwhelming generosity, I managed to part with a great deal of money in Madrid, and when I finally returned to Morocco I wrote a chapter for Fodor’s guides to make back some of the money I spent.   This helped my financial situation but consumed more time.  I also passed three weeks in Chicago and Manhattan in December of 1998, giving a paper at the Middle Eastern Studies Association meetings, visiting my grandparents, and finalizing a book chapter I co-wrote with Katherine Hoffman.   During the periods I was in Morocco, I never stayed in the village for more than ten straight days, and often not more than a week at a time.  I moved around the mountains visiting different places and returned frequently to Katherine’s house in Taroudant to get mail and check my email.  One’s own life does go on while one is in the field, or rather it goes on without you.  The most wrenching example of this was when my youngest sister Nathalie died in November 1998.  She was buried before I found out she was dead.  Also, during the time I was doing fieldwork the US was nearly constantly bombing Iraq.  These sort of things and my own congenital pessimism meant that I developed a more or less constant sense that while I was out of touch with the world bad things were happening.

Of the two years I was in Morocco, fourteen months were devoted to fieldwork.  Of these, after subtracting sick days, travel days, time in Taroudant transcribing tapes or writing, and time not working at all, I had 286 days of actual, on-the-ground research in the mountains.  I include these details because I am never very clear what people mean when they say, “I spent a year in the field.”  “The field” never seemed to me a very clearly defined place, and how one “spends” time and money tends to remain a mystery of anthropological practice.

It should be apparent from all this that I could not do whatever kind of project I wanted.  If my findings focus more on the material aspects of life in Tagharghist, and the specific things people mention as being important, this is because I had to learn the language in the course of doing the research.  I could not impute things from conversations around me; I had to watch and I had to ask.  There simply was not money available to study Tashelhit before beginning the research, only Arabic.  Arabic and French are the languages of power in the region, and one’s research is constrained by this fact.  Arabic, of course, was fairly useless for work in the village unless I wanted to restrict all my conversations to Abderrahman and a very few other men who had spent time in the cities.  To use Arabic for research in the Moroccan mountains is to elicit a highly particular and somewhat elite perspective, and that was not the view I wanted.  It should also be clear that even though I use the term “villagers” my own intimate social circle was narrower than this.  I knew almost everybody in Tagharghist, but like all social situations you end up far closer to some people than others.  Even towards the end of the project there were many people whose names I never could get straight.  This partiality skews the way one sees things.  People are particular, and what apparently solid generalities we assert have to be leavened with this.  In the course of this thesis I attempt to present what “facts” I could distill from this all-too-human sort of investigation, things like landholding information and irrigation cycles, marriage histories and housing patterns.  These facts came to me along particular routes, social circuits into which I inveigled myself.  The way I came to know such facts has something to do with how they emerge here, and how they are presented as “facts” at all.

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