Moroccan Households in the World Economy: Labor and Inequality in a Berber Village

Preface: Notes on the Practicalities of Growing a Book

xi Preface Notes on the Practicalities of Growing a Book T his ethnography examines the transformation of a village in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, one hundred kilometers south of Marrakech. The village is called Tagharghist, though in the text I refer to it as “Tadrar.” The reason I do so is that English speakers tend to pronounce “Tagharghist” (“the place of the steep gorge”) as “terrorist.” My apologies to the villagers of Tagharghist/Tadrar for the presumption of changing the name of their home. Few other pseudonyms are employed in the text. Most people in Tadrar know who I talked to, and the local government agents know virtually everything I did and everyone who gave me information. Everybody was aware that I was “writing a book,” and I was publicly, constantly writing things in my notebook. Nothing I say here is much of a secret in the mountains , and there is little to be gained by disguising names. Pseudonyms might protect me from being responsible for getting the story straight, but it would take no serious effort to figure out who I am talking about. Some villagers, in fact, adamantly insisted that their words be credited to them, and so they are. The one exception concerns the transcript of my fieldnotes in chapter 6. Here I disguise the names of government and development agents about whom I have unkind things to say. None of these people work any longer in the region, so I do not think I am compromising their careers. The people of the High Atlas, like most of the mountain people of Morocco , are referred to as “Berbers.” Berber, from the Latin for “barbarian,” is the English word for the majority population of North Africa in historic times and is also the word for the language they speak. Most scholars refer to Berbers as the “indigenous people of North Africa,” and the culture does seem to have very deep roots in the region (Brett and Fentress 1996). Today you find Berber speakers across North Africa, from Egypt to Libya, Tunisia, xii  Preface Algeria, and Morocco, and down to Mauritania, Mali, and Niger. The largest population of Berber speakers is in Morocco, and is said to equal somewhere from 20 percent to 40 percent of the population (Crawford 2005). They do not only exist in rural areas, but in all of Morocco’s cities and all social classes. There is also a large Berber diaspora in Europe, especially in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Since the arrival of Islam in the eighth century, ever more North Africans have come to consider themselves “Arab” and speak Arabic—whatever their family history. The vast majority of Berbers are Muslim. The issue of the place of Berber language and culture in North Africa is widely debated (Boudraa and Kraus 2007; Boukous 1995; Chaker 1989; Crawford and Hoffman 2000; Crawford 2002; MacDougall 2006). Some activists object to the term Berber because it is exogenous to the people being described, and because of its link to barbarism. Contemporary activists and some scholars use Imazighen (singular, Amazigh) to refer to the general, contemporary Berber-speaking population, though, confusingly, Imazighen is also the name for the Berber-speaking people of the Middle Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Contemporary scholars often use Amazigh to refer to the family of Berber languages and the associated culture. However, the Amazigh people of the High Atlas, where Tadrar is located, refer to themselves as Ishelhin (pronounced Ish-al-heen) and their language as Tashelhit (Tashal -heet). I use various combinations of these terms in the book, depending on whether I am taking the local perspective (Ishelhin), suggesting a wider and more politicized way of thinking (Amazigh), or am trying to be as clear as possible to English-speaking readers (when I use the most common term, Berber). I do not believe that Berber has any negative connotations in English (Sadiqi 1997). Throughout this book I have tried to use the most comprehensible transliterations of Berber words that I could manage. Morocco was a protectorate of Franceduringtheearlypartof thetwentiethcentury,andmanyMoroccan words—both Arabic and Berber—have developed standard spellings in Latin characters. If there is a common French spelling, I try to use it (thus “Marrakech ”insteadof “Marrakesh”),butinmanyplacesIhavehadtorelyonmy own imperfect ear for the best rendering of Tashelhit as it is locally spoken. The bulk of the research for this book was undertaken in 1998 and 1999 while I was preparing my Ph.D. dissertation, though I visited Tadrar once...