The Political Ecology of a Moroccan Oasis: Ethnicities, Community Making, and Agrarian Change

Summary Statement of Manuscript accepted for publication by University Press of America.

NSF - SBE - BCS - Cultural Anthropology
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

In this project, I am concerned with understanding how, when, and under what circumstances agricultural intensification occurs because this has a direct effect on economic development as well as agrarian change.  I examined the relationship between ethnicity and agricultural production at the household level, and the weight of recent ethnic transformations in restructuring patterns of land access and social mobility within the ethnically stratified communities of the Ziz Valley, Morocco. Surrounded by Saharan desert, the valley is a 250-km long expanse watered by the Ziz River , and houses a dense, rapidly growing, and ethnically diverse population of Arabs, Berbers, and Haratine (Blacks).

          Upon the analysis of the Ziz data, I reached three major findings. First, although the prevailing models of agricultural intensification explain some aspects of land productivity, these changes can not be examined strictly as structural or ecological causes and must be understood as historically specific developments tied to the ethnic distribution and control of resources. The analysis of who makes land more productive revealed that different ethnic groups get different yields per area cultivated.  Despite the unexpected finding that Berbers actually get more out of the same amount of land than Haratine and Arabs, and the fact that the Haratine are not the most productive farmers as hypothesized in the research design of my project, this case study underscores the urge to reformulate the theory behind agricultural intensification to incorporate the key variable of ethnicity and its role in making land productive in the analysis of agricultural change.  Thus, contrary to current theories which examine social and economic change in terms of agricultural productivity and crop complexes, my findings demonstrate that the same agrarian regimes in the ethnically heterogeneous Ziz Valley differ markedly in production and intensity between ethnic groups, and provide household-level evidence that ethnicity is a key, albeit a heretofore ignored, variable in the processes of economic and social development.

          Second, the academic study of ethnicity has dwelt too much on defining what ethnicity is, erecting its boundaries, and outlining its emergence as essential elements in the structuring of social organization between and among groups.  In the Ziz Valley , however, with the infusion of remittances from abroad the Haratine have made ethnicity a political and economic instrument through which a Haratine corporate group has emerged to resist the old ethnic mode of production and domination.  The combination of foreign cash turned into land acquisition has provided the Haratine with a solid political block in the community, allowed them participation in the politics of the village and the entire valley, and equipped them with an ethnic consciousness capable of refurbishing the old Berber and Arab stocks of traditions.

          Third, ethnic change in the valley, and for that matter throughout the oasis social world of Southern Morocco, could not have risen from within the communities social structures, and the only avenue for the subaltern groups to change their lot in terms of political participation and access to land was to migrate outside the valley’s villages, return home with large sums of cash, and chip away at the chains of ethnic stratification.  Migration outside the oppressive communities of the oasis has been salient for the Haratine’s transition from the pre-colonial period of “the people without history” to the people with history.  Armed with remittances the Haratine have been engaged in appropriating the Berber and Arab cultural concept of al-asl or land, and this has provided them with a multiplicity of cultural and power bases to restructure the traditional cultural hegemony of the declining nobility.  

          My research forces an anthropological re-analysis of agricultural development theory and demands the incorporation of ethnic difference that has heretofore been ignored or minimized.  By focusing on ethnicity and resource use, this study demonstrates the inability of the major theories of development to explain the agrarian situation in the multi-ethnic communities that typify much of the developing world.