Hsain Ilahiane
Weatherhead Resident Scholar 1997-1998
Ethnicity and
Agrarian Change in Morocco
The Ziz Valley, situated between two rivers on the edge of the Sahara Desert
in southeastern Morocco, offered Hsain Ilahiane an ideal setting for the fieldwork
supporting his dissertation—a political-ecological account of ethnic changes
and their relationship to farming intensification. Surrounded by arid desert,
the valley houses a dense, rapidly growing, and ethnically diverse population
of Arabs, Berbers, and Haratine. Irrigated farming of cereals, olives, and
dates, along with livestock raising, has dominated the lives of its inhabitants
for centuries, with transhumant groups herding camels, goats, and sheep in
the surrounding dry lands. Not incidentally, the Ziz Valley is also Ilahiane's
homeland.
Fluent in Arabic, French, and English in addition to his native
Berber, Ilahiane supplemented ethnographic accounts, oral histories, and colonial
archival records with socioeconomic and ecological findings based on a household
questionnaire strategy. This multilevel approach allowed Ilahiane to situate
the valley and its inhabitants in the historical events of the past century as
well as locating them in their geographical and ecological setting. One Arab
farmer told him, "If our ancestors would rise from their graves and walk
among us they would not recognize the place they left. In less than four decades,
almost everything has changed."
In the dynamic situation of the Ziz Valley, Ilahiane found
that the Haratine, traditionally sharecroppers, brought back cash from working
abroad and—for the first time in the valley—have become landowners. "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 and innovating the old Berber and
Arab stocks of traditions," said Ilahiane. His dissertation, "The Power
of the Dagger, the Seeds of the Koran, and the Sweat of the Ploughman: Ethnic
Stratification and Agricultural Intensification in the Ziz Valley, Southeast
Morocco", provides a rare study of the Haratine, whose voices are almost
nonexistent in North African scholarship.
Although Ilahiane expected to find that the Haratine were
the most productive farmers per unit in the Ziz Valley, his study showed the
Berbers to be slightly more successful. "This can be explained by the difference
in land quality," he said.
"By focusing on ethnicity," Ilahiane explains, "this
study demonstrates the inability of the major theories of development to explain
the agrarian situation in the multiethnic communities that typify much of the
developing world."
In addition to completing his dissertation during his fellowship
year, Ilahiane wrote a paper on Estvan, the sixteenth-century Moroccan explorer
of New Spain, and identified several areas of future research. They include the
use of remote-sensing technology to track temporal, environmental, and social
changes in the Ziz Valley, the impact of globalization on traditional agricultural
technologies, and a case study of how date palm disease has affected the oasis
environment.
"At the School, I found a nurturing and mentoring environment," Ilahiane
said, "ranging from the mechanics of dissertation and proposal writing to
guidance on professional networking."
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Scholars 1997-98
