Berbers living in North Africa outside the major Berberophone regions (sometimes called an internal diaspora) face special challenges in maintaining their Amazigh identity despite spatial dislocation from their region of origin. This paper examines how Berbers in the Numidya Cultural Association in the Arabophone city of Oran use theater as a pedagogical tool to remember and reconstitute their heritage as well as to recover and practice the Berber (Tamazight) language. The paper is centered around a play that the troupe rehearsed and performed extensively in 2008-2009, “Annegaru ad yawi tabburt” (The Last One Out Closes the Door), by the Oran-based Kabyle Berber playwright and director Djamel Benaouf. Drawing on data from weekly rehearsals I attended for six months, I consider how language pedagogy and theater pedagogy were brought together in the rehearsal process. I show how rehearsals came to constitute a site for developing fluency or, in some cases, for recovering the language itself. The text of the play served as a heritage tool in that it challenged the actors to make sense of a range of figures and events in Berber and Algerian history. Yet the text was a less important pedagogical device, I contend, than the rehearsal process, which became a de facto classroom for language training. Drawing on video recordings of a range of rehearsals, I show how learning the lines and the stagecraft of the play simultaneously served as a performance of linguistic proficiency or disfluency. I examine how different languages of instruction were mobilized (Berber, French, Arabic); how the frequent disfluencies were handled; and how interactions unfolded among troupe members themselves around issues of pronunciation and vocabulary. Finally, I consider how Tizi Ouzou, de facto capital of the Kabyle region (some 350 miles away) and one of the troupe's touring destinations, was turned into a kind of disciplinary figure whose very spatial and cultural distance from Oran enabled it to haunt the language practices of even the most fluent troupe members.

The Berber customary law practiced in many Berber communities of North Africa prior to Independence has commonly been seen as disadvantageous to women relative to the norms of the Islamic fiqh used by their neighboring communities, whether Arabophone or Berberophone. Male privileging is particularly apparent in the areas of inheritance and divorce initiated by the wife. Exceptions to this generalization generally concern the Berber communities with matrilineal residues such as the Kel Tamasheq (Touregs). One important exception to this generalization is the institution of tighrad (literally ‘shoulders’ or ‘effort) also called tizla (‘racing about’) or in Arabic, al kad wa al sia`aya. Tighrad is the practice of dividing marital wealth--whether in the form of domestic expansion, agricultural bounty, or the creation of a business--upon divorce or death. This benefits both spouses and family members who contributed to the creation of wealth during the duration of the marriage. Tighrad as a legal institution originates and for a long time appears to have been unique to the Ishelhin of southwestern Morocco. Evidence of its application is clear in the dockets of the Berber customary courts created by the French in 1930 and used by hundreds of thousands of rural Berbers up until Independence in 1956 when King Mohamed V declared the customary courts defunct and left mountain communities without a legal system until Islamic qadis were appointed two years later. While little is known about what precisely justice looked like in this liminal mid-century period, oral histories suggest that Berbers continued to follow pre-Independence customs including tighrad. Today tighrad continues to be practiced in the Anti-Atlas mountains, sometimes overseen by rural notaries who authorize its application as legal by shared consent. The 2004 revised family code (muddawana) applicable to all Moroccans, Arab and Amazigh, introduced this Berber principle concerning “effort” into divorce proceedings, one of several reforms for greater gender equity both within marriage and upon its termination. Today, Moroccan first instance and appeals courts are deliberating the value of women’s work in home maintenance, improvements to property, agricultural labor for agriculturalists, and unrecognized efforts to expand husbands’ businesses in the case of the urban middle class. This paper analyzes this institution drawing on multiple sources: the original Berber customary court dockets; oral histories among Moroccan retired civil servants and Protectorate employees; and interviews with Anti-Atlas fuqaha and Moroccan judges, legal scholars, and lawyers deliberating these cases.

This paper draws from a forthcoming book of photography and ethnographic description focused on a village in the High Atlas Mountains. The large format, black and white photos show people in their daily tasks: working, playing, talking, though always aware of, and often formally posing for, the camera. The process was dialogical, with the subjects selecting how and where they would be pictured in conversation with the photographer, his Tashelhit-speaking assistant, and an anthropologist who had long worked in the village. The accompanying texts attempt to put the images in a larger context. They explain relevant features outside the frame of the camera: who the people are, and how they came to be pictured, particularly by sketching something of the rich history embedded in their extended social world. Both photography and ethnography have been guilty of presenting rural people as timeless, as representatives of a past that urbanites have left behind. Photographs obviously freeze people as they were in a moment, and thus seem to suggest that the moment of the photograph extends limitlessly into the past and future. Ethnography, with its use of the “ethnographic present” tense, can be similarly faulted. The challenge of the current project is to place timeless words and photos in productive, and ultimately timeful, tension. The words inject intimate knowledge of the subjects’ pasts and personalities, and place them in time by drawing out details in the portraits and landscapes that have changed or are changing. What appears timeless to outsiders is not necessarily so. Unveiling the fluidity within the photos turns frozen images into rich palimpsests, and reveals how the past obtrudes into the present and how it is subtly, slowly effaced. The words of the subjects and the anthropologist working with them are meant to draw forth the dynamism of rural life from the still images on the page, and illuminate how this specific place articulates with the broad currents of our shared epoch.

This paper analyzes the costs and benefits of the adoption of a global discourse on indigenous rights by Berber (Amazigh) activists in Morocco. Drawing on the case of the southeastern oasis of Goulmima where I have pursued ethnographic research for the past ten years, I explore how activists negotiate between different scales of engagement. I examine how they attempt to balance their participation in national and transnational fora where "Berber culture" is deployed as an object of political struggle, with demands from local constituencies that they attend to issues of regional relevance – namely, the procuring and protection of infrastructural resources (land, water, electricity, education, etc.). Effective local engagement requires translocal connections to urban journalists, state functionaries, and international NGOs, connections that are accumulated through Amazigh ethno-politics. Yet, the over-accumulation of such non-local relations generates local suspicion that activists are playing "politics" (siyasa) for their own personal gain, or worse that their national and transnational engagement in Berber politics is bringing undue state scrutiny to local affairs. In other words, as the paper seeks to demonstrate, Amazigh activists in rural towns like Goulmima face a scalar dilemma only partly of their own making. In highlighting these scalar discontinuities, I engage and challenge earlier anthropological models of "segmentary" or "composite" societies that presume either a singular logic of political action or a unified structure of commensurable, nested organizational forms.

In the pre-Saharan oases of southern Morocco, changing land use practices represent key sites for contestations around livelihoods, political authority, and social hierarchies. In the predominantly Berber Mgoun valley, extended drought and longstanding poverty have spurred many mountain residents to move into newly settled areas of the steppe in order to gain access to wage labor. Along with migration remittances, this has created an economic dynamism that spurs agricultural expansion into the steppe around regional market towns. These two major phenomena – the conversion of uncultivated steppe into agricultural land and the expansion of housing settlements from oasis communities into the steppe – reflect shifts in land tenure systems resulting from transformations in livelihoods and social hierarchies in the region. People increasingly challenge tenure regimes and communal institutions historically identified as characteristically Berber, not because they reject their Berber roots but out of a renewed commitment to them. Their sense of place shapes how households construct their livelihood strategies; it also drives their resistance against historical inequalities and the institutions that supported them. While households with the resources and prestige to navigate customary tenure regimes in their favor use these institutions to access land, marginalized families instead mobilize to divide collective lands and secure individual freehold tenure. With these new forms of resistance, many of the most marginalized remain “true” to their Berber identity, in contrast to the communal institutions that many see as having been co-opted by a national government and local elites unconcerned with –even hostile to – their well-being. In this paper, I explore household livelihood strategies and their relationship with land use practices through a detailed analysis of 12 households in three communities in the Mgoun valley. Assessing these households’ diverse activities in the past and present contextualizes their decision-making about how they use land and negotiate tenure regimes. Even for households with a tenuous link to agriculture or with minimal holdings, land and a related sense of place are fundamental both to their livelihood strategies and to their sense of identity as Berbers. This cultural importance underlies the contestations around land tenure that are intensifying throughout the region.