Part 1: Backdrop: Southern Morocco, A City and a Hinterland
Part 2: A Modernity of One’s Own
(History)
(Power)
Part 3: Summary: Modernity Becomes Imazighen
 

Draft 4/24/2001
*** Please do not cite without permission
 

Part 1: Backdrop: Southern Morocco, A City and a Hinterland 

    From the air the city of Marrakech seems to throb in the haze of the vast Haouz Plain like an agitated neuron, thin asphalt tendrils winding out from it.   In the better suburbs oddly shaped turquoise splotches dot the landscape: the swimming pools of the rich and the fortified resorts of tourists hemmed in by palms, Bermuda grass and bougainvillea.  Thin sheep graze outside the resorts in dirt lots strewn with wisps of plastic bags.  The streets are mostly quiet but for the few hours a day when the commuters leave or return, or when busloads of European tourists rumble by to their compounds.  Other suburbs are less elegant: fleets of concrete block apartment buildings, with rows of stores on the ground floor, and streets gurgling with busses and taxis and trucks.

    Within all these newly built, cement suburbs is the old city center, the medina.  It is still visible at the core of Marrakech, the thick mud walls begun by the Almoravides in the tenth century, the venerable Koutoubia minaret rising as a somber reminder of lost imperial glory.  In the poorer quarters of the medina laundry dries on every rooftop, stirring like Buddhist prayer flags whenever a breeze winds languidly through the city.  Below the jumble of roofs, in the raucous streets of the urban core, smoke-spewing busses jostle with bicycles and trucks, cars and horse-drawn cabs, donkey carts, pushcarts, pedestrians and swarms of whining mopeds.  Merchants, shoppers, businessmen, women on their way to public baths, teenagers cruising aimlessly, beggars, lunatics, children going to and from school: all converse in a welter of languages, Arabic, Berber, and French, sometimes all in the same sentence.   At its core Marrakech is a city alive, one of the fastest growing in the country, popular with Moroccan and European tourists seeking heat, sun and exoticism.  An international airport pipes great floods of these tourists into the city for holidays and the streets are lined with things to sell them, from carpets and brass trinkets, to pottery and tee shirts.  Marrakech is perhaps less exotic than it used to be.  Tourism is Big Business and the stalls of the famous outdoor carnival at Djeema el-Fna have been numbered, electrified and aligned on a grid.  The city’s estimated 27,000 colonial-era prostitutes have been dispersed or driven underground  and the medina is part living city, part “tradition” on display.  Marrakech remains alluring even in her dotage, however: a busy hive of humanity on a vast, hot and mostly empty plain.
 
    South of the city the Atlas Mountains rise against the sky.  Snowcapped sometimes from November to July, these mountains are anchored by a family of peaks over 13,000 feet. high.  Some even top 14,000 feet.  From within this mass of rock,  snowmelt plunges down steep valleys, gradually dissipating to flow thinly out to the plains.  To the north these waters slake Marrakech.  To the south what streams escape the mountains are captured in cement dams, or seep into rocky alluvial fans that lose themselves in the desert.  Beyond the Atlas is the immense expanse of the Sahara, and beyond that the rest of Africa.  From the perspective of Marrakech the Atlas Mountains stand as a solemn, unfriendly guardian between the habitable world of the city and plains and the great desert beyond.  However, from the perspective of the people who live in these mountains the world looks very different.  To them it is “home” with all the warm particularity that such a word implies.  This “home” will be the focus of this paper, a world of insular mud-walled villages clinging to hillsides above the life-sustaining water of the rivers. The question at the heart of the paper has to do with “modernity,” the way such a place is and is not connected to the rest of contemporary Morocco, and the rest of the world.
 
    Specifically, I will focus on the people of the Agoundis Valley, located about 100 kilometers due south of Marrakech, just beyond Jebel Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa.  The Agoundis begins at about 3,500 feet in altitude at Ijoukak, at the confluence of the Agoundis and the Nfis Rivers.  From Ijoukak the Agoundis rises ever higher into a thicket of valleys and the trail becomes more rugged with each fork of the river it parallels.  About half way up the northerly fork of the Agoundis, that is, half way between the end of the paved road at Ijoukak and the highest possible place where crops will still grow, is the village of Tagharghist.  Tagharghist is where I lived and worked for a period in 1998-99.

    The people of Tagharghist are farmers of barley and maize.  They herd goats and sheep in the mountains above them and the better-off families keep a cow in the dark rooms below their houses.  These villagers are pious Muslims, meaning they work hard to follow the five basic tenets of Islam: they believe Allah is the one and only God and that Mohammed is His most important prophet; they fast during the holy month of Ramadan; they help the poor by donating a portion of each year’s harvest to the less fortunate; they pray five times a day; and if they can afford it, they make the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lives.  In following these tenets the people of Tagharghist are similar to most other Moroccans, and indeed to most of the people of North Africa.  But while the villagers of Tagharghist pray in Arabic, it is not the language they use in daily life.  Their mother tongue is called Tashelhit, which is a variety of Tamazight, or what most people who speak English know as Berber.  Some scholars estimate that as many as 40% of the Moroccan people speak some form of Berber as their first language (Sadiqi 1997), and the 240 or so people who live in Tagharghist form some small part of this larger community.
 
    When I first visited Tagharghist in 1995 there was no running water, except for the river, no electricity, solar or otherwise, no toilets.  Indeed there was no road.  The only way into the upper Agoundis, and the only way to get to Tagharghist, used to be a series of narrow trails etched into the slopes.  From the main path above the river, looking down, you would see massive walnut trees crowding the rocky course of the river. Fields of maize (in the summer) and barley (in the winter) grow in steep, carefully built terraces above the spring flood level. Almonds are planted throughout the fields and even higher, on ledges the river water cannot reach.  Rock and mud houses are terraced above these, clustered together in places that least frequently suffer rockslides.  Grapes, pomegranates, figs, blackberries, squash, mint, potatoes and tomatoes grow where space can be found in the dizzying patchwork of fields, trails and irrigation ditches.  Olives, carob trees and prickly pear are scattered around the lower elevations.  On the highest hillsides there are a few juniper and oak trees that the women use for firewood, though these resources are growing scarce and are protected by government laws.
 
    The fields are watered year round by the ever-melting snow captured by the mountain peaks above the village.  In Tagharghist, this water passes though seven main targa-s, or canals, and many hundreds of minor causeways and ditches.  Each of these has a particular name, as do many of the fields, and so people are able to discuss space and movement through it in astonishing detail.  The targa-s are operated in a complex rotation by the twenty-nine households of the village. Each canal has either a nine or ten-day cycle, with different households owning different sections of the days.  Sometimes a wealthier household will own a whole day’s worth of irrigation water on a given canal, or even two days in a ten-day cycle.  Poorer families can sometimes lay claim to no more than a quarter of a half-day cycle, or even less, and for them it is a long wait until they again have access to the precious water. The order of the rotations within a day is decided by debate; the order of the days themselves is decided by lottery at the beginning of the dry season.  The quantity of time is determined by the quantity of land an owner has inherited.

     The majority of the land in Tagharghist is given over to grain, though some fields are too shady, especially those deep in the canyon beneath the walnut trees.  These fields are used to grow fodder for the animals, or tooga.   The women and girls cut tooga down near the riverbed or when this runs out they harvest bushes and shrubs from up on the hillsides near the sparse forests.  They then haul the fodder along the steep paths in bundles that are often larger than the women themselves.  Cows are kept under the houses in pens and are fed, watered and milked almost exclusively by women and girls.  The songs of the younger women echo through the valley as they fetch water, collect wood for the bread ovens, wash clothes, milk cows and lug babies around in slings on their backs.  Men and boys work the irrigation system, plow, harvest and plant, and care for the sheep and goats.   Younger boys seem mostly to throw rocks at each other.  During fieldwork I tended to many injured boys who attested to the accuracy of their compatriots’ throwing arms.
 
    Some of the older boys and men spend their summers herding goats in distant pastures, a day’s walk up at 10,000 feet and higher along the Ouanoukrim Massif, a ridge of mountains that forms the core of the newly created Jebel Toubkal National Park.  The shepherds bring the animals down to their winter grazing area just above the village in October, before the heavy snows.  Other less hardy animals, especially sheep, are kept in these local, “summer” pastures year round.  Partly because of the availability of these pastures, and partly because of the availability of water combined with the absolute lack of flat land, this is one of the most densely populated areas of Morocco in terms of people per arable land unit (Bencherifa1983, 1988).  In other words, these people make more human bodies out of less fertile land than almost anyone.  This productivity makes Tagharghist look a little like Shangri-La feel: a dense thicket of green jammed into the crevasses of dry, impossibly rugged mountains.  But it’s a hard place, no paradise.  There is little to sell, and thus no cash for doctors or dentists, books, paper, medicine or, sometimes, even shoes.  “Ishqa,” people say again and again, “toodert n’idrarn ishqa.”  Life in the mountains is hard.
 
    In Tagharghist radio reception is sketchy and there is no television.  Neither is there television in Tazguart, Tagoundafine, Ighir, Agerda, Ait Moussa, Annamer, Zouite or in any of the villages of the entire valley, at least once you leave the end of the older part of the dirt road down at the place called Maghzen.   When I did my fieldwork nobody in Tagharghist could really be called literate except for the teacher in the mosque, and only a very few could speak much of the national language, the Moroccan form of Arabic called Derija, with any degree of confidence.  Some could write their names and the names of other families.  All villagers could recite parts of the Qur’an, the holy book for Muslims, and most of the children worked to memorize Quranic verses with the fqih, the religious teacher in the mosque.  A very few men could read parts of children’s stories in standard Arabic, and a couple women could tell me Moroccan Arabic words for things.  None of them could read their own language, Tashelhit, either in Arabic characters or modified Latin script.
 
    While I was there things in Tagharghist were changing rapidly, however.  Between my initial visit in 1995 and my period of fieldwork in 1998-99 the people of the Agoundis Valley had built themselves a road.  One migrant who had made his fortune in the construction business in Marrakech donated a jackhammer, a generator to run it, and enough dynamite to blast out a ledge on the hillsides on which rocks could be stacked and filled with earth.  The villagers themselves contributed the labor, as they do to repair the road every winter when the rains wash parts away.  This dirt road now allows trucks up into the valley at least once a week.  People are proud to tell you the government contributed nothing; they did it all themselves without cement or steel, without anything but rock, dirt, teamwork and sweat.  The arrival of trucks means that crops can be taken to market and by the time I finished my fieldwork villagers were beginning to experiment by planting apples, cherries, plums and other fruit trees in their fields.  As these farmers begin to grow crops for sale rather than personal consumption their relationship with markets and the rest of the society will certainly change, as will the older rhythms and social connections of the local subsistence economy.
 
    These changes are occurring throughout the Agoundis Valley, but the village of Tagharghist in particular is changing.  The Peace Corps sent a volunteer to live there in 1997 and he helped get the funds to buy pipe to bring water from a spring above the village.  Eight taps now deliver clean water to the village, saving the women and girls a lot of walking and sparing everyone the nastier microbes living in the drinking water they used to use.  The mosque now has a solar power panel and lights that I bought in exchange for the villagers helping with my dissertation research.  Lights in the mosque make it easier for men to do their pre-dawn prayers and the girls and boys who study there are better able to see the Quranic verses that they write on wooden boards, especially in the dark winter months.  At the time I left Tagharghist Moroccan government agencies were investigating the possibility of installing a turbine to produce electricity from the river and the World Bank was suggesting funding other projects, such as providing cement to seal up some of the notoriously leaky mud and rock canals.  In 2000 the Bank began a massive, seven-year initiative meant to increase eco-tourism in the region and improve the environmental condition of the Toubkal National Park.  This Park is where villagers today graze their herds each summer, so “improvement” is bound to affect their ability to shepherd.  It has already brought new sorts of development workers and Moroccan state agents to the valley.
 
    Perhaps even more dramatic, the Moroccan government built a school in the summer of 1998.  It was painted shocking pink, and at first the villagers loved it.  The children continued to study in the mosque in the morning and at night, but in the daytime they went to a modern school.  Here they sat at wooden desks instead of on reed mats, and studied from picture books rather than from the Qur’an or wooden boards.  They finally had a chance to learn the national language, to read and write, and gain some sense of their broader Moroccan history and geography.  When the government school opened, it was the first time many of the children had sat in a chair or held a pencil.  Their teacher, unfortunately, spoke only Moroccan Arabic and no Tashelhit, and this was her first job.  Learning was difficult for the monolingual Tashelhit speaking children and the teacher too was often frustrated by her inability to communicate.  Moreover, being a self-consciously sophisticated woman from the city of Casablanca, life in the hard, dirty conditions of the mountains was decidedly not what she expected from a career in education.  The teacher requested a transfer after one year, which is common in the countryside.  A new schoolteacher was assigned the next year, and the year after that since there are few urban-educated teachers who want to settle into the difficult life in the mountains.  There are two teachers this year, 2000 - 2001, and they are Berber speakers.  As such they have the advantage of speaking the same language as the children, but because they are from the plains nearby they are reported to abandon their duties frequently for long visits home.  It’s hard to imagine that the villagers will ever get teachers that are content to live and work in the mountains, at least until some of the village children themselves become educated enough to do the job.
 
    The villagers remain determined to educate their children, however.  Parents know the importance of this kind of education even though they had none themselves.  They know that there will not be enough land for all their children to remain in the mountains.  To survive in the city the ability to speak or at least understand colloquial Arabic is very important, and that has to be learned.  Those who can manage send their kids to stay with relatives in the city so that they can go to school, but not every family has such relatives.  The government school remains the best hope for most people.

     Even with all these changes life in the mountains remains different than the plains.  The pink school seems a curiosity more than a functional part of life.  The road is little more than a glorified path.  Arabic remains an exotic language.  Looking down from the peaks at the even lines of lights leading to Marrakech, at its Hilton hotel, Pizza Hut and international airport, the separation of the mountains and the rest of the country seems striking.  The busy, comparatively wealthy world of the flatlands –especially the new suburbs-- doesn’t seem connected to the jumble of village life.  The long straight roads of the plains look nothing like the tangled pathways of the mountains.  But in some ways the two worlds are very connected.  It is wrong to imagine that mountain people (or any people) live in isolation from the broad changes brought on by what is often termed “modernization” or “globalization,” and it is a mistake to imagine that Moroccan Berbers are not part of the larger community of Moroccans and the even larger community of Muslims.  The real question is how they are related.  This does not seem to have easy, categorical answers.

Part 2: A Modernity of One’s Own

 It used to be assumed by anthropologists and others that “modernity” was unquestionably desirable, that people existed on a continuum of primitive to modern and that there was a tendency for societies to “progress” from the former to the latter.  Still today in many ways these notions of modernity and progress infuse our assumptions about how the world works.  In this view the denizens of National Geographic --primitives, savages, indigenous, aboriginal or traditional people—are either valiantly defending their culture from modernity or are succumbing, giving in to become migrants and consumers.  Modernity might incorporate different traditions --Scottish plaids find their way on to high fashion runways, blues riffs show up in rap songs, the Mona Lisa smiles back from tee shirts-- but in the end the pursuit of profit wins.  Profit drives the system to digest all that is “traditional” and reconstitute it as something to sell, one form of product or another.  Marx made similar point over a century ago when he wrote, “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.  It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.  The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country” (1967:83).  Modernity wins in the end and there is something generic about it.
 
    But if this idea was prescient at the time of the industrial revolution, more recent scholars have challenged this notion of a single kind of “cosmopolitan” modernity, with its assumption of a necessary end and the notion of progress that goes along with it.  They have challenged the idea that an economic system –capitalism-- necessarily produces a particular kind of culture.  On one hand, it is surely the case that Europe spawned an economic system that harnesses energy at a scale hitherto unimaginable.  “Our” system of production is so outrageously fecund that it puts hugely complicated devices like televisions in every home and a car in most every garage.  Western society, and in particular the US, is driven by the economy (“the business of America is business,” said one president ) and the economy generates “things” like no other ever invented or perhaps even conceived.  On the other hand, what does this material hyper-fecundity really mean?  Is production what matters to culture, to who people are and how they see themselves, or is it consumption: the way people use products to signify, classify and define themselves?  If consumption matters, how does it matter to people who have almost no disposable income to consume with, the people whose lives are overwhelmingly focused on producing enough money or food to live?
The fact is that for the majority of the people on the planet the modern “choice” is not between a Toyota and a Ford, but between one miserable, low-paying job and another.  No matter how enchanting most Americans find the information superhighway or the international fashion of Benetton, a new Pearl Jam release or a Jackie Chan movie, somebody must still plant the food, must still care for it, and must pick it.  Somebody still has to haul away the trash; somebody has to gut the chickens that show up in our stores so neatly, bloodlessly wrapped in plastic.  Whatever else society does an army of people must labor to keep it going, invisibly, usually for very little reward, often in unsafe or unhealthy conditions.  They labor in fields and restaurant kitchens, factories and informal workshops: the places where the “stuff” that is the shining symbol of modernity is produced.  In the US, these “somebodies” are often not treated as “Americans” at all.  In other words, a class of politically and often socially excluded people labors to support “our” modern, Western society.  For these folks modernity might mean something like social disconnection, hard physical work, and constant reminders of what they do not have and cannot be.  This observation requires us to ask where the boundaries of “our” society are and how “modernity” happens outside of the dominant arena of upbeat sounds and images so familiar to anybody who owns a television.  If there is a certain conformity to the drudgery of sweatshops everywhere from East Los Angeles to Bangladesh, that does not in itself mean that the vital, imaginative worlds of the people who slave in them have been reduced to a similar uniformity.  Modernity looks different from different parts of the economy, but also across other axes of difference.  Such different views have to be ethnographically unpacked before they can be understood.  The trope of “modernity vs. tradition” that strikes us as funny or quaint (a man on a donkey talking on a cell phone, people in a yurt watching the Superbowl) is misleading.  It suggests that cell phones and donkeys, yurts and the NFL have appropriate places in the world… and we know where they are.  The juxtaposition grabs our attention because we believe the elements in the picture to be out of place.  In fact, of course, we have no idea what’s going on in the picture and the place of the elements in the mind of the people using them is what matters.  This is as true in Morocco as it is anywhere else.

    In Tagharghist, as I note above, there are no televisions or cell phones; there aren’t even toilets.  That does not mean that they are not modern, however, and this is an important point.  There is a tendency to portray people like those in Tagharghist, who continue to live through simple technology and human and animal labor, as being simple.  The villagers who worked with me did not have unproblematic “traditional” lives just because they farm rather than work in a factory, because they haul things around using their own two legs rather than using a car.  In fact, the relative lack of technological sophistication makes their lives far more complicated if for no other reason than the most basic aspects of life, like producing food, require enormous amounts of labor and cooperation.   Cooperation between people is never very easy.  It takes work.  The people of Tagharghist do not march through life oblivious to how difficult their lives are or how different their lives might be.  We should not romanticize subsistence farming or “traditional” ways of living.  They are not plotting to avoid the products and gizmos we identify with modernity, but they want them on their own terms, in their own way.  We should not assume that to be modern is to give up being Berber or Moroccan or Muslim.  Muslim, Moroccan and Berber modernity are versions of contemporary reality we in the West don’t see very often.  But we don’t see them only because we don’t look closely enough, not because they don’t exist.  “They’re” not any less important than “we” are because they are poorer and less powerful (as one political scientist tried to convince me).  And they’re not some sort of derivative of “us,” a modernity outside of their own making.  The way “the” modern world is viewed in Tagharghist depends very much on a particular history that the villagers share, and upon particular positions of relative empowerment within the village.  I have suggested that there is great, and generally under-appreciated, diversity in our own society, especially in regards to the people who labor invisibly to keep it running.  I have hinted that there are similar sorts of urban/rural and class differences in Moroccan society.  There is also a surprising amount of social differentiation within the small world of Tagharghist and this has something to do with how different people see themselves and their place in the contemporary world.

History

    Before turning to the complexity of village life, and the particularity of individuals within that complexity, we need a word about the history of the village as a whole.  Modernity always contains a sense of surpassing something, of a pre-modern that came before it.  The particular modernity of the Moroccan mountains is thus related to their particular past.  It is important to show that Tagharghist has not always been as it is now, that 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.

    The earliest references to this area, and the oldest memories of the most knowledgeable villagers, are from 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.  The oldest saints’ shrines near Tagharghist are dated by reference to this crucial rupture in mountain history.  Those who claim to know say simply that such shrines are from “before the time of Ibn Tumart.”  The families that occupy Tagharghist today believe that they came to the area in this epic era, following the mahdi to the mountains from Arabic-speaking areas to the north, and Berber-speaking areas in the southern deserts and mountains.  There were people already in the valley when these newcomers arrived, people whose names are still known by particular walnut trees, rocks and streams named after them.  These ancient families were displaced and have now moved on or died out.  Thus people in Tagharghist today, or at least the people who think about it, have a notion of becoming what they are.  Their own vision of their world is not enduring and unchanging, nor unconnected to the powerful currents of a much wider history.

    After the time of the mahdi there is a murky period in local history, at least in the history as it was explained to me.  But the early 19th century comes alive as the time of “tribal” government, of the organization of villages into grand leagues of opposed moieties called lfuf, a form of political organization much discussed by French ethnographers.   Around the middle of the 19th century this form of “tribal” organization came to an end locally with the rise of Si Mohammed n Ait Lahcen of Tagoundaft, a village a few miles above Tin Mal, the ancient capital established by 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.”  “Goundafa” then finds its way in to French reports and later ethnographies as the native “tribe” of this area.  Goundafi was ruthless by many accounts, but hardly unintelligent, and he managed through deft political and military maneuvers to repel a militarized, tax collecting expedition sent by the sultan, who then, perhaps without a choice, designated Goundafi the official caid of the area, the representative of the central government.

    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 caid-s, Glaoui to his east and Mtouggi to his west.  The village of Tagharghist sits very near this eastern border with Glaoua territory.   Tales remain vivid of the raids endured by the villagers.  Marriage patterns, I argue elsewhere, reflect one attempt to insure stability across political borders conjured into being by a leadership far beyond the control of mere farmers.  Tagharghist was for some of this period the primary outpost of Goundafi power in the Agoundis River Valley and contemporary landholdings and political alliances reflect this fact.  Even in this arguably pre-modern period the amghar or overlord of this remote valley, Mohammed Oushen, not only built a fort, a personal mosque and a sort of minor court on the peak above Tagharghist, he also owned several houses in Marrakech.  He took the ex-wife of an official in Marrakech as one of his four spouses, and an Arabic speaking woman from the plains of far off Rehamna as another.  These long-term imbrications of countryside and city should serve to disabuse scholars who, following Ibn Khaldun and contemporary writers like Ernest Gellner, overemphasize social and political isolation, especially the separation of the rural world from urban centers of power.

    In the 20th century the French invaders saw clearly that they had no real way to directly control the Western High Atlas and they 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 caid Tayeb Goundafi, son of Mohammed, owed his nominal fealty to French rather than Arabic speaking outsiders. In fact, the 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 caid” 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 caid, 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 caid 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 the modern bifurcation between political parties.  The most powerful local official is still the caid, 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 circuits still carry people to places that seem insignificant if one considers only the contemporary configuration of social life.  The “present” became so through a torturously complicated 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.  Some historical intersections matter a great deal, some events provide touchstones and lessons, they continue to shed light as they are meaningfully reconsidered and reconstituted.  The particularity of this history bears upon modernity in several ways, not least in the path by which contemporary configurations of power came to be.

Power

    It has been customary to write about power and politics in Morocco either by reference to egalitarian Berber tribes in the mountains or the authoritarian state in the plains.  Both approaches seem to me dubious.  In my view, in Tagharghist power begins at home.  I say this because virtually everything people do is related to their position in a household and this critical, complexly evolving social unit is curiously absent from most discussions of power in Morocco.  Academics tend to maintain the isolated, individual actor as the basis of political relations, and this is wholly off the mark for highland Morocco.  The ever-changing composition of households and the interactions within them condition individual possibilities for village level interactions, and both the domestic and village power arrangements determine what is possible, conceivable or at least likely in terms of interactions with the larger economy and state level politics. Understanding the political economy of the domestic sphere is necessary to understanding the other levels and forms of power in Tagharghist.

    The twenty-nine households, or tikatin, of Tagharghist are not only the foundation of village life, but also the primary social units of production and consumption.  Every one of the 212 villagers belongs to a takat (a household) and everybody knows to which they belong.  Tikatin are comprised of people who usually live and often eat together, but more importantly they are the means by which finite, individual, temporally overlapping human lives are continually reorganized into integrated, productive arrangements.  Built mostly around marriage and descent, households vary from two to seventeen people, from a husband and wife with their children to a group of brothers with their wives, sisters and mother.  They usually begin as a young, childless couple and sometimes extend to four full generations living together.  A takat may consist only of an old couple living alone, either childless or whose children have moved away, but such a household will require help from neighbors or relatives; they will need gifts of wood, perhaps fodder, and certainly labor.

    Whatever forms tikatin take at a given moment, they all have a sort of lifecycle.  They hive off from the parent household at some point, grow, change, wither and die --like the humans who constitute them.   Usually all members of a takat share an oven, a hearth, and live together under one roof, but not necessarily.   Some members may spend most of their time shepherding outside of the village or have houses in other villages.  They may have seasonal jobs working on big farms in the plains or permanent work as nannies in the city.  These working individuals can be, but are not necessarily, tied to their parent takat, which is to say they may or may not continue to devote labor and share resources with their takat members in the village.  Some fathers periodically travel to the city to collect the paychecks of their children working there, and these children are seen to remain in the takat even though they may rarely be in the village.  Other children have chosen to fend for themselves, to assume responsibility for their own finances in the atomized economy of the flatlands and cities.  These people are no longer members of a takat no matter how often they visit the village.  Some dependent sons set up separate houses inside the village with their own wives and families --what seem tikatin in their own right-- but must still work their father’s harvest, must turn to their fathers for seed, and must turn their crop over to him.  While ambiguous, these are referred to as part of the parental takat since they are dependent on the land vested in the living paterfamilias.  A few sons have managed to set themselves up in the village independently through commerce or periodic wage labor, but only a few.

    The fundamental aspect of a takat is that it is an economic association, an assemblage of people who work a certain set of property and share its rewards.  The terms in which this working and sharing is done are never equitable at a given time and part of the role of tikatin is to transfer labor, land, love, care and money across generations.  Tikatin are based on biological relationships propagated through the social institution of marriage, but there is a wide variety to both the forms households take and the meanings these forms hold for the household members themselves.
 Economically men dominate almost every takat.  In the one case in Tagharghist where married children and their mother make up the takat, the oldest brother has taken over the role of his recently deceased father.  This arrangement circumvents the problem of dividing that takat’s meager property among the children with each of them receiving a portion insufficient for their own support.  Having the brother adopt the father’s role, and keeping the takat intact, allows a consolidation of resources so that the family can continue to live together.  Excepting this household it is fathers who head each takat and “own” the majority of the resources.  Women may have inherited property, and this may be kept separate from the husband’s for the purposes of inheritance, but in most cases it is far less economically significant than what the husband owns, and is generally controlled by him as long as he is alive.

    This disparity in property emerges over time because of inheritance customs.  Sons and daughters inherit women’s property equally, but men’s property goes to sons over daughters in a ratio of two to one.   This insures that over the generations land tends to flow into the hands of the village men.  Moreover, nearly 80% of Tagharghist women marry out of the village and rarely seem able to effectively claim their inheritance.  Women with many brothers and a small patrimony are also unlikely to receive their share, even if they marry within the village.  Men explain that these women “didn’t ask for their land,” or more forthrightly, “there was not enough.”  There are numerous cases where people –usually women-- receive token portions of the harvest, or just exaggerated hospitality, rather than their “rightful” share.
 
    In most cases children will not come to own any significant property until the death of their father, which for sons means they will not have their own takat until then.  Young women will generally be married before their mid-twenties, and will go live with their husband’s takat.  If her new husband still lives with his father, the bride joins a new, extended takat and her working life will probably not change dramatically.  That is, if she moves from one large takat into another she moves only from working in the service of her mother to working under her husband’s mother or sometimes grandmother.  If the groom has his own property, however, the bride is set up as the female head of a household, a dramatic transformation from her position in her natal takat.  As a new matriarch of a household a woman moulds her own oven by packing mud around a large clay pot (such an oven is literally a takat) and she can begin to raise the children who will provide the labor that will sustain the household, and that will eventually make new households from it.  She may also have moved from one village to another so that marriage for women often means not only learning a new set of fields, trees and other property to which she has rights and obligations, but a new social world in which such property is embedded.

    In all tikatin women defer to men in most situations that bring them together; younger people always defer to older ones.  Women do have a somewhat autonomous sphere of influence, meaning that in general men concern themselves with men’s issues and the women rule their own affairs more or less unencumbered by their husbands and fathers.  It is generally men who deal with “formal” politics, however, with the state officials and development agents.  Importantly, though, not all men are equally able to participate in these dealings.  These sorts of politics require time and only some men have it.  Men need time to entertain visitors, distinguished and otherwise, time to gossip and collect information, time to travel to other villages and discover what’s going on there, time to travel to the weekly market --a market that is as much about information exchange as it is about buying things.  The only men who have this time are those blessed with particular combinations of property and progeny.  In other words, to be a political player a man needs to own enough land to support a family, and he has to have enough family to work the land.  Some men own nearly ninety fields, while some have as few as twenty-seven.  Some households control as many as thirty-two full days in a ninety-day irrigation cycle, while at least three households have less than ten days.  While some men were said to have as many as 400 sheep and goats, others had herds they could count on their fingers.  The very poorest villagers had no land or animals at all and survived by migrating to find wage labor, and by living off of the charity of their more fortunate neighbors.  Land in itself does not create wealth, however, since an intensive irrigation system requires vast amounts of labor.  Since labor is gendered, a household without sons is not able to irrigate without the input of the father and a household without daughters will lack firewood and fodder for cows.  The men who are best positioned to interact with the new development agents, the schoolteachers and Moroccan government officials, are those with the right combination of land, water rights, and children of mixed ages and sexes to do the work of the household.  Such men can afford the time to politick for precisely the same reasons that I can afford to sit writing this chapter: somebody else is growing, picking and preparing the food that sustains us.

    The point in detailing the political and economic situation in Tagharghist is to demonstrate that whatever might be true about the village as a whole and whatever the general relation to history and modernity, there are particular perspectives too.  Two brief examples should serve to illustrate this.  First, my main informant Abderrahman Ait Ben Oushen, grandson of Mohammed, the original Oushen, is a consistent advocate of all things modern.  It was Abderrahman who stopped me on the path when I was traveling in 1995 and asked me if I wanted to stay and work in the village.  He was also the one who solicited the services of the Peace Corps volunteer.  He has the only licensed tourist guest house in the entire valley, he housed the schoolteacher and supervised the building of the school, and he is keen to meet with any and all “outsiders” who want to work in the village or in the valley.  He is able to do this partly because he has taught himself a bit of Arabic by listening to the radio, and partly because he has more land than almost anybody in the village and a battery of sons to work it for him.  Abderrahman himself does almost no manual labor at all.  His household is at the peak of the domestic cycle, the high point of its size and productivity, and Abderrahman is at the head of the household.  This does not create the desire or the ability to be a village “big man,” but it does constitute the conditions under which such a big man can come to exist at all.  Abderrahman controls much of what happens in the newly formed “village association,” and his promotion of dues for different households and for all sorts of communal projects are not always shared by his neighbors and relatives.  Social position does not equate to political positions, but it certainly feeds them.  Abderrahman sees what he thinks of as modernity as an opportunity, not as a threat.

    To take a second and very different example, my neighbor Fatima Id Baj specifically brought up the issue of modernity one day.  She is the only woman in her household and was working, as usual.  Wrapped in a headscarf, hauling a load of grass to her cow, she was adorned in the many layers of brightly colored sweaters and skirts that all mountain Berber women wear.  A colleague of mine, also an anthropologist, was visiting and the anthropologist asked Fatima whether she ever wore a tamelHaft, a sort of cape traditionally worn by Berber women.  “Oh no,” Fatima answered, “we don’t wear them.  We’re all modern women here.”  There are at least two things that are interesting about this.  First, Fatima was dressed in clothes that most tourists would take to be “traditional.”  Berber women are famed for their love of bright colors and bangles and bracelets, and especially contrasting wild patterns.  Most any urban Moroccan would consider Fatima’s clothing, at best, to be pretty “hick.”  What I found interesting was that Fatima considered herself to be modern for precisely the same reasons other Moroccans would judge her to be pre-modern, traditional, or out of date: her clothing.  Second, Fatima used the Moroccan Arabic word ‘asriya to mean modern.  She probably knew the word because she’d lived in the city briefly and had picked up some Arabic.  While I didn’t ask the question specifically, it’s a safe bet that she took the very use of Arabic to be modern, to be something associated with cities.  In cities it’s often the case that the upper classes use French rather than Arabic if they are discussing things we might associate with “modernity.”  In Morocco Arabic tends (although this is a gross generalization) to be the language of the household, or religion, or of tradition.  Again, what Fatima is using to signify the modern is precisely what somebody else takes to be its opposite.  Both Abderrahman and Fatima associated much of what it was to be modern with things.  Fatima with clothing and cities; Abderrahman with piped water and a cement schoolhouse.

Part 3: Summary: Modernity Becomes Imazighen

 Today urban Berber activists are coming to call all Berber speaking people “Imazighen,” (sing. Amazigh) a Berber or more correctly Tamazight word meaning “free people.”  These activists do not like the fact that the term “Berber” is not itself Berber, that it comes from the Latin word from which we get “barbarian,” which is how the ancient Romans thought of these people on the edge of their empire.  Contemporary Amazigh activists do not, of course, see themselves as barbarians, but as the proud inheritors of a rich and extensive cultural history, one that has been around far longer than the Arab society in which they are immersed, one that had developed a great civilization long before Europeans had learned to bathe.  These Amazigh activists are coming to imagine themselves in new ways in the urban, political economic context in which they live.  They are using web pages and newsletters, international conferences and United Nations forums to press their case for a distinct and enduring Amazigh culture that should be allowed to speak their language and maintain their “culture.”  (At present, for instance, it is illegal in Morocco to give children Berber names.)   Mountain Imazighen are coming to see the world differently, too.  However, since they live in different conditions than their urban cousins their vision is not the same.   All Imazighen -- like all people-- are building their own version of modernity and as such they are not “becoming modern” so much as modernity is becoming Amazigh.
 
    To reiterate the specific case, the people of the Agoundis are not hooked in to state maintained roads, to water lines or sewer lines, electricity or phone lines.  They have no house numbers, no phone numbers, no zip code, no passports, no credit cards, no bank accounts, and no secret code for the ATM.  In fact they have no numbers at all.  Once a year the police hike through and update the villagers’ residency cards and extort what money they can.  These cards are then quietly put away in a bag or under a rug until the next year.  While the new king, Mohammed VI, is revered and his picture hangs in most homes, “politics” as such are strictly local.  Nobody further than the next river down has ever heard of the politicians that really matter up here, and vice versa.  What we call “the” state has much more particular names in the mountains: the names of the particular agents of the National Park Service and the Water and Forest Agency, the names behind the faces and the hands that actually deal with the villagers and who relieve them all too often of their money and resources.
 
    Despite similarities and some sense of convergence, differences remain between village and urban life in Morocco and between Arabic speaking and Berber speaking areas.  The disjuncture between the rhythm of the village and the grid of city life is perhaps most easily seen in August, vacation season. This is the time of year when you see urban Moroccans dressed like French tourists --with shorts, Ray Ban sunglasses and Diesel brand shoes-- sweating their way up the dusty road.  They have big radios, hip sneakers and chic haircuts.  Some have forgotten how to speak Tashelhit, or remember but flaunt their French and Arabic in front of sometimes dazzled, sometimes disgusted villagers.  Some young men want to ahouwash every night, party country style, beat drums, find their roots.  They are visiting a culture park the way Americans visit Main Street at Disneyland.  They sleep late in the mornings and don’t hear the singing of the girls in the fields, the ululations cascading down the valley as they carry their loads of wood up paths even mules can’t navigate. It is too bad the city boys don’t listen better… sometimes their names are in the songs.
 
    All this does not mean that these villagers are our contemporary ancestors, that they are folklore come alive in a real-time diorama.  When an Arab visitor to a local wedding said to me, in French, “c’est un autre monde, no?” all I could do was turn, bewildered, and say, “no.”  It’s not another world.  The world of the Agoundis is our world in a fundamental sense.  This is my central point: the people of Tagharghist are contemporaries of every English-speaking person trolling through these lines; they live their lives at the same historical moment as you, albeit in strikingly different circumstances.  While these Imazighen live off the edge of what I have been calling “the grid,” they still live in some relation to it.  Conceptually it matters when villagers say things to me like, “we’re poor here, we don’t have telephones or cars,” or when they install water taps in their houses that are fed by buckets in the next room, or hang light bulbs in rooms with no electricity.  It matters that they describe their reality in terms of what it lacks.  What it lacks is stuff, meaningful stuff, things they know other people have.  The grid means something.  The global economy connects the ethereal substances of Arab, African and Western civilization, the circulating water, vehicles, bodies, electrons, ideas, sewage, information --and the capital that never seems to circulate quite far enough up into the hills.  There is meaning to these things, but it is not imported wholesale, in chunks, from the great purveyors of crap in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Casablanca.  Rather, meaning is always homemade, or re-made.  Local meaning is a multifaceted response to the strategies of nation states, and the multinational corporations they serve.
 
    This is not just true of culture and concepts, the flitting holograms of pure culture that populate some anthropological studies.  The movement of people, physical bodies, sacks of blood, bone and brains, the actual people that toil in mines and restaurants, farms and factories: these are palpable examples of solidly material differences in contemporary modernity.  Bodies exist differently in different niches of the global economy, and they move.  Lives don’t elapse; they’re lived, actively, purposefully and personally.  Mountain people don’t just move one direction; they don’t flow into the cities like water down a hill.  People move on to the grid, certainly, but they move back off too. Indivisible bodies negotiate fractured social disciplines.
 People who still consider themselves villagers spend time in schools and hospitals, in stores and offices and factories of the flat land below.  They acquire numbers.  They come to see magic as normal, to expect their shit to disappear with the touch of a button, rooms to fill with light at the flick of a finger.  The miraculous is normalized and their minds and bodies themselves become gridded.  The heart comes to be seen as a pump, wealth as a divisible number printed by a computer rather than an assemblage of inalienable and necessarily complementary resources.  But many Berbers, many Imazighen, come back up to the mountains, back up to the thinner air.  Their social circuits only intersect the rationalized cartography of the flatlands; they have not been sucked wholly into it.  Those whom these back-and-forth travelers love, those who love them, those whom they will marry -- these folks live in houses of artfully stacked rocks, balanced on cliff edges, smeared with mud against the freezing winter.
 
    In these types of houses only humans circulate.  There are no wires, no pipes, no tubes of water or hot and cold air.  Humans dwell here with the animals that sustain them.  A cow downstairs.  Chickens maybe.  Cats.  Flies.  A sheep tethered for the ’Aid al-Kebir, the celebration of the sacrifice of Abraham, the most important day of the year.   There is no glass in the windows, little to hold out the cold.  No screens keep the insects from the house or the bats from swooping in after the insects.  Those who the migrants end up marrying often come from these families huddled together in mud and rock houses, families grounded by their name to certain small, arduously maintained patches of earth, to fields and canals they build and rebuild, to particular orchards and forests, and most of all to other families.  Families reproduce themselves here on the carpets they eat on, were born on, make love on, and stay warm under in the long months of snow and cold.  In Marrakech such carpets are sold to tourists, and when they get back to France or England they will represent the exotic, the pre-modern, the “traditional” handicrafts of traditional lives.  In the highlands they mean something quite different, since the patterns in the cloth refer to very specific places and sometimes even the particular woman who wove them.  In the mountains such carpets remain quite literally part of the fabric of life.
 
    The human circuits of the High Atlas spread their tendrils down to the flatlands, into the cities, to feed off the grid.  The grid then feeds on them, taking bodies, “rationalizing” minds, and building humans appropriate to the international corporate discipline of monotonous wage labor.  But these are only the missionaries, the emissaries, the lambs sent to the urban wilderness, a few hard sacrifices that might, by the will of God, return some of the nectar flowing through the cities and plains back up to the bony highlands.  The people of the mountains are not lining up to march into modernity, nor are they living in “resistance” to it.  The people of these mountains are modern, in the historical sense.  They live now, like everyone else living now.  Their relation to the things we Westerners have decided define modernity is different than ours, however.  We may have been eaten by the grid, digested, reordered in its image.  Global capitalism, wildfire consumerism, reactionary and reformist religious movements, and a world of discrete nation states with personalities: these exist for the people of the mountains too.  But they exist differently: different than Marrakech and the plain around it, and certainly different than Paris or New York or Santa Cruz.  Sometimes such notions exist differently from person to person, between women and men, or between older and younger siblings.  As such the complex modernity of the Moroccan mountains reveals a unique face of who we are as a global people, a cultural species united by our ever changing differences.

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Notes

  **The research for this paper was funded by generous fellowships from the American Institute of Maghrib Studies and the Near and Middle East Program of the Social Science Research Council.  Dissertation writing supported by the Graduate Division of the University of California, Santa Barbara and the UC President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship.  My thanks also to the Department of Anthropology at UCSB, which provided the funds for me to be a visiting student researcher at the London School of Economics, where this paper was written.
 
**Three main languages are spoken in Morocco: Arabic, Berber and French.  Berber is generally called Tamazight.  People who speak Berber are generally called Imazighen (sing. Amazigh).  Tamazight is normally divided into three varieties.  Tarifit is the variety spoken in the northern Rif Mountains, especially in the east.  Tamazight is spoken in the Middle Atlas Mountains, from the area east of Marrakech north to Fez.  Tashelhit (called Shleuh in Arabic) is spoken in the Western High Atlas and the Anti Atlas Mountains.  There are different varieties of Arabic, also.  Derija is the form usually spoken in the street, and there is some regional variation in this with people from Marrakech, for instance, having a different accent than people in Fez.  In addition to Derija, news broadcasts and formal speeches are generally read in what is called Modern Standard Arabic, a form of the language understood all over the Middle East and beyond.  Religious studies are done in classical, Quranic Arabic.  The Egyptian form of Arabic is also widely understood because of the popularity of Egyptian television and movies.  French is spoken because of the influence of French colonialism, which lasted from 1912 until 1956.  Many university subjects are taught exclusively in French and all educated Moroccans speak it.
  See Bidwell (1973:121).
  **Tashelhit, and the broader category of Tamazight, are not written languages.  There is an alphabet called Tifinagh, but only a very few university specialists and activists know how to write in it.  Normally when Tashelhit is written down it is either in Latin characters like we use for French or English, or Arabic characters.  I wrote Tashelhit in Arabic characters because they have more of the letters necessary for the sounds that are used in Tashelhit.
  **Actually Calvin Coolidge said, “The chief business of the American people is business” on January 17, 1925.
  **Such moieties are known as lfuf (sing. leff) in Morocco and sfuf (sing. sfaf) in Algeria.  See Jacque Berque (1978 [1955]:424-39) and especially Robert Montagne (1930, 1973).
  **The border between these territories is marked by a zaouia, or religious lodge, as Gellner would have predicted.  It did not, however, arbitrate disputes between the all-powerful caid-s, but offered a “place of refuge” to warriors, who on both sides might be best seen as farmers pressed into military service.
  **Gavin Maxwell (1966) seems to have coined the term “lords” for this sort of governance.  The French usually referred to the three caid-s Glaoui, Goundafi, and Mtouggi as “les grandes chefs” or “les grandes caids de l’ Atlas.” See Justinard (1951) for example.
  **See Hart (1981) for an account of how the ‘Ait Atta, Berbers from the mountains east of Tagharghist, resisted the French.  Also Dunn (1977) and in a broader perspective Bidwell (1973).
  **Most of what I emphasize about the local significance of households is treated in a broader and more theoretical sense in Robertson (1991).
  **This comes from the Holy Qur’an, Sura 4:11 "Allah commands you as regards your children's (inheritance); to the male, a portion equal to that of two females; if (there are) only daughters, two or more, their share is two thirds of the inheritance; if only one, her share is half.  For parents, a sixth share of inheritance to each if the deceased left children; if no children, and the parents are the (only) heirs, the mother has a third; if the deceased left brothers or (sisters), the mother has a sixth.  (The distribution of the cases is) after payment of legacies he may have bequeathed or debts.  You know not which of them, whether your parents or your children, are nearest to you in benefit, (these fixed shares) are ordained by Allah.  And Allah is Ever All-Knower, All-Wise.” See also Sura 4:12 “In that which your wives leave, your share is half if they have no child; but if they leave a child, you get a fourth of that which they leave after payment of legacies they may have bequeathed or debts.  In that which you leave, their (your wives) share is a fourth if you leave no child; but if you leave a child, they get an eighth of that which you leave after payment of legacies that you may have bequeathed or debts.  If the man or woman whose inheritance is in question has left neither ascendants nor descendants, but has left a brother or a sister, each one of the two gets a sixth; but if more than two, they share in a third.  After payment of legacies he (or she) may have bequeathed or debts, so that no loss is caused (to anyone).  The is a Commandment from Allah; and Allah is Ever-All Knowing, Most-Forbearing.”

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