Do not cite!
These are just notes for a short talk.

     In this paper I will report on one aspect of my fieldwork in highland Morocco: economic differentiation.  I make the point, first, that there is such a thing.  There is a tendency among agencies interested in the amelioration of rural poverty to consider “the poor” as a generic category.  In fact, I find, there is considerable and qualitative variation.  One reason for the difficulty of understanding this variation is that “wealth” in this subsistence farming economy is not a calculable number but a complicated combination of interdependent resources.  All fields, for instance, are not created equal.  They vary in a number of ways, from size to soil quality to the number of trees planted on or near them.  More confounding for my computations, though, is the fact that fields that are privately “owned” remain dependent on arcane, publicly administered irrigation schemes.  Thus they have almost no “value” outside of their social context.  Even worse, the labor available to invest in fields determines some part of their value and this will vary over the lifetime of a household.  It is therefore quite a methodological trick to render any useful distinction amongst “the poor,” or at least these poor.
 My second point is that these material differences are not wholly unconnected to cultural reality.  That is, they are invested with meaning and as such it is impossible to make much sense of the anything like “Moroccan” or more narrowly “Berber” culture without attending to them.  To make this point I draw on two noteworthy anthropologists of Morocco, Lawrence Rosen and Abdallah Hammoudi.  Each of these scholars has, it seems to me, identified salient aspects of Moroccan culture, ways of behaving and rendering things meaningful that I observed and heard discussed.  Using a model of “negotiating for reality,” in the first case, and a Foucauldian episteme, in the second, Rosen and Hammoudi show the complex ways that socially ascribed positions of domination and submission are actualized.  I will show that cultural positions of domination mirror material positions of domination.  While I do not believe that an economic “base” determines any cultural or social form, the clear homologies between cultural and material systems should cause us to pause before assuming that either sort of phenomena should be investigated without attention to the other.