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Realms of Amazigh Memory: Place-Making and Past-Making on the Moroccan Frontier
Abstract
This paper addresses the politics of Amazigh social memory at different scales of activist engagement, from the southeastern oases of Morocco to transnational to diasporic struggles for minority rights. I query how normative nonchalance about the pre-national (and pre-Islamic) Berber material past comes to be arrested and interrupted, how historical ruins come to be recognized, and indeed made, from the aggregate rubble. Drawing on my research with Amazigh activists in the Ghéris oasis valley, I try to fathom how a particular ethical-aesthetic sensitivity to the material past is cultivated through sustained effort and training, to 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 affective intensities, producing complex emotions that combine melancholy, outrage, and an incitement to political action. I thus argue that current Amazigh heritage politics and conservation efforts as they operate at national and transnational scales are not the end result of a pre-formed ethno-political ideology but the material and embodied means through which such cultural awareness and politics comes into being.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Maghreb
Sub Area
Ethnic Groups