This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of the social and political organization of daily work and local identity among Tashelhit (Berber) speaking farmers in the Western High Atlas, Morocco.  Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in the village of Tagharghist, I examine local configurations of space, time and power from the perspective of labor, and through this shed new light on the social contexts crucial to identity formation.  Three main conclusions emerge from the study.

     First, urban and international activist assertions of a broad Amazigh (Berber) ethnic identity do not strictly obtain in the Agoundis.  There is a local notion of being Berber, and while this overlaps with activist discourses in some respects, there are important differences.  I argue that these differences derive from the different practices involved in being Amazigh/Berber in urban multi-lingual and rural monolingual environments.

     Second, genealogical “tribal” social organization claimed for other areas of the Moroccan Atlas is not evident in the Agoundis Valley, where the research was conducted.  Patrilineal relatedness is an important organizing feature of some sorts of village-level labor organization and has some bearing on local identity formation.  This does not extend beyond the village level, however, and its significance is inflected by a variety of crosscutting social processes, from household dynamics to state-level interventions in the local economy.

     Third, an important locus of local identity is in being poor.  Poverty in the Agoundis Valley is obvious and often extreme.  The social and physical labor required to cope with poverty is constant, and this labor is strictly and unequally gendered. The work involved in daily survival is thus at once productive of physical and social reality.  In this sense poverty in Tagharghist is generative, it compels action, inspiring constant, intensely important and continuously revitalized forms of social organization that bear on how people see themselves and their place in the social world.  I argue that understanding the subjective experience of poverty is a vital, and often ignored, task for sociocultural anthropologists.