Guides of the Atlas

Front matter

Simon Holdermann

GUIDES

An Ethnography of Publicness, Transnational Cooperation and Mountain Tourism in Morocco

Contents

List of Figures‘... u... ea nennen 9 Chapter 1

Introduction. eii a nr 15 Doing: Ethnography: ur... a Ea 25 Outline:of the: Book s waiccies 5: ern: 30 Chapter 2

A Place for Technology +... u... ns 60

Chapter 3 Brokers of Change au... een le 96 Chapter 4

OF: Saints:and:Arbitration u. nee Ban 130 Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Guides of the Atlas: ioega aa ERREA a A TEA RETER RSIR 201 Saints Of the Atlas? au... sea 237 Chapter 7

The Zaouiat Ahansal Ultra Trail 0.2.00... eee cece eect eee eee ee neeeeeees 245

Concluding

List of Figures

Figure 1: Figure 2 & 3:

Figure 4: Figure 5: Figure 6: Figure 7: Figure 8: Figure 9:

Figure 10: Figure 1: Figure 12 & 13: Figure 14:

Figure 15: Figure 16: Figure 17:

Figure 18: Figure 19 & 20:

View of central valley, Suq in the front, Agoudim in the back (left) and Amezray (right), with its ighrim,

Training session with the coordinators of the computer club 69 Agoudim, with its four igherman, and Sidi Said’s tomb on

Example of the different households of one extended family 140 The president's schematic drawing of Agoudim’s water supply system... nn ren 168 An older man from a “holy” lineage watching

Camp site at the end of a stage (left), finish at lake Tislit

Acknowledgement

The above was one of the first proverbs I learned. It literally means that a camel can be fitted into a cooking pot only little by little, and only piece by piece. Any task, no matter how big , can be accomplished, ifone just takes it slowly and in small steps. It is a joking way of saying that anything is achievable with just enough persistence. This book was my camel, and at some point, I almost got the impression that I had been cutting off too many big chunks in order to accomplish my task. And inevitably, now that I am writing this acknowledgement, I have the feeling that far too many other parts of the camel should have found their way into the pot as well.

During the process of writing, this book seemed more and more like a living thing; evolving and changing. Maybe it is just the same for every author and every attempt to write a book, but this is what I found in my first experience: This book started as vague idea, as a project, and as an uncertainty. There were guidelines and a framework, but not much more in the beginning. I “finished” my time of fieldwork without the feeling that I had finished. Similarly, I finished my dissertation thesis and submitted it in to the University of Cologne, and I did not feel quite finished either. I felt exhausted and relieved. Happy even, a little later. But finished? While thinking and re-thinking parts, abstracts and ideas that went into this manuscript and book, I now belief, in retrospect, that such a feeling of “completion” or “having finished” is completely illusory. Perhaps that is the beauty of it. While there are certainly moments of accomplishment, where one feels truly finished, it feels almost impossible to have put down on paper everything I wanted to say and everything that was going on in my head. Moreover, if I had started to write this book at any other point in time, I am sure that the outcome would have been slightly different. Writing this book is, thus, somewhat coincidental, contingent, and uncertain. That is why, in a way, I do not consider it as a completely finished piece of work, but rather as a documentation of my line of thinking, researching, and reasoning at that certain period of time. Even as I finish writing it, the book continuously keeps (re-)writing itself in my head. To borrow an anthropological truism: if a gift keeps on giving, a book—or more precisely, ethnographic research—keeps on demanding.

Many people have contributed to this book. I cannot possibly name all of them and all the details and aspects of the ways in which they have supported me. First and foremost, and I really do not know to put this in words properly, I would like to thank the people of Zawiya Ahansal from the bottom of my heart for making this book possible: the people, interlocutors, research partners, friends, who welcomed me in their midst. It has been a truly overwhelming experience. Above all, I would like to mention the staff of Amezray SMNID and ACF. Without their support and willingness to share their work with me, none of the below could have been developed. Thank you, Youssef and Medina, for having my back, Sidi Amahdar for your wisdom, Ayoub, Hassan, Bahemu. I do not know I would have started my stay without you, Ismail. Thank you for your friendship. Mohamed (Bahelu), thank you for your impressive unreserved compassion and support. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for teaching and encouraging me, for being a family to me in the absence of my own: Said, Tuda, Baba Moh, Ati Fadma, Baba Hamou, Ati Daha, Ati Aicha. Bouchra, Sanaa, Ayoub.

Many colleagues and friends have at one point or another contributed to the ideas that I have developed in this book, with discussions, critical comments, and suggestions. This was indispensable. I am grateful for the academic environment at the University of Cologne, which enabled me to develop the thoughts and questions that led to this research: The participants of Prof. Martin Zillinger’s research col-

Acknowledgement loquium, the discussions in the a.r.t.e.s. research lab, with Thiemo Breyer, Johannes Schick, Mario Schmidt; Michaela Haug and the Future Reading Group; the Delta Research group for discussing my overflowing chapter concerning water; class 7 of the a.r.t.e.s. graduate school for the humanities, Katrin Sowa, Souad Zeineddine, Susanne Ebner, Felix Lussem, Karim Zafer, and, of course, Julian Schmischke. Thank you Monika Böck and Anja Höse, without you nothing would have been possible. Thank you for great cooperation as “Team MZ”, Leonie van Dreuten, Anna Krämer, Annette Steffny, Ole Reichardt and, above all, Christoph Lange.

I would also like to thank the CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation’ for the funding and providing the financial and academic background through which I was able to conduct my research. I especially thank my colleagues from Bo4, with whom I had a horizon-expanding exchange and a truly wonderful time: Prof. Volker Wulf, Markus Rohde, Sarah Rüller und Konstantin Aal (bo lihya). I would also like to thank my supervisors Prof. Martin Zillinger, Prof. Thomas Widlok and Prof. Erhard Schiittpelz for taking the time to look so deeply into my tangled thoughts from the High Atlas. The discussion with you was stimulating, motivating and a pleasure. Thank you, Martin, for your tireless support and the occasional nudge in the right direction. But most of all, thank you for your enduring enthusiasm for the questions of anthropological research, which truly motivated me, almost as much as your inspiring handling of complex theory and worlds of thought. A big thank you also goes to Michael Dorrity, who copyedited my manuscript with excellent expertise. All existing errors remain due to my own shortcomings.

Finally, many friends and family have supported me along the way. Through the depths of my repeated writing exile you have helped me wonderfully, thank you, David, Marlene, Jona, Martin, Jari and Paul. Thank you, Seb, for always being there! Thanks, Paps and Anita, for your never-ending support. Without the Bavarian writing exile, this book would surely have one chapter less, thanks Mam and Andreas for the surprise packages and impulses to push through. With all my heart, I thank you, Anja. I cannot think of anything more I would like to ask for than this: to grow with you together. Carla, I dedicate this book to you.

Note on transliteration

Since I am not a trained Arabist and this is primarily an anthropological study, the transliteration of Arabic and Tamazight terms does not follow an official linguistic transcription. Rather, I have adopted the terms as they appear in the relevant literature, or used the common English way of writing Tamazight phrases, which was also used by my interlocutors. Linguistic impossibilities or errors in the transliteration are entirely my own fault and I hope that interested and informed readers will nonetheless be able to recognize and make sense of my use of foreign-language and emic terms.

I use the following notations for letters of the Arabic alphabet that have no clear equivalent in the Latin script:

©: kh

g: &:gh

Chapter 1 Introduction Research Focus: New Media, New Publics and Situated Scaling

This book is an ethnography of social-technological transformation processes in the High Atlas of Morocco. These processes include various aspects of political-economic, infrastructural, and socio-cultural change. In order to understand these lines of change historically situated and contextualized, the book explores the media-technologically supported processes that restructure social practice. In particular, and as part of a cooperation project with socio-informatics, this means zooming in on media, mediation and mediators as well as the new forms and gradation of publicness they trigger, shape and reflect. Thus, I have set out to analyze the varieties of media practices concerning the organizational work and transnational collaboration that take place there. In this context, the negotiation processes of various actors to increase their scope and forge new cooperative relationships are both an ongoing achievement and promise to successfully navigate the unfolding transformations.

The main questions that drive this work, and to which it seeks to provide answers, therefore revolve around how transnational influences and changing socio-economic conditions are brought to bear locally. More systematically, these are questions about the scaling work of the actors themselves within their multiple networks of relationships. Scaling work is my attempt to analytically capture, what these actors are ina very practical sense doing: How do they make ideas and concerns connectable and compatible, how do they translate and integrate them into the local context of the High Atlas? What are the spaces of possibility and structural shifts involved?

The theoretical appeal of the concept of scale has gained some traction in anthropology in recent years (see among others Strathern 1991; Tsing 2000; Latour 2005b; Carr/Lempert 2016). In the course of this work, I understand scale as a combination of translating, working out, adopting, embedding, and contextualizing circulating imaginaries, discourses, and concerns on different levels—for and in specific situations and arrangements. Consequently, the global seems to become local as a result of engagement and negotiation. On closer inspection, however, both concepts (global and local) turn out to be incapable of adequately and analytically capturing the processes. Indeed, they seem to dissolve, as ethnographically neither the local nor the global can be grasped—but mereley a situative amalgamation of both. This leads to the question: What are the affordances of scale-making? How do actors make and unmake connections for their various concerns and goals?

This is not so much a matter of making plausible and filling in pre-figured models or concepts of media and public sphere with ethnographic material. Reversely, it is necessary to ask what these concepts actually mean for the context and selected regional case, elaborated on the basis of the empirical circumstances. More precisely, and in particular, the following questions arise from these considerations, that have oriented the present research: Which media practices can be observed? In what way, with what motivation and for what purposes are the various groups or stakeholders involved in producing, enacting and employing them? Which infrastructural arrangements and lines of development become visible? If new forms of cooperation supported by media technology put existing values, views and practices to the test, how is in this process publicness produced or contained for different concerns? Which (new) alliances have been forged, which resources mobilized in order to win new cooperation partners and to make own interests and concerns connectable and compatible for a wider public?

Thus, the main interest lies on the resources actors in the High Atlas draw on to accomplish scale and administer change. These resources can be social, technical, material and imaginative. In sum, then, this book follows a praxeological approach that considers the affordances that shape local practice at certain locales and the social institutions that enable and confine them as much as they are themselves reconfigured through time. The argumentation of the present book can be unfolded along three terms: In the High Atlas, scale-making—and transformation more general—is territorialized, which emphasizes the materialities of place and locality that need to be taken into account in dealing with resources. The actor’s scaling work is socialized, in the sense that the actors are dependent on dense networks of social relations to draw on, but are also changing them at the same time. Finally, instances of scale-making present themselves as processes of re-infrastructuring, in which rising public concerns are encountered by embedding, standardizing and institutionalizing them in particular organizational arrangements or administrative procedures. For the specific region of the High Atlas, development cooperation, NGO work, and especially tourism are areas that have been particularly influenced by these processes of transformation and, in turn, have helped to shape them. In a similar and yet different way, practices of scale-making can be found in all of these contexts, as I will argue in the course of this book.

Figure 1: Panoramic view of the valley in the High Atlas

A Valley in the High Atlas or When is Periphery?

The High Atlas Mountain range covers an area of about 160 000 square kilometers, amounting to 22.8% of Morocco's territory.’ This region where I did my fieldwork is considered by policy makers and tourists alike to be remote. This is both a relational and awkward term, whereby it is not quite clear which concrete information it contains, and yet at the same it time conveys a very clear normative meaning. The followup question should therefore always be: From whose point of view is it remote? In comparison to what?

The valley consists of four main villages inhabited by a total of between 11,000 and 12,000 people of the Berber or Amazigh community’, which is considered the indigenous people of North Africa. A more conclusive number as would be derived from a census, for example, is not available, for no such census are carried out. The administrative buildings and the market (sug) are located directly on the river and at the end of the road that leads from Azilal, the main town of the province. The administrative center of the valley is basically a little settlement of official buildings and the Suq between the villages of Agoudim and Amezray. The oldest settlement, Agoudim, can be found just south of the administrative center, Amezray, is located a 20-minute walk away, if one follows the

1 http://www.tourisme.gov.ma/en/tourism-territories/atlas-vallees (last accessed, 25/07/2018).

2 There is an ongoing discussion about the appropriate use of the term Berber. Unlike other languages, the term is not pejoratively connotated in English. | also want to take seriously the emic perspective: what and how my research partners, interlocutors, and friends would use it. They themselves would use Berber, Imazighen, Ishelhin interchangeably. Sometimes Ishelhin would convey more the sense of a shared language and specific cultural aspects (as dancing ahidus, not ahwach...). Imazighen sometimes had a more pan-Amazigh political ring to it, as being one North African indigenous people. Berber would seem slightly more universal in its applicability. All those slight nuances seemed to not always and strictly apply. | decided to use Berber, sometimes alternatingly Amazigh/Imazighen, thus following the main thrust of English-speaking scholarly contributions.

river north from the Suq. Both are central villages, both next to the river, and both connected to the access road. The third village, Taghia, is further south along the river, behind a gorge and nested within steep mountain walls. It is about one and a half hours away from the administrative center on foot, and cannot be reached by car. Tighanimin, the fourth village, is a one hour walk from the administrative center and Agoudim to the east, at the foot of the mountain range. It is the furthest southeastern extension of the valley. The dirt road leading there from the administrative center was widened a couple of years ago and can now be used by cars. In addition to these four villages, there are a number of smaller settlements scattered in the side valleys or along the hills beneath the high plateaus that border the valley to the east and west. To the north, the river runs out of the valley with slowly flattening mountain ranges until it finally flows into the Bin el Ouidane reservoir.

Figure 2 & 3: View of central valley, Suq in the front, Agoudim in the back (left) and Amezray (right), with its ighrim, from the riverbank

With reference to ethnographic research in Morocco, Clifford Geertz famously took the position that the “locus of study is not the object of study. Anthropologists don't study villages (tribes, towns, neighbourhoods...); they study in villages” (Geertz 1973: 22). Moreover, the following descriptions have not fallen out of time nor should they be read as in any way natural, original or authentic, but always as already part of the changing life in the mountains. The question then becomes: how one can understand something as spectacular as profound change? Moreover, one should bear in mind that actions in a particular place are typically perceived by those involved as simply living life. My attempt to tackle this conundrum entails giving detailed descriptions that show what it is to live everyday life and make a living in the chosen research area. By doing so, I seek to bring specific aspects of change into view, namely a change that sets itself apart from the conditions that were themselves already in constant change and flux prior to my arrival.

The villages in the valley—like many places in the High Atlas—radiate a graceful beauty. The houses have the same colour as their environment use stones and natural materials from the local area to blend into the mountain slopes that surround them. In some places, especially in Agoudim, the houses are built so close together that at first glance it is not immediately obvious where one house ends and the next begins, if one roof forms the foundation of a house or terrace above, or whether a winding path is a village street or a house entrance. For my own part, I stayed in Amezray, with a married couple and their three children, the husband’s parents, his uncle (on his father’s side, 3mmi), aunt, and grandmother, who all lived in the same abode.

In terms of its distance from—and infrastructural connection to—larger cities such as Azilal, Beni Melal or Marrakesh, the valley is rather cut-off. The regional road R302 is the only central access road and reaches Zawiya Ahansal at exactly the point where it leads furthest into the High Atlas. The road leading from the west into the High Atlas from Zawiya comes to a standstill here, offering no means of continuing either east or south. Crossing the High Atlas—as one would, for instance, with the national road (N9) from Marrakesh to Ouarzazate—is not possible here.

The barren and often rugged mountain landscape coheres with an image of seclusion. Generally speaking, mountains are often considered wild and unconquerable. Yet, the mountains are a habitat and have been for hundreds of years. This includes mountain ranges, gorges, and seemingly impassable and fruitless terrain. The remote and barren nature often attributed to the mountain environment can obscure the fact that many have made it their home, and created the conditions to flourish in it.

Figure 4: Houses in the valley

Transformations

The region is subject to profound transformation. Indeed, local people are often quite aware as to what precisely must change for improvement to occur. In an interview given in Southern Morocco, Thomas Lacroix states the point quite well:

As this excerpt suggests, wage labour and transportation are particularly desirable constituents of change, both in the High Atlas and elsewhere. In the valley that is the focus of this book, infrastructural improvements and development have been occurring for about a decade now. Only in the last five to ten years have houses been connected to water and power lines been installed, while a secondary school was built in Amezray. The school, in particular, has led to the construction of more and more houses and an increase in migration from the surrounding areas to the central villages. Broadcasting towers for mobile internet are equally only a couple of years old. For the whole region, two ambulances and a small medical station have been installed. Infrastructural changes and integration into the expanding global economy provide the backdrop for an increase in touristic activity, and this equally applies to rural areas.

For many aspects of life, however, the trip to Azilal is obligatory. As the main town in the province, it has a hospital, pharmacies, gas stations, a police department and a number of other regional authorities. The journey from the valley to Azilal, a distance of a little more than 80 kilometers, takes about two hours by car. By public transport, a small minibus, it takes between three and three and a half hours. The main access road to the valley was paved with asphalt in 2014. There was previously only a dirt road. The trip, which was only possible with off-road vehicles at that time, could take between six and eight hours.

Newly paved roads and broadened mountain passes now enable more and more regular transportation with minivans and pickup trucks. As a result, there is more passenger transport, while the journey to the district town has become shorter and is offered at more regular intervals. All these developments have accelerated up existing transportation procedures to a certain extent (Wajeman/Dodd 2017; Duclos/ Criado/Nguyen 2017). Yet the chosen mode for covering a particular distance is not based solely on punctuality nor in accordance with the clock-time of a particular transportation schedule. Social ties and the maintenance of relationships are crucial. The better the social relations, the better the transportation. Waiting as well as knowing or calling the right person are basic mobility practices. If someone wants to travel from the valley, they call the driver of a minibus or pickup truck. The driver, in turn, gives the person a pick-up time and location, if there is room. Similarly, at the bus station in Azilal for public transport to the mountains, seats can be reserved with the bus driver. Normally, however, you simply go to the station, buy a ticket, and wait at your seat. Departure occurs when the bus is full or the driver no longer wishes to wait. The same is true for collective taxis (grands taxis), where planning mainly entails a spatial dimension, as travelers simply have to be at the right spot. Time, in this instance, plays a subordinate role. As such, one could well claim that space, rather than time, organizes thought and practice as regards transportation in the High Atlas Mountains. The predominance of time over space in discourses on modernization (Rosa 2005) is thus subject to a certain challenge here. However, forms of modernizing are becoming increasingly palpable in the rural areas of the High Atlas.?

In the context of critical discourse on modernization—and in settings like workshops and colloquia of our Collaborative Research Center—the project I participated in was repeatedly subject to questions on the meaning of scientific intervention and the actual necessity of a transdisciplinary cooperation project between German universities and a Moroccan organization per se (see chapter two). There was a clear moral undertone to some of these question: Were we really motivated by a desire to bring technology and the internet to the people in the High Atlas? Were we aware of our responsibility and the very likely negative effects of our research activities? Who would pay for this project? In a number of

3 Such dynamics extend, of course, beyond this particular area. Transportation is an interesting marker of modernization schemes. Within the three and a half years of my PhD studies and since my first visit to Morocco in summer 2016, | have witnessed: the renewed expansion of the access road from Azilal into the mountains as far as Ait Mhamd from one to two lanes and; the renewal of a nation-wide fleet of grand taxis. While my first trip from to Azilal in a grand taxi was in an E-type Mercedes—very much typical for that time—in September 2018 all such vehicles had been replaced by more recent models with seven seats. Similarly, when the new airport terminal in Marrakech was opened in 2016, anew shuttle bus service introduced, and a public bike rental system implemented. Of course, Morocco’s hosting of the United Nations Climate Change conference in November 2016 most certainly had a part to play here.

interdisciplinary academic discussions, many questions arose that revealed dichotomous thinking along the lines of traditional/modern or un(der)developed/developed. This, again, touched on the moral status and political implications of the project: Whose intention was it to bring technology there and in whose interest? Was it not problematic and paternalistic to bring people into contact with technology and to then investigate their behaviour? This almost went so far as to imply a critical laboratory set-up for the proposed project. The problematic aspect of this take on the proposal was the foreclosure of agency for the local people. Furthermore, this assumption holds that locals are unable to exercise their own autonomy. As such, the assumption denies them the pursuit of their own interests, the formulation of their own positions, and the capacity to take action. Similarly, this critique revealed prevalent notions of the physical research area as a secluded and closed authentic cultural arena, and asa harmonious structure, which our initiative from the outside would only serve to disturb. As such, this perspective completely ignored centuries of mobility, exchange, and interconnection.

The analytical shortcomings of these notions concerning relative underdevelopment is that they do not adequately account for the contradictions and inconsistencies of recent transformation processes. One such example is the conditions under which mobile phones are used in the economically weak and supposedly backward mountain region of Morocco. The speed of mobile data reception, which varies between 3G and LTE, is higher in the High Atlas than in many rural areas of Germany. Of course, it is not a question of proving that people live comparably modern lives in Morocco to those in Germany, say, but rather of indicating that these realities are perceived by many as surprising or exceptional, or at least remarkable. This is so because the assumed (and implicitly attributed) state of development of others would not suggest this. The critique we were confronted with at the beginning of our research project—although a welcome invitation to reflect on our own principles and perceptions—often reproduced even those very dichotomies and notions of progress and development. To explain this with insufficient information fails to grasp the point satisfactorily. Rather, the everyday understanding of a world of different stages of development—and the assumptions that go along with it—seem to express themselves particularly saliently here. In contrast to the actual complexities of Moroccan life, the imagined circumstances here are much more strongly determined by a deep-seated perspective of deficits, precarity, and even hopelessness (Ferguson 2006).

Despite the valley’s seeming remoteness, the region has always been connected by passing caravans from the Sahara. Moreover, it has been a center for nomads, who would come with their flock to the nearby summer pastures and for pilgrims, who would visit the sacred tomb of Sidi Said Ahansal. Remarkably, as early as the 1960s, there were even turbines in Agoudim, which generated electricity with river water. This was due to the French army, which hada military and administrative foothold there at the time of the protectorate. Since then, homes belonging to families from the holy lineage—who possessed special political importance for the French—had been supplied with electricity. Later, turbines were used to supply other households in the valley before the national power grid finally arrived in 2012. People also used solar panels together with car batteries to generate and store small amounts of electricity for individual households. Those are the markers of modernization, which can be found throughout the High Atlas: roads, electricity and running water as well as refrigerators, televisions, and telephones. For all the critical discourses I had previously perceived, this was the very empirical mélange in which my research took place and which oriented and shaped my perspective and research questions.

Doing Ethnography

Doing fieldwork is a kind of initiation ritual for anthropologists-in-themaking. As such, ethnography—the process of arriving at a description of social practices—is the primary intention of anthropological knowledge production. To achieve this, researchers immerse themselves in a society, in a community, in a context, producing descriptive data, and rendering the collected data intelligible for readers or fellow academics. Ethnography is an artisanal endeavour, which comprehensively challenges the researcher’s own body and biography. It takes time and commitment, sometimes even sacrifice. Only with time and shared experiences will it be possible to work out commonalities, build relationships and eventually produce ethnographic insights. As ethnography focuses on human (inter)action and puts it at the basis of knowledge production, it is in itself a proponent of practice theory (Ortner 1984). This is by no means a process of coincidence. Understanding human practices through ethnographic research means continuously working on that understanding and negotiating it. To understand such practices, ethnographers themselves have to enter into practice with an open mindset, awareness, and a receptivity toward both mutuality and commonality. Fundamentally, is the ethnographer’s task to forge cooperation.

Ethnography involves different types of data and the use of different media formats and technologies. The central question thereby is how lived social and cultural reality is (re-)produced, maintained and made meaningful. Therefore, ethnographers have to consider everyday situations, practices, and interactions, as well as discourses and standards of valuation (Sanjek 1996; Lüders 2010). Ethnographic fieldwork is not a methodologically fixed approach, but rather method and product simultaneously. As a flexible, processual research strategy, it offers researchers a framework to oscillate between their own immediate fieldwork experience and the analysis. Participant observation is inextricably linked to ethnographic fieldwork. It describes neither pure observation nor pure participation (Atkinson/Hammersley 1994). The aim is to generate as much proximity as possible to social phenomena and practices, while at the same time maintaining necessary analytical distance from full immersion and distorting biases.