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Draft: do not cite without the author's permission
Talk given at the Middle Eastern Studies Association Meetings (MESA), November 1998.
(Many sections of this talk are incorporated into "Modernity Becomes Imazighen," which can be found on my homepage.)
 
 

On Top of the Middle of the Edge: The Human Circuits of the Moroccan Highlands

David Crawford
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara




     Today I will talk about a Berber-speaking, rural village in the High Atlas of Morocco.  What I have to say is based on the first five months of what will be fifteen months of anthropological fieldwork.  It is a preliminary report, impressions of life in a particular place rather than hard data or concrete social analysis. My intention is to evoke what I feel is a relatively ignored sector of Moroccan society.  I hope to elicit a sense of how the place I work is different from more accessible areas of the country, and to encourage academic interest in the question of how this difference matters.

     This work begins with the observation that there seems a certain gap between the picture one gets reading the academic --and in particular anthropological-- literature about Morocco, and the picture one gets wandering the dirt roads and paths of the countryside.  This gap is not surprising if we accept the premise that all writing comes from quite particular places --both physical and conceptual-- and the organization of these places lends a pattern to the picture produced from  them.   That is, the organization of the production of knowledge about Morocco shapes what gets described as Moroccan  reality, and shapes it more profoundly than we might notice.  In this age of post post-modern scholarship, this observation should not surprise anyone, and I don’t want to belabor the point.  But the fact is that most of us who do academic work in Morocco are middle class, if not from the upper end of the middle class.   We tend to be urban.  We tend to live and work in urban areas of Morocco.  We tend to be trained in Arabic and French.  When we travel within the country, we take (air conditioned) CTM busses, or we opt for the First Class compartment on the train.  When we eat, we are more likely to be seated next to a clean, middle class Moroccan dressed like us than we are a villager huddled over a bowl of askeef or harirra.  We may learn Derija, Moroccan Arabic, but usually only after suffering through years of Modern Standard Arabic.  Nobody expects us to learn any Berber.  The situation is thus: the orientations of the institutions that support research in Morocco, and the backgrounds of the people who do research in Morocco, combine to encourage certain kinds of questions to be asked about certain sorts of people.  We end up with a pronounced emphasis on relatively urban, relatively affluent Arabic speakers, and a relative de-emphasis of the role poor, rural Berber-speakers play in Moroccan society.  So before I begin what I hope is the evocative part of the paper, some statistics are in order.  I mention these in a bid for legitimacy, to make the case that the small place I will describe later does indeed intersect the larger sphere of things.

      First, concerning the “Berber” or "Imazighen" part of my rural Berber focus: 40% of the Moroccan people are said to be “Berbers” (Brett and Fentress 1996:276).  Though this makes Berber-speakers a minority, it hardly makes them marginal.   Whatever we decide Berbers are in sociological terms, they are certainly are not small band of primitives that I ferreted out for my anthropological purposes. Berbers live in every area of Morocco, in every economic class, from the very poor village I will describe right up to the best neighborhoods in Rabat.   There are vibrant migrant communities in places like Paris and Amsterdam, websites, journals, newspapers and radio programs.  In many mountain and rural areas of Morocco Berber-speakers constitute nearly 100% of the population.   Altogether we are probably talking about something like ten million people who speak some variant of Berber, people in all walks of life.  And yet, except for a certain corpus in linguistics, and the work produced by educated Berber speakers themselves, there seems remarkably little interest in what speaking Berber means to people, or what it means more broadly to Moroccan society.  Even the Peace Corps has to rely on the French, on Lieutenant Antoene Jordan’s 1935 publication, “Texte Berberes,” for its language instruction manuals for rural Morocco.

     Second statistic, the “rural” part of my focus on rural Berbers: 50% of Moroccans remain classified as “rural” (Park 1996:59).  This is to say that studying rural people in a country like Morocco is not like studying farmers in America or France.  We are not talking about a percentile or two of the population, but about half of the people in the country.  While urban growth in North Africa has been rapid, and in some ways frightening, the rush to focus on things urban has left us surprisingly ignorant of those who are NOT flocking to Casablanca or France.  It is understandable and commendable that we try to make sense of the tide of people filling the cities.  But it would still seem prudent, on purely practical grounds, to garner some idea of the places these people are leaving.  We might assume that the cities are not just sucking migrants out of their former lives, and digesting them wholesale into a new social universe.  There may be some push in addition to the pull, something more rich and sociologically interesting than the naked force of rural poverty.  Even if we have no interest in rural places themselves, if we limit ourselves to studying the admittedly central processes of migration, we still have the rural half of migrants’ lives to make sense of.  In short, if rural Moroccans are understudied, and Berber speakers too are relatively ignored, Berber speaking rural people are particularly invisible.
...

    With this in mind, I want to evoke a bit of life in Tagharghist, where I live and work, a village that is exclusively Berber-speaking and very apparently rural.  It sits just under 5000 feet above sea level on the Agoundis River, which joins the Nfis down at Ijoukak and eventually flows out of the Western High Atlas in the general direction of Marrakech.  Fewer than two hundred people live here, depending on your criteria for being part of the village, but the Agoundis, and valleys like it, are chock full of villages.  When I firs visited  three years ago there was no running water, except for the river, no electricity, solar or otherwise, no toilets.  Indeed there was no road, and if the mule track terrified me I can only imagine what it did for the mules.

 From this path, looking down, you see massive walnut trees crowd the rocky river course. Fields of corn and barley grow in steep terraces above the spring flood level. Almonds are planted higher, on ledges the river water cannot reach.  Rock and mud houses are terraced above that, clustered in places which suffer rock slides less frequently.  Grapes, pomegranates, figs, blackberries, squash, mint, potatoes and tomatoes grow where space can be found.  Olives, carob trees and prickly pear mark the lower elevations.

     The fields here are watered year round by snow melt that passes though seven main targas, or canals, and many hundreds of minor causeways and ditches, all of which, it seems, have their own names.  These are operated in rotation by the six main families of the village.  The women cut fodder for the cows down in the river bed, or up in the forests, and haul it along the steep paths in huge bundles.  The girls sing as they fetch water, collect wood, 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.

     The sheep and goats, for their part, spend their summers in the high pastures, near 10,000 feet along the Ouanoukrim massif in the new Jebel Toubkal National Park.  The shepherds bring them down to their winter grazing area near the village in October, before the heavy snows.  Partly because of the availability of these pastures, 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 (Bencherifa 1983).  That is, these people make more human bodies out of less land than almost anyone.  This productivity gives the place a Shangri-La feel.  It’s a dense thicket of green jammed into the crevasses of impossibly rugged mountains.  But it is a hard place.  There is little to sell, and thus no cash for doctors or dentists, toothpaste or medicine, or sometimes even shoes.  “Ishqa,” people say again and again, “toodirt n’adrar ishqa”  Indeed, life in the mountains is hard.

     Here, radio reception is sketchy and there is no television.  Neither is there television in Tazguart, Tagoundafine, Ighir, Agerda, Ait Moussa, Annamer, Zoute or as near as I can tell in any of the villages of the entire valley, at least once you leave the dirt road down at the place called Makhzen.   As near as I can tell, nobody in Tagharghist could really be called literate, and none can speak the national language with any degree of confidence.  Some can write their names and the names of other families.  Most of the men can recite parts of the Quran, and most of the boys memorize Quranic verses with the Fqih in the mosque.  A very few men can read parts of children’s stories in standard Arabic, and a couple women can tell you some Moroccan Arabic words for things.  None of them can read their own language, Tashelhit, either in Arabic characters or modified Latin script.

     The times, however, are changing.  Since I first visited the Agoundis three years ago the people of valley built themselves a road.  One migrant who 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 which rocks could be stacked and filled with earth.  The people themselves contributed the labor, as they do to repair the road every winter when the rains wash parts away.  They are proud to tell you the government contributed nothing.  Within the Agoundis valley, Tagharghist in particular is changing.  The Peace Corps sent a volunteer who helped install pipe to bring water from a spring above the village.  Eight taps now deliver clean water, saving women a lot of walking, and sparing us the nastier microbes living in the drinking water we used to use.  The mosque now has a solar power panel, and to the great delight of some men, a loudspeaker.  We in Tagharghist are now able to persecute neighboring villages with our predawn call to prayer.  A school was built this last summer.  Though it is painted a color pink that makes the resident anthropologist physically cringe, the children will finally have a chance to learn the national language, to read some, and write.  Through the windows we can see we even have desks and a blackboard, though when I left it remained locked, waiting for the government inspector to make the trip up to approve its opening.  When it does open, it will be the first time many of the children will have sat in a chair, or held a pencil.

     From up here, from the high valleys, it is hard to feel the mountains are part of the lives going on below.  The pink school seems a curiosity more than a functional part of life.  Looking down at the geometry of the the lights of Marrakech, or  the supernatural green of the carefully irrigated grids of citrus around Taroudant, the separation of the two worlds seems to hit more in the gut than the intellect.  The gridded flatlands just don't seem connected to the jumble of village life.

 And it's true, 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, no secret code for the ATM.  Once a year the gendarmes come through and update their residency cards (and extort money).  These cards are then quietly put away in a bag or under a rug until the next year, an empty exercise in national solidarity.  While King Hassan is revered, and his picture hangs in most every house, politics as such are strictly local.  Nobody further than the next river down has ever heard of the men that 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 Eau et Foret, the names of the faces behind the hands that actually take the villagers’ walnuts and almonds away from them.

     The difference between the rhythm of village life and the grid of city is perhaps most easily seen in August, vacation season. This is the time of year when you will see city Moroccans dressed like French tourists --with shorts, Ray Ban sunglasses and Diesel brand shoes-- sweating their way up the dusty piste.  They have big radios, phat sneakers and hip 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 ahawash 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 women in the fields, the ululations cascading down the valley as they carry 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, "c'est un autre monde, no?"  All I could do was turn, stunned, and say, "no.  It's not another world."   This is my central point.  The people of Tagharghist are simply our contemporaries, living lives at the same historical moment in somewhat different circumstances.  While they live off the edge of what I have been calling "the grid," they still live in some relation to it. Conceptually, it matters when people 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 that must be hand filled.  It matters that their reality is described by them in terms of what it lacks, and what it lacks is stuff, meaningful stuff, stuff they know other people have.  The grid means something.  It connects to the vital fluids of Arabic and Western civilization, to the circulating water, vehicles, electrons, sewage, and the capital that never quite seems to circulate this far up the hill.  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, the meaning is home-made, or re-made, in de Certeau’s terms,  a multifaceted tactical response to the compound strategies of the state, and the companies it serves.

    We are not just talking about concepts, though, not holograms of pure meaning.  The movement of people, physical bodies, sacks of blood, bone and brains: this is the most palpable example of a very material differnce.  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 divided social disciplines.  They spend time in schools and hospitals, in stores and offices and factories of the flat land below.  They acquire numbers.  They come to see the magic as normal, to expect their shit to disappear with the touch of a button, for rooms to fill with light with the flick of a wish.  Their minds and bodies themselves become gridded.  Their heart becomes a pump, their wealth a number printed by a computer.  But they come back up to the thinner air.  Their social circuits only intersect the rational cartography of flat land, 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, of course, there are no wires, no pipes, no tubes of hot or cold air.  Humans live here.  And animals.  A cow downstairs.  Two chickens maybe.  Cats.  Flies.  A sheep tethered for the Aid al-Kebir.  An occasional scorpion.  No glass.  No screens.  Those who our traveler will marry come from families who huddle together in these houses, families grounded by their name to certain small patches of flat earth, to streams they build and rebuild, to particular orchards and forests, and most of all to other families.  Families reproduce themselves here, make love on the carpets they were born on, the carpets they eat on and stay warm under in the long months of snow and cold.

     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, building humans in its image.  But these are only the missionaries, the emissaries, the lambs sent to the wilderness, a sacrifice that might, God willing, return some of the nectar flowing through the cities of the plain back up to these bony hills.  The point is that the people on the mountain 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 have decided define modernity is different than ours, however.  We have been eaten by it, digested, reordered in its image.  Global capitalism, wildfire consumerism, a world of discrete nation states, with personalities: these exist for the people of the mountains too.  But they exist differently.  It is this difference I am trying to make sense of, and trying to write down.  It is this difference I am trying to evoke today.

     Whether or not I have been successful, whether I have elicited a sense of this difference, I want to insist that it is out there and must be grasped if we are to conceptualize something we want to call “Moroccan” culture or society.  We cannot ignore Berber-speaking Morocco if we want our analysis of the nation to ring true.  We cannot ignore rural Morocco.  This huge hinterland must be taken seriously if we want to leave a record of this time that is more than a projection of our own literate, urban selves on to the diverse whole of Morocco.  We have to come to terms with what Jacque Berque called, “the bewildering complexity of the Moroccan countryside.”

Bencherifa, Abdellatif
1983 Land Use and Equilibrium of Mountain Ecosystems in the High Atlas of Western Morocco. Mountain Research and Development 3(3):273-279.
Brett, Michael, and Elizabeth Fentress
1996 The Berbers. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
de Certeau, Michel
Park, Thomas Kerlin
1996 Historical Dictionary of Morocco. Volume 71. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press.
 

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