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

2 INTIMATE MATRICES

48 2 Intimate Matrices T his chapter moves from an evocation of the spaces of Tadrar to a discussion of households, the fundamental social units that build, rebuild, and live within those spaces. Households are not the same as houses, and in Tadrar households are not the social realm of leisure, people with whom you relax after work. Instead, in Tadrar households are the primary locus of work, the social bodies that coordinate where and when a person labors, what she or he does over the course of a day, and what becomes of her or his productive efforts. It is this involvement with who does what, day in and day out over many years, that makes households “fundamental,” and fundamental in a different way than in urban areas. In most households in urbanized, modern societies production is partially or wholly separated from reproduction, which means simply that making money is spatially and conceptually separated from making babies. There are exceptions, but generally adults go “off to work” and children are either cared for at home or sent elsewhere to be trained or educated. In the words of David Graeber, “one of the most striking things about capitalism is that is the only mode of production to systematically divide homes and workplaces: that is to say that the making of people and the manufacture of things should properly operate by an entirely different logic in places that have nothing to do with each other” (2006, 62). We even say in the United States that women or men who stay home to do the difficult job of raising children are “not working.” Americans think very differently about work in the home—“housework” and “homework”—than they do about paying jobs. For most Americans, work in the home is not really work. Not so in Tadrar. As in many rural societies, and almost all traditional ones, the distinction between production and reproduction makes little sense. Young people labor for their parents in their homes, pastures, and { { Intimate Matrices  49 fields, then marry and produce the children who will in turn work for them. Girls work alongside their mother until they marry and join other households . Boys work for their father, then bring their brides to live and work in the father’s household. Only upon a father’s death do most boys fully become men by establishing their own independent households. In Tadrar productive labor is not recruited through contingent, short-term contracts and the allure of a Friday paycheck. It is instead generated, disciplined, trained, and rewarded in a long-term process that does not sharply distinguish between “household” and “labor,” or the exigencies of production and reproduction. In some ways these conceptual distinctions in Tadrar are unusual even among rural societies. For the agricultural Maale of Ethiopia, for instance, there are several different kinds of labor groups and ways of trading labor back and forth, but a clear distinction is made between work in the home and work without (Donham 1985, 264). By contrast, in Tadrar the key distinction is between work within the household and outside of it, and we should not confuse the social unit “household” with domestic space, the house. Household labor—whether undertaken within the actual house, outside in the fields, or off in distant pastures or the city—is subject to a strict hierarchy of age and gender; work organized between households is far more egalitarian. Households in Tadrar are strongly patriarchal and gerontocratic, meaning the father or eldest male rules more or less absolutely, at least in theory. Patriarchsrarelyhavemuchtosayaboutwomen’slabor,however,soinpractice the eldest woman (often the wife, sometimes the mother of the patriarch ) manages the feminine labor of the household. Thus there are parallel lines of age-based authority, one among women and one among men, with each person dominating the next youngest, but these lines converge in the patriarch. Intriguingly, some villagers imagine the broader Moroccan political system to operate analogously, with the king acting as patriarch of the nation. If household labor is organized hierarchically, labor organization between households is marked by negotiation, consensus, and a concern for fairness rather than authoritarianism, both among women’s labor groups and men’s. (This is explored specifically in chapter 4.) This is not to say that age-based authority is absent in interhousehold labor exchanges, but that in villagewide negotiations gerontocracy accommodates other, consciously equitable organizational models. In some sense this might be seen to reflect a widespread cultural pattern in the Muslim...