Resumen de Rethinking Moroccan Social Hierarchy and Ritual: from Colonial Ethnology to the Postcolonial Historical Anthropology of Abdellah Hammoudi
This paper traces an historical anthropology of Moroccan social hierarchy and ritual from colonial ethnology to the work of Abdellah Hammoudi. I examine how postcolonial Moroccan anthropologists like Hammoudi have responded to the sacralization of “Berber” places like the southern Draʼa/Draa valley and High Atlas mountains into ethnographic exemplars of social reproduction and segmentation in earlier French colonial documentation and British social anthropological theorization. Instead, they insist on a phenomenological and historical framework in which ritual and social hierarchy are produced and transformed through the actions and interactions of multi-ethnic, spatio-temporally situated actors. In so doing, they remind of the need to account for both the larger, changing Moroccan dimensions of power and dominance under pre-colonial, Protectorate, and independence eras, as well as the localized meanings and significations that animate local inhabitants of various backgrounds. I point to the implications and impact of such insights for later studies of North African social life, drawing on my own fieldwork on the emergence of postcolonial Amazigh politics in southeastern Morocco
