Welcome, everybody.
Welcome to Rhode Island Hall.
Welcome to Brown University.
My name is Sue Alcock.
I'm the director of
the Joukowsky Institute
for Archaeology and
the Ancient World.
And I'd like to
welcome you to what
is the fifth installment
of what has actually
turned into a sort
of a signature
event of the
Joukowsky Institute.
And that is these things we call
"State of the Field" workshops.
These were born in
2011 over a drink
during a rather lugubrious
conversation about how
relatively few North
American archaeologists were
either actively doing
fieldwork in Italy
or were well networked into
the archaeological world
of that peninsula.
And the idea emerged
to kind of do
a pulse check, a state of the
field analysis from an upfront
and admittedly largely
North American anglophone
perspective.
So 2011 was Italy; 2012, Turkey;
2013, Greece; 2014, Iberia;
and now 2014b, North Africa.
Now, what has characterized
all of these occasions
is that, first, they have
been highly informative,
especially for those
of us who don't work
in the countries in question.
But they've also been very
productive-- very proactive,
I guess I would say.
And I would stress that sort
of duality of these events,
informative and productive.
Lord knows there's
lots to learn,
but the point of
these gatherings
is just as much and,
in some ways, even more
importantly to talk through
the state of the field
and debate about
what could or should
be done in future differently
and, hopefully, better.
Now, picking what to do next can
sometimes get a little tricky,
but that we were going to
do North Africa this year
really in the end seemed
almost over-determined.
It was a team effort.
It is a team effort.
And a solid team it
is, and it all sort of
coalesced around doing it now.
I'd like to introduce Andy
Dufton, a doctoral student
in the Joukowsky Institute.
Corisande Fenwick, now at
the University of Leicester,
who was here at the Joukowsky
as a postdoc last year.
And Brett Kaufman, who is here
as a postdoc at the Joukowsky
this year.
It was made pretty
clear to me that there
was no way on earth we were not
going to do North Africa now.
So I'm going to hand
things over to them,
as I have handed over
pretty much everything else
about this workshop.
On to what we are going to
do for the next two days.
Let me introduce again Andy
Dufton and Corisande Fenwick.
[APPLAUSE]
So why North Africa?
Why now?
Well, these are pretty
exciting times in North African
archaeology.
For many years, this
region has been little more
than a footnote in the big
debates in world archaeology--
and with reason.
North Africa is difficult
to get a handle on.
It's both Mediterranean and
Sarahan, Western and Eastern,
has a long and
complicated colonial
and post-colonial history.
And of course, it's
not a single country.
It's four nation-states with
very different histories
and archaeological traditions.
It is big.
It is complicated.
And it's not always an
easy place to work in.
For North Americans
in particular,
North Africa has seldom
been on the radar.
This is in no small part
due to North Africa's
colonial history.
Fieldwork in the former French
colonies of Morocco, Algeria,
and Tunisia has been undertaken
largely by the French.
Similarly, Italian and,
to a lesser extent,
British teams have
dominated work in Libya.
Unlike the longstanding and
prolific American involvement
in countries such as
Italy, Greece, and Turkey,
there are a much, much smaller
number of American projects
in North Africa.
[? For the moment, ?]
exciting changes are afoot.
In the wake of the
Arab Spring of 2011,
North Africa has captured
the world's interest.
More and more
people are aware of
and interested in the
history and politics
of this complex region,
past and present.
And over the last few decades,
archaeological scholarship
in North Africa has become
far more international
than it has ever been in
the past, with increasing
contributions by
British, Spanish, German,
and American teams working
in close collaboration
with their North
African counterparts.
Joint projects are now the norm.
Big digs at Roman
towns have given way
to much more targeted
research questions,
pushing the boundaries
of our understanding
of such diverse topics as
the origins of urbanization,
life in the Sahara, or human
migrations from prehistory
to the present.
The heritage industry, too, is
big business in North Africa.
Tourism is a major source of
income for Tunisia and Morocco,
at least.
And conservation heritage
management programs
developed here, particularly
those [INAUDIBLE]
by the World Bank have become
the model for heritage programs
elsewhere.
Now, at the same time,
there are new challenges,
both intellectual and pragmatic.
How do we integrate North
Africa into broader debates
in world archaeology?
How do we encourage work
on periods and topics
that in North Africa have seldom
been a priority-- prehistory,
the Islamic period, the
Berbers, rural landscapes,
the domestic sphere, the
material culture of non-elites.
And the practical note--
the political climate
is tense at the moment.
Libya is in the
midst of civil war.
Algeria, most of the
Sahara is off limits,
and it's increasingly becoming
difficult to conduct fieldwork
in many areas.
Funding, of course, as
always, is also an issue.
How do we preserve
archaeological sites
at a moment when
there is less and less
funding available for
conservation and heritage
management?
So this is, then,
a critical moment
for North African archaeology.
And our aim today and
tomorrow is to showcase to you
some of the latest, newest,
and most stimulating
research on the
North African past.
To bring to your attention the
rich archaeological heritage
of this often-neglected region.
And to raise awareness
of some of the issues
that face North
African archaeologists
and archaeological sites
in the current moment,
whether it's war-torn Libya
or budget-strapped Tunisia.
We do not pretend to
be comprehensive, nor
representative,
merely to offer you
a taste of the richness
of the North African past,
and to invite you
to join us in what
promises to be an exciting two
days of debate and discussion.
To borrow Corisande's
turn of phrase,
what tastes of the richness
of the North African past
should we showcase?
The reasons why we want to meet
to discuss North Africa are
many, but precisely
how we might go
about this in a
single-day event presented
another set of questions.
Our presenters
and audience range
from those with a
lifetime of experience
to those with a
growing curiosity
in the region to those working
in other areas that are here
to learn more and, perhaps,
to enjoy the wine and cheese
at the reception later.
So how can we harness
this shared excitement
to talk about issues that
matter as much to North African
archaeologists as to
those working elsewhere
in the Mediterranean and beyond?
In the past, the State
of the Field workshops
have presented a series of short
summaries of current debates
for various
chronological periods
or on particular themes.
These presentations have acted
as an effective jumping-off
point, inspiring
open discussions
between participants
and creating
opportunities for new
research collaborations.
By choosing to tackle the
archaeology of North Africa,
we are dealing with a
geographic area which
is over 2.5 times the
size of the area of all
of our previous State of the
Field conferences combined.
So as Cori said earlier,
it's really big.
The diversity of such a vast
area can be somewhat daunting,
and this presented
us with a problem.
How could we possibly
begin to summarize
this regional scholarship?
What periods would we discuss?
From what areas would
we select our speakers?
And who would we invite
to speak on, for example,
the prehistory of Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya
in under 15 minutes?
Clearly a realignment of
our purpose was needed.
Thus, in a slight departure
from previous years,
we've structured this year's
State of the Field workshop not
according to
chronological periods,
but around four broad themes.
In the morning,
we will hear work
from scholars addressing
two big topics cutting
across both chronological
and geographic divides.
First, North African
urbanism and urbanization,
a topic which is
dear to my heart.
For better or worse,
the city has been
and remains one of the focal
points of archaeological study.
This session
challenges old models
of the rise and fall
of the classical city,
examining the origins
of urbanization,
pushing the realm of cities
beyond the Mediterranean
and into the Sahara,
and questioning
the life of urban sites
after Muslim conquest.
From the confines of
the city to the openness
of the countryside,
our second theme
focuses on mobility in the
North African landscape.
This session looks
past sedentary models
and site-specific
analysis to draw attention
to the important role
of mobile communities
and the deep-rooted connections
between sub-Saharan Africa
and the Mediterranean from well
before the broadly accepted
date of the Islamic period.
Then we'll have lunch.
In the afternoon,
after we've had lunch,
we've selected two
topics to highlight
some of the practical problems
of archaeological research.
New fieldwork is often not
possible in North Africa.
It's expensive.
Permits are not
always forthcoming.
And political instability
restricts access in many areas.
In Encouraging New
Work on Old Data Sets,
we will look at how to make
the most of legacy data
from over 100 years
of excavations.
What are projects doing
now to bring new questions
to old data?
And what can we do in
future to make further use
of this remarkable resource?
It's an exciting session.
In North African Archaeology
and Its Broader Communities,
we will ask a
question central to
all archaeological fieldwork.
That is, how do we
ethically engage
local communities and
other stakeholders
in our field practices?
How can we best deal with
heritage that is under threat
from budgetary
restrictions, from looting,
from armed conflict,
from natural decay caused
by environmental factors, or
simply by the factor of time?
To maximize debate, each of
these four thematic sessions
will conclude with a focused
20- to 30-minute discussion.
And we hope these
discussions will
allow both for questions
on the individual research
their presenters have
shared, but also for broader
reflections on where
we are as a field
and where we can go from
here, to spark debate
amongst both North Africanists
and those working elsewhere
and to bring North Africa
back to the foreground
of archaeological scholarship.
And before I pass off
to Brett to introduce
our keynote speaker,
I'd just like
to have a quick thank you to
Sarah Sharpe and Jess Porter,
who have been working
tirelessly for the organization
of this event and who-- Sue
says she's passed stuff to us
because we've done things,
but we've passed a lot
off to them as well.
So they really have
done a lot of work
to make sure things
are running smoothly,
so I wanted to thank them.
And now, Brett, if you'd like
to introduce the first speaker.
OK, thank you,
Cori, Andy, and Sue,
and thank you, everybody,
for being here.
It's incredibly exciting to have
this amount of North African
scholars in one place.
And personally I'm very
much looking forward to it,
and I hope everyone
else is, as well.
There's a bunch of people I
haven't seen since the field,
so it's going to be really
nice, too, to catch up.
Without further ado, I'd like to
introduce Dr. Paul Silverstein.
It is my pleasure
to introduce him,
the keynote speaker
for the evening.
Dr. Silverstein received
his PhD from the Department
of Anthropology at the
University of Chicago.
His research interests
and fieldwork
are diverse, ranging
from his initial research
on Berber activism and
nationalism in Morocco
to colonial and post-colonial
discourses between France
and its former North
African colonies.
Also, through the role of
sport that he looks at,
particularly
soccer-- or football,
for those who are
from other places,
perhaps-- in the creation
of religious or national
identities.
As you may imagine,
such diverse interests
also lead to a diverse list of
publications, too many to list
here but of which
I'm a great fan.
And I strongly
encourage anyone who
hasn't read some of
his works to engage.
It's incredibly readable
and very thoughtful.
Of particular note are
his 2004 book Algeria
in France-- Transpolitics, Race,
and Nation, and his jointly
edited volumes Memory and
Violence in the Middle East
and North Africa and Bourdieu
in the Field-- Colonial
Politics, Ethnographic
Practices,
Theoretical Developments.
So, sorry to disappoint
the sports fans,
but he will not talking
about soccer this evening.
Rather, he will be discussing
his work with the Berbers
in his talk, Living
with/in the Material Past,
the Politics of Remains
and the Remains of Politics
in Berber North Africa.
Please join me in
welcoming Dr. Silverstein.
[APPLAUSE]
So thanks, Brett, for that
really generous introduction.
And thanks to the organizers, to
Cori and Andy and Sue and also
to, of course, Sarah and Jess
for the invitation opportunity
to share my thoughts and help
frame what looks like it's
going to be a really great
couple days of conversation
and inquiry into the state
of the field of archaeology
in North Africa.
Now, I myself am
certainly looking forward
to learning a lot.
Now, I'm not an archaeologist,
nor do I play one on TV.
But as an historically minded
sociocultural anthropologist
in North Africa,
I'd like to think
that I'm a fellow traveler
and not merely a naive
interloper into the
broader conversation
about the relationship of
the past to the present.
But if at the end of this
you decide that I'm actually
a blatant imposter just here
for the wine and cheese, as Andy
says, I can swear I can be
out of here in 15 minutes.
And we can all forget
this ever happened.
So really, no need
to call the police.
So for a certain
amount of time, I've
been interested in how the
historical record has served
as a ground for a variety
of identity projects,
from nationalism to
counter-nationalism,
that seek to forge genealogies
of settlement and occupation
in and of North Africa.
From this perspective,
archaeological artifacts
from the Paleolithic Era
through the Classical period
to the Islamic conquest
and beyond physically
present or discoverable
in the lived landscape
constitute signposts for
an emergent or contested
historical consciousness
in the indexes of what
the early 20th century American
cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks
famously called a usable past.
The utility of this past
depends on the particular work
it can do in the present,
whether it's a narrative
trope within a national
or ethnic mythos
or as a modifiable experience
to be sold to tourists.
As well as the use of
the past in projecting
a future trajectory
understood as
either a legitimate
continuation of the present
or a messianic
renewal of the past
or a definitive
revolutionary break from it,
historical remains thus become
first and foremost objects
of discourse unmoored from
their material specificity
and semiotically deployed
in particular political
narratives.
However, in my recent research
on the local dynamics of Berber
or Amazigh activism in
the southeastern oases
of peripheral
Morocco, I've become
less satisfied with this
largely discursive and semiotic
understanding of the
archaeological record.
Understanding historical remains
as primarily detachable signs
or narrative tropes
risks distracting us
from their undeniable
material presence
in everyday sociopolitical
environments.
The past is layered in the
present in physical as well
as narrative folds.
The crumbling architecture,
broken objects,
and dilapidated spaces
of earlier times
intersperse a built
environment that is continually
being modified with
new constructions
and new technologies.
Some of these past remains
do come to stand out
as objects for
contemplation, as ruins
or as relics endowed with
aesthetic and moral import,
as sublime testaments to human
ingenuity, if not divine grace.
But most artifacts inspire
less an affect of awe
than one of a blase
shrug, if they are even
remarked upon at all.
They present less
a privileged window
into a romantic past than what
the Argentine anthropologist
Gaston Gordillo has called the
rubble of the present a, quote,
"confusion, and
entanglement of debris,"
unquote, that blurs the
lines between presumably
distinct historical strata.
Modern constructions emerge
seamlessly from older forms.
Artifactual shards and
fragments serve as the mortar
for new fabrications.
Centuries-old habitations
are defaced and refaced
while others are left to decay
into primary usable materials.
Of course, there's
nothing particularly North
African or contemporary about
such disregard and recycling.
Archaeological research,
as I understand it,
suggests that the various
reuses of the material past
is likely normative
in most societies,
though there are
certainly those that
either abhor the
work of the ancestors
and literally push
it aside, or ritually
sacralize even the most
seemingly banal artifact
into various religious forms.
However, what I'm
interested in today
is how the norm of
nonchalance comes
to be arrested and interrupted,
how historical ruins come
to be recognized and, indeed,
made from the aggregate rubble
in which they are situated.
Drawing on my work
with Amazigh activists,
I want to speak to how
a particular ethical and
aesthetic sensitivity
to the material past
is cultivated through
sustained effort and training
so the ways in which
young men and women learn
to experience the physical
landscape as positively
haunted.
Through such training, ruins
become less the passive objects
for spiritual contemplation
than the active translators
of effective intensities of
emotional [? intensities, ?]
producing complex emotions that
combine melancholy, outrage,
and ultimately, in some
cases, an incitement
to political action.
The current Berber/Amazigh
conservation efforts
of which I will
speak are thus not
the end result of a preformed
ethnopolitical ideology,
but the material
and embodied means
through which such
cultural awareness comes
into being in the first place.
Now, when I emphasize the
material and body dimensions
of politics, I to
a certain extent
dialogue with an emerging
theoretical literature.
Sometimes it's labeled
"the new materialism"--
some of you may
know about this--
which I find to a certain extent
compelling but about which I do
hold some trepidations that
I want to lay out right out
front.
Combining insights from
object-oriented ontology
is a Bruno Latour
and his followers
in the so-called
speculative realism
of neo-Kantian philosophers
like Graham Harman and Quentin
Meillassoux.
This analytical move
seeks to displace
the monopoly of human relations
and explanations of agency
and causality, pointing
instead to the, quote unquote,
"vibrancy of matter,"
unquote, in the words of Jane
Bennett, that infuses and
grounds all worldly affairs.
On one hand, such materialism
is hardly new insofar
as it draws on a long tradition
of vitalism and phenomenology
that traces back to Aristotle,
Burke, Spinoza, Henri
Bersonne, and others.
Even the old materialism
of Karl Marx famously
qualified that if indeed men
do make their own history,
they only do so under
the circumstances already
given to them,
transmitted from the past
as a psychophysical weight.
Archaeologists long
anticipated Latour
and directed their
investigations
to the assemblages of humans,
objects, and technologies
that constituted the
civilizations under study.
Artifacts never
simply were congealed
vessels of past human ingenuity,
but the very conditions
of possibility for
social development.
In this sense, my insistence
on the material as well
the semiotic potency of the
past on present politics
will no doubt come off as
preaching to the choir.
But on the other hand, the
new material's displacement
of human subjectivity
risks projecting vitality
onto objects whose
own ontologies
we ultimately only know
through human apperception.
In saying, as I'm trying to,
or in suggesting that material
remains effectively translate
effective intensities,
I'm not trying to
attribute a mode of force
to the objects
themselves, but rather
pointing to their
unavoidable centrality
within ultimately human
projects of self-cultivation and
political transformation.
My point is simply that we
cannot reduce such objects
to discursive props.
We need to pay attention
to the phenomenology
of political action that
emerges through deeply
embodied interactions
with the material world.
Again, no real surprise to
anyone here, but my hope today
is to provide some historical
and ethnographic grounding
to this basic point by exploring
the particular metadiscursive--
but not necessarily
prediscursive--
practices through which North
Africans and Amazigh or Berber
activists in particular come
to literally incorporate
the material remains
among which they
live into their
efforts of self-making.
Some, though certainly not
all, of these practices,
might qualify as
quasi-archaeological,
and in that sense may be of
some interest to discussions
we're going to have
over this weekend.
If nothing else, I do
have some pretty pictures.
Here's one.
This is the area
in which I work,
which I'll get to
later in the talk.
Gives you something to look at.
As Diana Davis and
Patricia [? Lorcin, ?]
among others, have
shown, imperial visions
of North Africa had
difficulty making out
the North African present
from behind the apparent past.
This was as much true for
Arab sociogeographers like Ibn
Khaldun and later
Leo Africanus as
for French colonial ethnologists
from Louis [INAUDIBLE]
to Robert Montagne,
even all the way
to Pierre Bourdieu, all of
whom, to one extent or another,
relied on a genealogical
method for tracing
how the sociopolitical
configurations they encountered
emerged from prior forms,
leading to various speculations
on the spatiotemporal origins
of particular ethnolinguistic
groups.
Under French rule,
archaeological surveys
accompanied broader
sociological inquiries,
mapping a classical past
onto an ethnographic present.
Colonial ideologues in part
justified their authority
in the region as a
rehabilitation of the Roman
imperium, outlining a new
Mare Nostrum, "Our Sea," that
would similarly
reincorporate Barbary
into the fold of civilization
after centuries of dilapidation
and decadence, supposedly under
the Vandals, Arabs, and Turks.
Berber-speaking
groups were especially
singled out as living relics
of prior civilizational spurts.
With their village assemblies
likened to Roman Republican
fora, various Judeo-Christian
practices and signs
like the tattoos that
some Berber women have
on their foreheads or their
chins in the forms of crosses,
seen as peeking through
superficial Islamic tradition.
And even the red
hair and green eyes
of some coastal
Kabyles in Algeria
explained as the vestiges
of Viking settlements.
That Berber distinctiveness
was attributed
to such pre-Islamic
survival [INAUDIBLE]
explains in part both the
partial colonial administrative
separation of Berbers
from Arabs in the region,
as well as the stop/start
treatment of Berbers as vectors
for assimilation
through differential
educational policies and
preferential recruitment
into the military
and civil service.
The [NON-ENGLISH], the resident
general protector in Morocco,
in particular, as Gwendolyn
Wright and others have argued,
brought together these parallel
imperatives of conservation
and development in his plans
for protector of Morocco.
His ethic of [FRENCH], a
term that we were talking
about over dinner
last night, addressed
both the undertapped
natural resources
and agricultural productivity
of the Moroccan soil,
as well as the archaeological
and architectural patrimony
deserving of preservation
for the benefit of humanity.
The colonial era divide of a
[FRENCH], a useful Morocco,
from a [FRENCH], a
useless Morocco--
these are the colonial-era
categories-- incorporated
both of these criteria with
much of the Moroccan south
falling into the latter
category, into the [FRENCH].
Even when the former [FRENCH],
the land of dissidents,
which is kind of co-terminus
with this notion of useless
Morocco, was finally
pacified-- again,
in the French
colonial terminology--
in the early 1930s, the 20
years after the establishment
of the protectorate, this
was primarily understood
as a tactical move to
eliminate the instability
and protect trade routes in
that part of Morocco that was
useful, accorded to be useful.
And these mostly Berber-speaking
areas on the periphery
received little to no investment
in terms of infrastructure
or industrial development.
The overall result was
a de facto partition
of North Africa, blurred
though it may have been,
into ethno-spatial zones marked
by different historicities.
One that was understood
to be future-oriented,
the others that was understood
to be more or less forever
grounded in its past.
Anticolonial
nationalists successfully
countered these
colonial divisions.
While, as James
McDougal has shown,
Salafi ideologues
like Ahmed al-Adani
or Mohammed [INAUDIBLE] of
Algeria, like Al al-Afasy
or Mukhtar al-Susi in
Morocco certainly upheld
their own historical
models of salvation
through spiritual
renewal and elaborated
Khaldunian genealogies to
connect North African peoples
back to Middle
Eastern migrations,
they nonetheless insisted
on the fundamental unity
of the national community
under the mantle
of a forward-looking
Islamic civilization.
They decried Berber identity
as a colonial invention
and marginalized those
Berber intellectuals
who had risen through the
French separate but equal
educational system.
Beginning in the 1960s, the
newly independent states
of Algeria and Morocco
embarked on major projects
of infrastructural,
agricultural,
and industrial development, such
as the construction of dams,
generators, refineries, ports,
agro-industrial factories,
originally with public funds
and later in partnership
with private
multinational firms.
Such projects, alongside an
ever-growing military force,
constituted spectacular
performances
of national strength,
much as they did in Egypt,
in Libya and Tunisia and
other post-colonial states
across the region.
While such development
was clearly uneven,
privileging certain regions
and marginalizing others whose
loyalty to the central
state, to the [NON-ENGLISH]
or to the [FRENCH], to
the FLN, was questioned,
it nonetheless fostered what
sociologists would come to call
a rural exodus of
labor migration,
a mobility that unified the
country through the medium
of migrants and remittances,
even as it eroded the material
bases for independent
rural social reproduction.
In Morocco, such
peripheral areas
retained marginal
folkloric utility
as potential tourist
destinations.
But even so, the state's
primary cultural investment
remained centered on places
like Fez, Rabat, Marrakesh,
Essaouira, and
other coastal towns.
Rather than uphold the
survival of a past worthy
of preservation, the
Berber-speaking periphery
was suspended in an
indeterminate state
of to be developed,
with the anticipation
of an imminent if momentarily
deferred modernity.
The first generation of
what we might call today
Berber or Amazigh activists
arose in the late 1960s
with such expectations
of soon becoming modern.
Born and raised in the
neglected periphery,
they had prospered in
the expanding state
educational system and
migrated to Algiers, Rabat,
and, in some cases, to
Paris, either to continue
their university training or to
embark on professional careers.
Of course, the vast
majority of their age-mates
wanted nothing whatsoever
to do with these Berbers
that they had left behind,
having internalized
the association of Berberness
with rural backwardness,
as [? anthropologist ?]
Ernest Gellner famously noted
in his 1972 explanation for why
no Berber nationalism as such
would ever arise.
I think he's wrong about
this, but at the time,
he might have been right.
Their desire was
for assimilation.
And they [? lived their ?]
migration as semi-permanent,
investing only in
their native villages
to build retirement homes in
urban architectural styles
and materials.
I'll show some
pictures of that later.
The nascent generation
of Berber activists
took a slightly different if
equally modernist approach.
They disavowed any
association with primitivity
by rejecting the
label "Berber"--
a term that, after all,
shares the same etymology
with "barbarian"-- and instead
adopted the ethonym Amazigh,
or Imazizighen in the plural,
which means "free man,"
free at least
historically in the sense
that it differentiated those
with full political rights
from those others,
like blacks or Jews,
without autonomy
and without rights.
These activists worked to
transform [? spurt-spoken ?]
Berber dialects into a
single standardized language,
Tamazight, either to be written
in modern Latin or Arabic
characters or endowed with its
own alphabet, called Tifinaugh,
itself revitalized and much
modified from [INAUDIBLE]
script that to a certain extent
was still in use by certain
Tuareg folk.
In hopes of establishing
a literary, musical canon
as Jay Goodman
has explored, they
published written
updated versions
of oral folktales, sometimes
via Western genres of poetry
or the novel and some other
such tales to modern [INAUDIBLE]
or classical or folk-rock
instrumentation.
They published periodicals--
newspapers, magazines,
et cetera-- destined for an
imagined community of Amazigh
readers who could follow
events in the simultaneous
and co-inhabited space-time
with what they understood to be
an Amazigh world of
[NON-ENGLISH] or [NON-ENGLISH],
to use a neologism.
They projected, in other words,
a future-oriented Amazigh
nation on equal footing with
French and/or Arab modernity.
Most of these efforts by
urbanized diaspora Berbers
continue to this day.
By the 1970s and 1980s,
through the medium
of politicized North
African universities,
Amazigh activism had conjoined
with a Marxian critique
of state imperialism,
which emerges
in oppositional movement
against so-called Arabo-Islamic
hegemony.
While their ostensible focus
on culture spared most Amazigh
activists the fate of many
Marxists and Islamists
at the time who became victims
of [? state-sanctioned ?]
torture and extrajudicial
executions, nonetheless,
periodic uprisings occurred
in Kabylia in 1980, in 1988,
in 1998, in 2001, and
on smaller scales across
the Moroccan-speaking Berber
periphery which further
bolstered the Amazigh movements'
increasingly shrill demands
for language recognition as
part of their Amazigh activists
in the most recent round of
violent protests in 2011.
Their shrill demands of
language recognition,
civil rights, within
what they hoped
to be a multi-cultural Morocco.
In the last 20 years, the
Algerian and Moroccan states
have responded by officially
inscribing Berberness
into their nation's identity,
recognizing Tamazight
as a national and, in
the case of Morocco
in the wake of these protests,
a official language of the state
and establishing well-funded
public institutions to oversee
its introduction into
the educational system,
the audiovisual media, and
the national festival circuit.
And institutions such as
the Moroccan Royal Institute
for Amazigh Culture, or IRCAM,
which is housed, as you see,
in a hyper-modern building
in the ritzy Hay Riad
neighborhood in Rabat,
but built into it
a certain number
of motifs that are
supposed to signal Berberness.
A number of radical
Amazigh activists in return
have rejected these
top-down concessions
as little more than efforts
to silence Amazigh opponents
with employment, co-opt them
into the Moroccan and Algerian
state's global wars on
terror, and reduce Berber
culture to mere
folklore, [? always ?]
already relegated to
a museum in the past.
Criticizing the
state for refusing
to address real issues
of material inequality,
they demand a fundamental
reorganization
of Algeria and Morocco
into federal states,
with Berber-speaking
regions granted
fiscal and
administrative autonomy,
if not self-determination.
They aspire, in other words,
for the same modern stateliness
for which their nationalist
forbears have previously
struggled.
In this sense, North African
states and Amazigh activists
appear locked in a battle
of modern one-upsmanship.
However, today what
interests me is less
this quite serious political
game which I've just described,
played by urban and
diasporic Amazigh activists,
than the local terrains in
and through which activists
in training become sensitized to
Berber culture, or [INAUDIBLE],
in the first place as something
worth risking their lives for,
as worth risking
prison sentences for.
This is, after all, a
conference on archaeology,
not on political science
or social movements.
So what I want to
focus on to today
is the southeastern
Moroccan oases
in and around the
provincial town of Goulmima,
again back to here, where
I've been conducting
my ethnographic field
research on and off
for the last 10-plus years.
Mostly because I know
this area most intimately,
not necessarily because it's
inherently exceptional in terms
of either its
archaeological inventory
or the embodied relations
that inhabitants forge
with such an inventory.
No doubt those of you working in
other sites across North Africa
will recognize many of the
attitudes and practices
I'm going to describe.
And indeed, some of
you may find what
I have to say rather
unremarkable, even
indeed banal.
But what I want to suggest in
good anthropological fashion
is that sometimes even the most
banal of cultural behaviors
are worth our
attention for what they
reveal about the unsaid
of cultural life.
And in this case,
what is sometimes left
unsaid but deeply
and viscerally felt
is that of which the
political was made.
For not all Berber university
students of the 1970s and '80s
which I've just described
remained in the urban centers.
But quite a few returned
to their home regions,
generally as school teachers
of any number of subjects,
from the natural sciences to
physical education to French
and even to Arabic literature.
These mostly young men-- and
they were mostly young men.
There are a number of
women who became active
in the Berber movement both
locally and nationally,
of course.
But the majority of
them were young men.
And the young men took
the kind of spokesperson--
they became spokespeople
for the movement.
Tended to be sons of notable
settled pasturalists,
they had originally
left home happy to flee
the strictures of kinship
and small-scale sociology.
When they left home,
they had dreamt
of the excitement of the
university metropolises
with their temporality
of perpetual [INAUDIBLE]
[? becoming ?] rather than
the seeming endless repetition
of stagnant hierarchies
of oasis life.
At school, they discovered
the intricacies and intimacies
of campus life,
the micropolitics
of tactics and ideology
when they joined
political movements,
but more importantly,
a cadre of other Berber speakers
from very different regions
who yet shared a similar
sense of estrangement.
When they returned to
Goulmima after graduation,
they did so not just
as Berber speakers,
but with a growing
self-awareness as Berbers,
as Amazigh, with a
nascent sensibility
to the grounding of
their own particularity.
They returned to discover a
cultural and mature landscape
that no longer could
be taken for granted,
but was in the process
of disintegrating
before their eyes.
In response, they began a
salvage anthropological project
of collecting and documenting
the region's patrimony.
Recognizing the older poets and
oral historians, [NON-ENGLISH],
of the surrounding
countryside as a dying breed,
they forged relationships with
them and made a life's work
of recording and
transcribing their memories.
In other words, a
younger generation
that basically had gone, trying
to get away from their elders,
comes back to the
region and tries
to forge these connections
through these ties.
Eventually these young
men established a cultural
association, [NON-ENGLISH],
which means "freedom,"
to coordinate their individual
efforts and transmit
to the next generation the
awareness of the endangerment
to Berber culture and
responsibility for conserving
it.
The association would become
a space for young residents
to gather to learn
to write in Tifinagh
or to play a traditional
air on a banjo or hitar,
or simply to get some
after-school tutoring
from the older members.
It also became a
space for politics,
for petitioning the municipal
pasha for local development,
for redacting communiques in
support of Amazigh politics
elsewhere across the region.
In 1994, seven of the leading
members of the association
were arrested in
nearby Errachidia
for marching in a May Day
parade with a banner written
in Tifinagh calling for the
recognition of Tamazight.
Their lengthy
detention and trial
solicited international
outrage, prompting King Hassan
II to promise for the first
time a set of liberalizing
cultural reforms that
ultimately would result
in his son, Mohammed VI's,
establishment of the IRCAM
and more recent
constitutional revisions.
In other words, they
played a central role,
these local activists, in
what would eventually become
pretty national politics.
It was these same
activists that would later
become the founding members
of the Amazigh World
Congress, which continues to
be the primary international
spokesbody for Berber-speakers
around the globe.
But such national and
transnational political
engagement did not arise
fully formed from their sudden
coming into consciousness
as university students.
It required the
sustained cultivation
of sensory attention to
a material environment.
So a set of forms
and objects that
came to be gradually
recognized as relics and ruins
in need of preservation
rather than indistinct rubble
cluttering the landscape.
And it required that the
attitudes of such remains
shift from a flat
or blase affect
to an emotional intensity
of melancholy and outrage,
one that would spur them
to political action.
Now for generations,
young men and women
had walked the
territory, the Tamazight,
surrounding the modern town of
Goulmima, trekking up the hills
or to local springs to make
tea from gathered herbs
or eat a simple meal,
seeking peace or inspiration
in these natural landscapes.
The crumbling [NON-ENGLISH]
wall-- [NON-ENGLISH],
which comes from
the word Portuguese,
and is used here to just
basically mean anything really,
really old.
There's a long history to that.
I can get into that
if you're interested.
Or the [NON-ENGLISH], or
the various [INAUDIBLE]--
[NON-ENGLISH], which
means "house of the Roman
or Christian or white person"
or some person of the past.
But from the root to mean Roman.
Or the various grave
markers they'd passed along
the way had perhaps in
the past been curiosities,
vestiges of previous
inhabitants,
but never destinations
in and of themselves.
The new generations made them
veritable sites of pilgrimage,
and in so doing sacralized
the landscape as a whole,
including even those faint signs
of the former colonial presence
like a refurbished church,
which many people would
walk by and not even recognize
it as a church anymore,
but which Berber activists came
to recognize it as a church.
Or the barely distinct
bomb crater outside
of the local ksour, the
multifamily habitation,
which came from the
violence of pacification.
The great irony,
pacification from violence.
Basically a French bomb
campaign to terrorize
the local inhabitants
would allow
them to come and set up shop.
Faint signs-- faint signs
indeed-- but ones that became
increasingly sacralized,
increasingly understood
as the moral geography.
Much of my own
fieldwork in the oases
consisted in following
local activists
and cultural producers
on these wanderings,
gratefully letting
them regale me
with the various myths,
memories, histories,
genealogies, and etymologies
that the various sites evoke.
More than simple recreation
or individual quests,
these excursions map
out a moral geography
much akin to what
[? Keith Baswell ?] has
described for the Western
Apache in Arizona.
In this sense, it
should not be surprising
that local waterfalls,
arroyos, et cetera,
feature prominently in
videos and music and sung
poetry performed by
local Amazigh artists
and posted on internet
sites like YouTube.
The poems and songs
themselves nostalgically
calling forth past times
of cultural and territorial
integrity.
Indeed, even the most
seemingly barren tracts of land
can be subject to a certain
kind of moral projection
and future-oriented
nostalgia, especially when
threatened with expropriation,
[? as seemingly ?] done.
As I've described
elsewhere, in 2004,
local activists
finally succeeded
in petitioning the state
to rebuild the bridge
over the riverbed with one
that would better withstand
occasional flash floods,
which happen every time it
rains in the mountains.
All the water comes
tumbling down into the area
and it takes out the old bridge
and erodes the landscape,
things like that.
Unfortunately, the new
bridge that was built,
which was indeed much better,
bypassed a local service
station.
And as compensation, the
state exercised eminent domain
over five hectares-- that's
what this picture is--
of collectively owned land on
the other side of the riverbed
from the people who owned
it, which the service station
owner, a non-local
investor, hoped
to develop into a
hotel/restaurant complex
for tourism.
Now even though this
set of land had never
been used for grazing
or agriculture,
at least not in the
recent past, and indeed
the village
[? council ?] had earlier
given up the larger adjacent
area just out of the photo
frame, for the
settlement of nomads,
activists were nonetheless able
to mobilize local residents
to protest the development
on the basis of the land's
future divisibility to build
homes or cultivated fields.
Residents gathered on
the future building site
and staged what they
called a "sit in."
That's the term they used.
Calling on the pasha
to stop giving away
the land of the
widows and orphans.
This says, "Pasha, stop giving
away the land of our widows
and orphans," a moral
tone that fit to a larger
conceptualization that
increasingly equated land with
Amazigh language and identity
through the quasi-homophone
of [? tamazight, ?]
again meaning "land,"
and [NON-ENGLISH], meaning
basically "language, culture."
Seeing the expropriation
of the land,
the literal death of the tribe,
this is a part of the protest.
They marched around.
It says, "Kabylia Goulmima,"
the tribe of Goulmima,
i.e., the local area which was
in the sense going to be dead
if the land was given away.
What made the [INAUDIBLE]
case particularly galling--
and by the way, just so you can
make it more symbolically rich,
[INAUDIBLE] a coffin
also because the land
was literally adjacent
to a cemetery--
so it doubles in that reference.
What made the [INAUDIBLE] case
particularly galling was that
a local activist had only a
year before applied to the state
for a permit to construct a
similar complex in the hopes
of drawing tourists to an area
all too often bypassed in spite
of its architectural patrimony
of ksour [NON-ENGLISH].
This is another protest that was
happening about the same time.
Again, gives you a sense of
the older architecture here.
The ksour [NON-ENGLISH]-- and
this is called a [? ksar ?]
or an [NON-ENGLISH] in Berber.
Basically a collective granary.
That's what it's
often translated as,
but basically the
function is fortified
multifamily habitations.
An entrepreneur in nearby
[INAUDIBLE] had even
transformed the [NON-ENGLISH],
the [NON-ENGLISH],
as they called it, into a
three-star tourist hotel.
This is from their website.
So there was precedent for this.
Now among the 16 ksour, the 16
[NON-ENGLISH] around Goulmima,
several of which date back
to at least the 17th century,
to the time of [INAUDIBLE], long
before the current [INAUDIBLE]
tribe had even come to occupy
the valley, made of adobe,
the ksour required constant
upkeep or they fall
into disrepair and
eventual collapse.
I have a couple pictures
of these old [NON-ENGLISH],
the old ksour that are falling
apart, that are really--
because of a lack of
upkeep, as I'll describe.
I just want to pause a second.
When I showed these pictures a
few weeks ago to a crowd that
included a number of Moroccans
from the area around this,
they cried when they saw this.
They really kind of
burst out in tears
because they saw the place
that very much resembled
the places where indeed their
parents and their grandparents
had grown up in a
state of utter decay.
Just to give you a
sense of the material
affects that are produced
through that kind of experience
of this particular
material dilapidation.
In the 1940s, residents
began to move out
of these ksour to build modern
cement homes, such as these,
in the fields or gardens
owned by their families,
sometimes using immigrant
remittances to build
in modern urban styles.
By the 1990s, again, many
of the ksour stood in ruins,
and those that remained
at least partially intact
were occupied no longer by the
original residents, but often
by new migrants
to the area, often
themselves of former
[INAUDIBLE] black sharecroppers.
So there's also kind
of a racial story
here that I'm not
going to get into,
but which was part of
also the local activists
[? understanding ?] what
was happening to their area.
Now, even the most
ruined ksour did still
house functioning mosques
and wells, albeit sometimes
with rubber buckets
replacing the leather ones.
And visiting activists who
would visit these places
would always remark on the
water's sweetness in contrast
to the piped-in water
in their modern homes
in which they tended to live.
Indeed, that somehow the
water reminded them of home.
This is what water
should taste like, not
like that stuff that's coming
through the pipes in our house.
Indeed, activists who had
formerly craved electricity
and running water of the modern
town began to look upon these
ruins much as they did the
remains of the colonial-era
school, the [NON-ENGLISH],
which many of them had attended,
which [? was probably ?]
shut down about 25 years ago
and quickly fell into
disrepair, with nostalgic sorrow
[? and blinding ?] outrage as
patent signs of governmental
neglect.
They came to see them in much
the same sentiment expressed
by the renowned Moroccan
writer [INAUDIBLE]
in the opening lines of his
retrospective novel, [FRENCH],
written in 1993, shortly
before his death.
Quote, "What can be more
fascinating, more disturbing
than recent ruins which had
been homes when the valley still
lived by the rhythm of the
seasonal labors of men who
didn't neglect even the
smallest tract of land
to ensure their subsistence."
Several activists
returned to take up
residence in the very ksour
their parents had left,
rebuilding the homes in
traditional materials
and architectural
features deemed
more suitable than
the cement cinder
block of the new constructions
to the desert climate.
Indeed, activists were virtually
outraged when in the midst
of the [NON-ENGLISH] protests
a sudden storm caused
the collapse of a dilapidated
house in the [NON-ENGLISH]
ksour where many
of them were from,
killing a young
homeless man, Hashmi,
who had taken refuge in it.
Activists mobilized local
residents in protest,
marching Hashmi's
body through the town
and calling on the
municipality to preserve
what constituted the
region's material patrimony
and its ongoing
source of well-being.
Ultimately the state did
respond with development funds
through the resulting work.
But the resulting work--
namely, what they ended up
doing was refacing
on the interior walls
of the main corridors
and actually putting up
concrete along some
drainage areas,
some drainage gutters
and downspouts--
struck activists
as but half-steps
that violated the
architectural integrity
and authenticity of the ksour.
While they had accepted
electrification of the ksour
and other modifications
of convenience,
they reacted viscerally to the
integration of modern homes
into the original
architecture or, in one case,
the local ksour of [NON-ENGLISH]
on the replacement of one
of the original towers with
a modern urban-style minaret.
This also plays on the
complicated relationship
that Berber activists
in particular
have with religious practice.
For them, this seemed like a
deep violation of patrimony.
Alongside this is another
case of Berbers rebuilding
the entrance to the old
Jewish Quarter, the mellah,
of the [NON-ENGLISH] ksour.
And this was the old entrance.
The new facade-- there's the new
entrance-- old, 2004, new one
in 2008.
The old one of which had
eliminated the traditional
motifs that had given the
ksour, given the [NON-ENGLISH],
its traditional sense of
cultural particularity.
Again, this is the old entrance
to the old Jewish Quarter.
The Jewish Quarter had
its own separate entrance
and was locked separately,
was closed off.
It was part of the ways in
which different populations were
segregated, even in
these rural areas.
Now it might seem odd that
Amazigh activists, all Muslim,
of course, though of
varying degrees of piety,
would come to care about
the material remains
of a former Jewish presence.
Jewish shopkeepers and
clerks had lived in Goulmima
but had all left by the 1960s.
But even those were
mostly transplants
from the middle Atlas.
And those that had previously
lived in the mellah,
in the all-Jewish
quarter, had likely
left by the mid-19th
century, long
before the arrival of even
the French to the region.
But the centuries of
Jewish/Berber coexistence
provided Amazigh activists
with an alternate basis
of affiliation and
historical consciousness
to the state-sanctioned
Arabo-Islamic narrative.
Like in other southern
Moroccan settings,
generations of local women
regarded Jewish remains
as propitious, especially
for attracting spouses.
They'd ritually visit old
Jewish cemeteries-- this one,
[NON-ENGLISH], just the Jewish
cemetery for the mellah,
just on the other
side of the river,
but part of the same
thing-- where they visited
by moonlight, take a bath
and leave behind the clothes
and broken vessels
with which they bathed.
That's an embodied
act of appropriation
of the site [? parts alone. ?]
For a number of years, a
local entrepreneur had even
made some cash excavating--
or digging up, I should say,
not to give it more credit
than it deserves-- digging up
Jewish graves and marketing
their bones to healers
in the Moroccan north who
used the bones-- literally,
again, the material remains
of the past-- in local cures,
especially for impotence.
But others have come to
approach the material past
in less exploitative terms.
Moroccan anthropologist
Omar [? Boome ?]
has charted the growth in
display of Jewish artifacts
in Morocco, in
particular to those
Jewish emigres who periodically
return as tourists.
[INAUDIBLE] has accumulated
a large collection
of local artisanal
work, including
a set of jars inscribed with
Jewish stars which he describes
as talismans, a
collection which he
hopes to expand into a
standalone Jewish museum.
I couldn't find my
photos of these.
I'm sorry about that.
But it's really an incredible
collection he's got.
One Goulmima-based
activist artist
took up residence in an old
home in the mellah, where
he preserved the storage jars,
implements, and documented
fragments he discovered there.
He's also been at the
forefront of efforts
to preserve the two
historical Jewish cemeteries
in the valley, uncovering
tombstone fragments,
photographing them, and getting
visiting anthropologists
like myself to help
translate their inscriptions.
Of course, I don't read
enough Hebrew, especially,
the epigraphic Hebrew on these
tombstones, to be of much help,
so I had to consult with a
Moroccan expert who then was
able to help me translate it.
I don't know why they
thought-- it's interesting,
just the assumptions of
you're a visiting American,
you're probably Jewish,
you can figure this out.
[? No, I've got to ?]
go talk to Moroccans.
There are people
that in effect-- just
to say that people who are very
interested in the Jewish past.
He even incorporates Jewish
motifs into his own paintings.
This is his door to
his home in the mellah,
allying them with
ancient Roman ones
sometimes, including of
course the motif of Jugurtha.
I hope that comes
out on the slide.
Straight from the
old coinage, as I'm
sure you're familiar with.
Jugurtha, the
recalcitrant Numidian king
described by Sallust,
who has become,
as [INAUDIBLE] and
others have argued,
the Ur ancestor for
Amazigh resistance.
He was described as this
is our great ancestor,
the strong Berber.
Today's Amazigh activists
make pilgrimages to Jugurtha,
or as they say,
[INAUDIBLE], tomb in Rome,
and even take on his name
as their nom de futbol
in local soccer leagues.
I did get to the soccer.
I don't know if
you can read that.
It says [INAUDIBLE].
It's Jugurtha.
He's Jugurtha when
he plays soccer.
I could go on more about
the local soccer team.
They've taken on the jerseys.
They call themselves
the [INAUDIBLE],
which is the name of the big
Berber soccer team in Kabylia.
Won the African Cup multiple
times, et cetera, et cetera.
They've taken on the same
name-- [NON-ENGLISH].
Here it means [NON-ENGLISH],
literally the local habitation,
and they use the same kind of
motifs and there's big Amazigh
symbols on the front
side of the uniforms.
In all these varying ways,
ways that I would say
are materialized ways,
Amazigh activists
have come to recognize their
socio-spatial environments
as haunted by layers of past
residents still readable
in the material rubble that
seems to clutter the modern
[INAUDIBLE] aspirations of the
state and many of its subjects.
Conservation thus emerges
not as conservatism but as
an agentive transformation
of the decaying landscape,
a counter to the willful neglect
of the state, a resistance
to the homogenizing
trajectories, predetermined,
they see, by modern
building materials--
the concrete, the rebar, et
cetera-- and the limited forms
they tend to produce.
In protecting Tamazight,
again, the material landscape,
this activism projects
Tamazight, the Berber language
and culture, into
a future definite.
But conservation is
simultaneously also
an appropriation
of the past into
new socio-semiotic and material
landscapes, not preservation
for the sake of
the past as past.
The [? protectorate ?] school
doesn't provoke nostalgia
for the colonial but for
a post-colonial promise
still to be realized.
The mellah, the Jewish Quarter
and the shards of Jewishness
recall earlier models
of social solidarity
before the contemporary polemics
around the Israeli/Palestine
conflict, and thus call
forth alternate visions
of a cosmopolitan future.
The ksour mosque's well
water tastes sweet even
for the inveterate secular
activists searching
for a sense of home in the
maelstrom of globalization.
In walking the
sedimentical landscape,
contemplating its
layered remains,
and imbibing its many
fruits, activists
cultivate an
aesthetic appreciation
and an ethical
sensibility that impels
them to try to politically
transform the material
conditions under which they
live as cultured and yet
at the same time modern Berbers.
Their projects and politics
are decidedly archaeological,
even if what they
excavate and collect
may not necessarily make its
way into many American museums.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
Man, did we pick the right
person to keynote this or not?
Just when you think,
as an archaeologist,
all the permutations
of what could be,
what these things,
this materiality
of what we have to think,
whoa, how complicated it can be
and then we hear just how
complicated it can be.
So questions.
He goes in lots of
different directions.
Yeah, questions.
Thank you.
This was really insightful
and I appreciated
the way in which you've
done the work of bridging
the material, the
archaeological,
with the anthropological.
So my question is really
about who are these activists.
How representative are they of
Berber society more generally?
Are any of them coming back
to these villages, these towns
as professionals in
cultural heritage?
They're coming
back as architects,
or as archaeologists or
as those would be engaged
in the [NON-ENGLISH],
in the restoration.
And then if they
are a special case,
what role are they playing
in evangelizing this
amongst the locals when they've
come back from university
studies in Rabat or Casablanca?
Good question.
Things I went through
very quickly in the talk.
Look, there is certainly
an ambivalent relationship
between the very
politicized activists, some
of these guys that
I was talking about,
especially specifically
this region.
There is a small
particularity of this region
for why they may be a little
bit more hyper-politicized
than elsewhere.
There's a little bit
of tension between them
and some of the local residents.
A number of local residents.
They're doing, in
many cases, what are
seen by the locals as politics.
And politics has a bad name.
Politics means people
trying to get ahead,
people trying to make
a name for themselves.
People trying to
get a connection
and get their way up to Rabat.
Politics means bringing
undue state attention
into local affairs
when they'd rather
keep the state
where the state is,
meaning in Rabat and elsewhere.
Like keep the pasha in
his little pasha house
and we'll move forward.
So it actually
presents a challenge
for many of the
activists, some of whom,
indeed-- a couple of
them-- do play politics.
And probably there's a
reason why the local folk
in many cases are suspect.
But a lot of them really
have a deep integrity.
They do come back
and they are trying
to do-- like again they're, the
ones who are putting together,
doing this kind
of heritage stuff,
not just for outsiders,
but for local folk.
They are overseeing and
trying to oversee some
of these restorement projects.
And if the state
doesn't do it, they're
doing it themselves
in some cases,
investing a lot of
their resources.
And then so there's
a kind of integrity,
but they are aware
of this suspicion.
And so they get engaged,
sometimes against their will,
into local projects that
sometimes have only marginally
at least in their
original concept
to do with Berber culture.
So the one protest I was talking
about, the one in [INAUDIBLE],
the piece of land.
I think under
normal circumstances
I don't think Berber activists
wouldn't necessarily see that
per se as part of their cause.
But they came to, and
they came to in part
because they saw
ways in which this
mattered to these local folk.
Because local folk like we're
thinking about this land
is like, well, this is
our land and now it's
going to go to outsiders,
but this is our land.
This is our land.
And there was of course a
whole back politics to that,
but if something
was deeply material,
it was deeply about resources,
deeply about agriculture,
it's deeply about a future
ability [? and home. ?]
And so they got involved
with that in part
because they wanted to
show their own utility,
that they weren't
just there speaking
in this high kind of
urbanized mobile language
of cultural rights.
Now, cultural rights actually
meant something material.
It meant improving
people's lives,
and that's why they were there.
And so in part it's this
kind of getting engaged.
And there are all sorts
of those actions going
on throughout the 2000s,
even today, which are all
about protecting just basically
a plot of agricultural land.
A little plot of agricultural
land could become big politics.
So between that and
the kind of evangelism,
if we can call it
that, I think sometimes
that is evangelism that
happens through these cultural
associations, especially for the
younger generation on their way
to college.
I asked one of the former
presidents of that association.
I mentioned [INAUDIBLE].
I said, what's your membership?
And he's like, it depends
what you mean by membership.
I said, what do you mean?
Why do you ask that?
He said, well, it turns out that
there are all these members.
And a lot of times they're
like this younger generation
that they may not get
involved, they may not
do a lot on a daily basis,
but they want the affiliation.
The affiliation matters.
It's kind of political capital
when they go to the university.
And so in a sense there
is almost this traffic,
you could say, in just having
a card from the association.
But indeed I think
for the activists
that's fine, because
even if it's just a card,
it may mean that those
people do come to an event
sometime down the road.
It may mean that they do defend
the actions of the association.
It may mean something else.
So there's a way
in which there's
a lot of different vectors.
Are they representative?
In some sense, of course.
There is a particular
class of educated folk.
It's not everybody.
It tends to be young men, of
a certain kind of background.
It tends to be young men
who are white Berbers.
They are not black Berbers, and
there's a whole racial story
there as well.
But there are ways in they
do interface somewhat well
with the local [INAUDIBLE].
Do you want to
pick your targets?
You talk about young men.
Are there any women
involved at all?
Yeah.
It's just something
I just really
glossed over really quickly.
This is, of course,
the traditional irony
that happens in lots
of social movements,
and especially ones
like the Berber movement
where women become really
iconic of some sort of heritage.
They're the ones who are
supposed to hold the mantle.
They're the ones
who are supposed
to hold the traditions.
And you have this
kind of bifurcation
of the home as the
source of tradition
and the outside kind of urban,
the street, the politics.
And so the men are
speaking on the street,
but they're always kind of
gesturing back to what women do
and women's wear
and all this stuff.
So in that sense women
have a complicated role,
because they always have to
play the conservative bearers
of tradition.
But in many cases,
and especially
in the Berber activism
and especially in
places like North Africa.
And particularly
among certain who
tend to be university
educated, a lot of women
get deeply involved.
They'll go march
on the street, they
put their lives on the
line, they become spokesmen.
It's the same in the February
20 movement in Morocco.
In general they become sometimes
international spokespeople
where their rights
quell women are also
kind of part of their rights
called Berbers as well.
So there is kind
of way in which,
at least for a certain
number of activists,
and indeed a certain
number of women activists,
part of the discourse
is that we need
to support Berber culture
because Berber culture has
a more open and liberal
gender relations.
So marginal but still
involved in some ways
and sometimes involved just as
objects rather than subjects.
And sometimes it's
subjects who then
speak this double language.
Given that Morocco is such a
traditional monarchy rather
than a constitutional
monarchy with a king who
claims direct descendance
from Mohammed.
Are your Berbers
flirting with secularism?
Yeah.
And often they are
accused as such.
Sometimes they're accused
even in the work they're
doing where they kind of
speak to a former Judeo-Berber
cohabitation gets
them accused of being
bad Muslims or apostates or
Zionists and things like that.
So that accusation is
leveled, sometimes a lot.
And people, and
some activists are
way out there are playing
with that, of course.
They like being labeled as such.
I'm extreme.
Like one dude I
know, very outspoken,
went as far as to get-- he
fell in love with somebody
who's working in
Rabat who's Polish.
And they ended up
getting married.
And he got married in
Poland in a church.
And then he had those pictures
sent to the Moroccan newspapers
to out him as an apostate.
So there's a way
in which that can
be played with by
people who want to get
their names in the press.
But let's remember that the way
in which the Moroccan monarchy
has always kind of presented
itself and always kind of
tied itself into the
Berber tradition.
The Moroccan kings-- the
current king is half Berber.
His mother is Berber, and
that's because traditionally,
at least the Alawi
kings had always
married into the Berber line.
And that was part
of the way and was
part of this notion
of incorporation
and the unity of the nation.
Eventually it got [INAUDIBLE]
but before that it was also
about a very bodied way in
which you build yourself
into the [INAUDIBLE] traditions
and [INAUDIBLE] tribes
and have build it
what are ultimately
patient-client relations.
So the fact that the
recent king has almost
seemingly incorporated
Berberness
into the revision
of the constitution
to be part of the
Moroccan nation,
he's just following
the precedent that
was done through other means.
It's now dawned and he's
kind of modern documentary,
constitutional ways.
So to anthropologists, yeah,
you guys ask me a question,
and I say it's complex.
And I speak for a little
bit about how it's complex
and then I never answer
your question sometimes.
This may get a similar
complex response,
but it kind of builds
on Ian's first question.
I think based on fact that this
is largely a youth movement,
and you can see the tensions
between the youth and the state
and municipality, but
are you also experiencing
tensions between generations?
Particularly older
generations that
would have had particular ideas
about post-colonial futures
that manifested themselves
very differently
than what the youth
is experiencing?
And particularly
how they identify
with the past and
the ruins that they
are experiencing varying ways?
That's a great question.
Here I was afraid
you guys were going
to call upon me to
give you some really
deep archaeological
reading of these things
and ask me questions that are
completely in my wheel house.
[INAUDIBLE]
You ask me questions that I
actually think a lot about.
Yes.
Yes.
There's your answer.
Yes.
There are tensions
between generations,
and they do have to do with
certain ways of projecting
what it means to be
Berber into the future.
The language of the nation that
the previous generation really
had is no longer
something that's
really interesting to
the younger generation.
What they're saying is,
what does it mean for me?
What does it mean
in terms of jobs?
What does it mean in terms of--
and I think beyond the nation.
And for some, I think
it is important.
The February 20 movement
was an all-Moroccan movement
and the whole language was
solely about Moroccan unity.
I am Berber and that's why
I'm going out on the street
on the 20th of February.
I am for this and I
want to you to do X,
and that's why I'm
going out on the street.
And it was all I am Moroccan.
But it's not just, it's
certainly not about discourse.
It's certainly not
just about language,
and it's certainly not
about whatever else.
It's about a certain kind of--
it's about a different kind
of cosmopolitanism.
It's a different kind
of post-colonial,
a post-colonial that is
de-anchored from the nation.
When the older generation-- it's
different generations of youth.
As an activist, I can
say, look, youth activist
well, the youth activists of the
'60s are now quite old today.
Even youth activists as babies
are now my age and above.
I tend to be, of course, as
one does when one goes silver,
one tends to hang out
with one's generation.
So one of the guys a
little bit older than me
who was very important
in the local movement,
I remember doing the
February 20 movement.
And he wrote me a note.
And he said, well,
you know, there's
a lot of stuff going on here.
The youth now go
out on the streets.
They can go out on the
streets for anything.
They're out on the
streets all the time.
It used to be you
had to have a cause.
Now for anything
they're on the street.
And I think on the
one hand it was
kind of almost a nostalgia
for the heavy-handed state.
The state now
[INAUDIBLE] more or less
says, OK, protest,
protest away [INAUDIBLE].
Of course before
it was like he was
one of those guys who
when he went on the street
with a sign [INAUDIBLE] he
got arrested and was in jail.
Now nobody's--
it's not for that.
They're getting arrested
because-- it takes a little bit
more.
And from his point of
view, his generation,
it's like he basically said.
It's our time to
just step out and let
the younger generation go.
Not everybody feels that.
There's some of the older
generation still holding
forth, and trying to
contain the movement.
And they're very well
respected by the youth,
but the youth have their own
icons and their own needs
and their own visions.
A lot of the youth
looked at Bilia
and they say, hey, those guys,
they took over the state.
They took over the thing.
Why can't we do the same thing?
[INAUDIBLE] this that are not
particular to the landscape,
to this particular [INAUDIBLE].
[INAUDIBLE], for
example, [INAUDIBLE]
where I grew up in
eastern Pennsylvania which
was very heavily developed
through the 1950s.
And one of the things that
happened was once it was
developed it reached a
point where, for example,
the more recent generation
looked at the landscape
and said, we want to recover
this lost landscape, the farms,
the fields/ and they did many
of the same sorts of things.
They created a sort of
sacred landscape of the past.
And they began to infuse it with
meanings that were, let's say,
pre-scientific or perhaps there
was a folkloric aspect to it.
And one way you seem
to be describing
is a generalized
phenomenon that is not
particular to a post-colonial
reality or particularly
a Berber situation,
but one which
occurs in modernity with sort
of the lost past, and in a way
has a very positive
effect in generating
perhaps people
within our world--
that is, archaeologists,
historians, who look at this
to be attracted to it.
I've seen this in France
a lot in local landscape
where the locals are
very passionate about it.
And it's folkloric,
it's mysterious,
it has a power that
in a way it attracts,
let's say, a lot
of archaeologists
into these landscapes, and
they value these people a lot.
So is it in a way
what you're describing
a larger global
phenomenon of modernity,
is it not on some levels?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I hope it was.
Otherwise, we would just
be hearing [INAUDIBLE]
about the Berbers.
I think there are a
couple things that
make it slightly specific.
And then again you
can find, if one
were to study this in southern
France, you can find it
and you have to kind of trace
out the local cultural ways.
It is also very specific
to eastern Pennsylvania.
A couple of things that I think
really play a major role here.
One is kind of an
Islamic understanding
of the pre-Islamic
past as [INAUDIBLE],
as ignorant, as that
which we need to get past,
as that which is in the past.
So that ramps up a certain
kind of-- it ramps up
the effects of any
kind of finding
a new sacrality
in the landscape,
and a sacrality which is not an
Islamic sacrality, [INAUDIBLE]
that in fact contemporary
representations of Islam
may find to be foreign.
So that changes, I think way
local conversation happens.
It ramps up the stakes.
And it also makes in some
cases that generation
of people who are doing
some of this stuff
seem really odd
and maybe apostate.
And then there's a second thing.
I think the colonial
situation really matters.
I think the colonial
system does matter,
partly because just
as I try to describe
the post-colonial state
really did everything
it could to differentiate
itself, even as in some ways,
like it inherited
the same mechanisms
and the same institutions
of the colonial system.
This forward-looking state
developmentalist thing,
which I'm sure you could
find some modernist attitudes
in other situations,
certainly eastern Pennsylvania
and southern France.
You're pretty remote in
southern France [INAUDIBLE].
But the fact that now not
only is there among, again,
these generations that
started in the '60s and '70s
and '80s, which indeed,
for starting off
on deeply modernist issues,
too, not only did they not
buy into or think that if
what's going to be our future
is one of developmentalism, it
can't be a break with the past.
It has to kind of find a
continuity of that past.
But it also then
returns to again
those colonial-era
establishments
themselves, like the church, the
old school, this bomb crater,
and endowed them with meaning.
And that's really different.
That borders on a kind of
colonial nostalgia which
isn't a nostalgia
again for the colonial
as much as it's a
nostalgia for the colonial
and moving beyond the colonial
used to mean but [INAUDIBLE].
So I think there are a couple
of ways to describe it.
I think our speaker has
earned his wine and cheese.
And I also hope you
appreciate that we've
got a demonstration outside.
That was just for you.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Let's do some fieldwork.
[INAUDIBLE] about the sports
team, let's put it that way.
You are all, please, invited
to come to the reception.
And tomorrow we get
back together at 9:00 AM
and we're clearly going to
have a lot to talk about.
But for the moment
let's thank our speaker.
[APPLAUSE]
