American Footprints » Morocco

Berber Households and Global Capitalism

Brian Ulrich — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:48:25 +0000

Several weeks ago I read David Crawford‘s Moroccan Households in the World Economy and decided I wanted to blog about it, but I was leaving town right afterward and am only now looking at it again with the details now far from my mind. Because of that, I apologize for some sketchiness in what I say below.

The book, concerning the village of Tagharghist in the Atlas Mountains, is an ethnography, a genre I often enjoy because I’m fascinated with how people live. Crawford is an extremely talented writer, and apart from the introduction and conclusion, as well as short bits in most chapters highlighting how material relates back to central themes, you can enjoy this book even if you have little tolerance for academic jargon and scholarly formulations. He also includes generous quotations from his field notes which are vivid in their descriptions at times frank in their expressions of emotion. From the first few chapters in particular, readers will get a clear sense of life in this village.

The book’s topic is how the extension of global capitalism interacts with the world of the village. As in many other times and places, the basic economic and social unit in Tagharghist is the household headed by a patriarch whose authority over his dependents is nearly absolute. The first four chapters explain how households function individually and collectively, and how time and labor emerge as factors which differentiate among factors economically. I’ve also noted he has a discussion of one lineage which represents a useful picture for how economic inequality emerges over generations despite an ideology that values equality and laws and customs which in theory perpetuate it.

Chapter 5, “Seeing and Being Seen by the State,” is important for those who wish to understand rural Moroccan politics. One of Crawford’s arguments, that development projects represent the primary form of engagement between the state and this rural community, calls to mind Toby Jones’s Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. He also argues that, to the people of Tagharghist, the state, conceived as a series of patronage and authority connections leading up to a distant monarch, has a certain family resemblance (my term, and no pun intended) to the genealogical expression of power within households.

Crawford address urban wage labor in his final chapter, and points out that participation in the wage economy is dictated by patriarchs and functions as yet another way to use labor in support of a household, though one that allows some to secede early from their natal household and start their own. In his conclusion, Crawford emphasizes the ways this complicates economic theories which take the autonomous, rational individual as the primary actor. In one hard-hitting sentence, he says, “The awkward truth is that since economics takes itself as the discipline best positioned to explain to the rest of us how the capitalist economy works, and since capitalism expands precisely in places like (Tagharghist) that are organized through households, and since economists admittedly have little idea how household economies work, we are handicapped in understanding what is arguably the single most significant dynamic in our contemporary social world.”

Simply put, this is an excellent book, one I recommend for those interested in Morocco, including its politics and economic development, those interested in capitalism and globalization, and those interested in rural household or lineage societies in any time period.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Missionaries in Morocco

Brian Ulrich — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:51:57 +0000

Morocco has suddenly begun expelling Christian missionaries whom it accuses of proselytizing:

“The largest incident took place at an orphanage for 33 abandoned children in the Middle Atlas mountains on Monday. Moroccan police showed up in the village of Ain Leuh, located 50 miles south of the ancient city of Fez, and separated orphans from their adoptive parents before delivering a grim piece of news: the Moroccan authorities had accused the volunteers of spreading Christianity â€“ a crime in this overwhelmingly Muslim nation…

“But the expelled volunteers from Village of Hope orphanage insist they were operating within the law.

“‘The fact of the matter is we werenâ€™t proselytizing,’ says Chris Broadbent, a New Zealander who managed the orphanageâ€™s office until Monday, when he and his family fled to Spain. ‘We understood the rules.’

“At the orphanage school, the children spoke Moroccan Arabic, studied the Koran, and learned Muslim prayers as stipulated by Moroccan law, Mr. Broadbent says. Outside of the classroom, itâ€™s true Christians were raising the children in Christian households, but Broadbent says this was a fact about which no Moroccan official could pretend to be surprised.”

Jillian York also has a round-up of reactions at Global Voices Online. Much discussion centers on whether the aid workers were teaching Christianity or evangelizing under the cover of charity work. My suspicion, however, is that the conflict comes from the ambiguity of such concepts in modern western Christianity.

Right now, I’m living in a very conservative, Christian area. Active involvement in religious organizations is the single biggest non-college commitment of Shippensburg University students. Many businesses have Christian music as their background motif, and discussion of religion is everywhere. Because of this, I meet a lot of people who are interested in missionary work, or at least hear about it and know what it is supposed to be.

Perhaps the best example of the point I want to get at came when I started discussing Spanish missionaries work in the Americas at the end of World History I last semester. Shippensburg students often have very weak vocabularies, so at one point I asked the class to explain what “missionary” meant. The first answer I got was, “Someone who goes somewhere to show an example of Christian living.” Specifically, this entails living for others by participating in the sorts of charity projects discusses in the Morocco pieces.

I meet a lot of college-aged and other young people who are interested in this kind of thing, or have done it themselves. To me, it seems clear that this form of missionary activity channels the same internationally focused idealism that joining the Peace Corps or those sorts of volunteer organizations does in more liberal areas. The impulses really are the same, people around here just tie it to religion because that’s the culture in which they were raised.

The ambiguity in all this comes up in how this ties into other concepts of missionary activity, particularly the direct and unambiguous proselytizing most people think of when they hear the word. The fact is, in theory of going somewhere to represent a Christian way of life, however defined, is to attract others to Christianity by example. The degree to which this is actually on an individual’s mind varies from case to case, of course, but it’s definitely in the background of a lot of these projects.

You can see how this creates a gray area for laws against proselytizing. It gets even more complicated when people talk about their religion with others. But how does one legislate a line where active proselytizing blends into just being whatever you think a good Christian should be and then talking to people who are interested in the religion within which you’re operating? The role of children in this is one thing, but at that point, you’re close to building a theological Berlin Wall around your population to keep them within the fold rather than just trying to control the behavior of outsiders within it.

I should say that, while running around trying to convert people to your religion doesn’t seem like a great use of energy, I also don’t think it should actually be illegal. However, given the motives and laws among various groups around the world are what they are, I suspect the ambiguities above are what lead to many of these conflicts.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Islamist Politics at MESA

Brian Ulrich — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:35:57 +0000

Greetings from the 2009 annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, where I’ve had the pleasure of attending four panels so far, all of which were interesting. One which probably has some interest for readers was Islamist Parties and the Political Process, which examined Islamist political movements in Morocco, Kuwait, and Algeria with eyes on inclusion in the formal political process, trends toward moderation, and competition among movements for members.

I write this based on my notes and the abstracts on the panel web site, but warn anyone who clicks through that ideas can shift between the submission of the abstract and the actual paper, and I think something like that happened with the paper “Public Religion, Democracy and Islam: Examining the Moderation Thesis in Algeria” by the University of Notre Dame’s Michael Driessen. At the very least, while I guess some of what’s in the abstract makes sense given the paper, my own notes picked up on different themes, perhaps because history is a less theory-driven field than political science and the abstract couched its topic in terms of theory. That said, he talked about the nationalization of religion which has taken place during the past decade or so as a means of co-opting Islamists and government attempts to manage religion, but also notes that, once the religious ideas are floating around, ideas, attitudes, and behaviors develop independent of both government and opposition Islamist influences, which he called an “individualization” of Islamist ideas. (Or was the government competing with the Islamists? The abstract suggests the former, but my memory the latter.)

The well-known Algerian Civil War of the 1990′s was an influence seen in the paper of Noureddine Jebnoun of the University of Montana, which was called “The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG): From Armed Confrontation to Ideological Reversal.” That conflict led the Libyan government to perceive and sell the perception of Islamist forces in their own country as a major threat, and quelling that threat was one of the objectives behind the Qadhafi regime’s reconciliation with the United States. Since then the LIFG has come to seek its own reconciliation with the Libyan regime, renouncing both violence and the practice of takfir, or rejecting another’s claim to me Muslim, in what Jabnoun sees as a sincere change of attitude.

The other two papers (a fifth presenter was unable to attend) dealt with Morocco, and were focused to some extent on the Justice and Development Party’s position in Moroccan politics and society. The government has legalized its political participation, and today it is the largest opposition party in parliament. However, St. John’s University’s Azzedine Layachi argues in “Official and Popular Islam: The PJD and the Struggle for Legitimacy,” this cannot be seen as a successful co-option of Islamism into the Moroccan regime as the PJD does not represent the bulk of Moroccan Islamists. Layachi put forward the idea that it might ultimately be on the same path as socialism in North Africa, gradually losing contact with its grassroots in gaining inclusion without being able to act on any of its agenda.

The University of Texas’s Avi Spiegel focused exactly on those grassroots supporters with his study of the political attitudes of youth in Rabat, Casablanca, and the belt along the train tracks between them. In addition to the PJD, he looked at the JSO, or Justice and Spirituality Organization, an illegal rival of the PJD, as a means of conceptualizing not the relationship of an Islamist movement to the state, but the relationship of Islamist movements with each other. In this case, the two organizations acted as rivals competing for supporters and therefore resources. Spiegel portrayed a fluid world, but argued for a broader trend in which, instead of disillusioned youth pushing seasoned movement leaders to take more radical stances, movements’ desire to broaden their base among youth led to an increasing moderation of an initially highly conservative religious message. I forget if this was addressed by Speigel, Layachi, or both, but in entering parliament, the PJD has added to its traditional focus on public morals and family law one on political reform which it uses to compete for public support.

Similar ideas came up later in the day in a panel on political change in Iran and Kuwait in a paper by the University of Oslo’s Bjorn Olav Utvik called “Electoral Religion: Salafis and Muslim Brothers Competing for Votes in Kuwait.” One of his points was that due to Kuwait’s somewhat open political system, one gains relevance in that country through election to parliament, and therefore in order to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood in the country, the Salafis had to enter the political fray. Since doing so, however, the Salafis have drifted well away from the common image of Salafism: The slogan of the most prominent hadhar Salafi MP is “Shari’a, stability, development,” and all have taken on broader social and economic causes. In response to a question, Utvik, who was also at the morning session on North Africa, thought the idea of parties moderating to successfully compete for influence among the broader public made sense.

This has been a long post, so I won’t say much about my own thoughts stimulated by all this, but I did think of Hamas, which has entered politics but focused on aspects of government other than moral reform, even in Gaza which it now dominates. The group has thus in a sense “moderated,” but one side effect is that hardline elements then form their own groups, such as the al-Qaeda-like one from a few months ago. This, I think, represents a response both to Hamas’s moderation and its inability to achieve much through its chosen strategy. The base unit of politics is not the autonomous organization, but the individual, and when individuals are free to choose whether or not to join organizations, those organizations will permutate based on their view of the benefits of recruiting new members and the strategies they employ to do so.

(Crossposted to my blog)