Old recipes for the good life may not have been lost, but they are conventionally discarded as reactionary and inhibiting. The result may just as well be frustrated confusion as positive self-realisation. Even without the aid of this kind of freedom ideology, capitalism is capable of creating insecurity and new social dynamics. It has been a massive force, uprooting people from their conventional ways of doing things, moving them physically, giving them new tasks and bringing them into contact with new others.

When mining began in the copper-rich areas of the eastern parts of present-day Zambia, just after the First World War, workers were recruited from all over the colony. They spoke many languages and had many different customs and kinship systems, but very soon, the workers began to sort each other, in a rough and ready way, on the basis of ideas about social distance see e.

The people hailing from the western regions were seen as a category apart, likewise the Lozi speakers, the matrilineal peoples and so on. Some of the groups had experienced regular contact before urbanisation, and had conventional ways of dealing with each other. Some even enjoyed an institutionalised joking relationship with each other.

Clyde Mitchell , who studied urbanisation in the Copperbelt in the s, once described a situation in a beer hall. A man and a woman are drinking beer. A second man joins them. He has a few coins which he puts on the table, intending to spend them on beer in a minute. Instead of joining in the laughter, the man becomes angry and says that he is far from being an X; as a matter of fact, he is a Z, and the Zs have no joking relationship whatsoever to the Ys.

The woman retorts that, to her, the Xs and the Zs are the same anyway. This vignette illustrates the social insecurity that arises when societies change quickly. Just as a fish discovers the water only at the moment it is being hauled out of it, so does identification become an explicit problem only when it can no longer be taken for granted. The Bisa, the Lozi and other groups who met in mining towns like Luanshya, developed ethnic identities which they had never had before, but they also immediately began to question the significance of their new ethnic identities.

Trade unions were also important in their new lives and, quite soon, Africans began to differentiate from one another through education and achievements in the modern sector of society. Notwithstanding the rigid racial hierarchy of the Copperbelt, which was sometimes reluctantly bracketed by the anthropologists working at the mercy of the Colonial Service, the newly urbanised Africans were thrust into a post-traditional existence, where their former taken-for-granteds had to be defended, or else could be questioned.

Another telling example of this transition is the changing significance of female circumcision among Somali women in exile. Because of the civil war and the near-total dissolution of the Somali state, a considerable proportion of the Somali population is exiled — many of them in neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia, but there are also many in Europe and North America.

In local communities in Somalia, nearly all women are circumcised. Most Somali women in Somalia are oblivious of the fact that most women in the world are not circumcised. Then some of them are dislocated to England, Canada or Norway, and soon discover that the attitudes towards circumcision in their immediate surroundings are different from what they have been used to. The very woman who was pure and perfect on the dry savannah of the Horn is suddenly transformed into a mutilated victim on the streets of London. Nothing has changed except the circumstances.

But this is enough for a seed of doubt to be sown. Will she really choose circumcision for her daughters, when nobody except a few Africans has it done in her new homeland? Is circumcision really necessary for a girl to become a proper woman?

A World of Insecurity: Anthropological Perspectives of Human Security

She may decide not to let her daughters be circumcised, despite the fact that this decision hurls her into cultural insecurity. Suddenly, she no longer follows the hallowed script detailing how to be a good Somali woman; she is forced to improvise and to trust her own judgements. As many as half of the Somali women interviewed in a Canadian survey indicated that they did not want their daughters to be circumcised. Some of them had only spent a couple of years in the country. In Somalia, the figure might have been 2 or 3 per cent.

When a Somali woman begins to question her own cultural tradition in this way, a deep ambivalence begins to ferment. If you have been engulfed in an unquestioned tradition your whole life and make a single individual choice contradicting the traditional script, it is as if the entire fabric becomes unravelled. In theory, from that point nothing prevents you from asking other questions of tradition: Why should I accept being subordinate to men? Why are we Muslims? What exactly does it mean to be a Muslim? Most Somali women in exile may limit themselves to asking a few critical questions of their traditions, but their daughters tend to be less modest.

But this is hardly the whole story. Many immigrants — both women and men — remain faithful to tradition because they are familiar with its feel and smell, it gives them a sense of security and a clear, safe identity, and, besides, it offers resources they need to survive, such as work, a social network and the right to be themselves.

They feel the cold breath of the chronic insecurity of late modern society, and some of them immediately withdraw into their shell to avoid being infected with pneumonia. What exactly it is that provides a sense of security varies. You may be an entrepreneur in one place, but then you become a dreaded anomaly in another.

There is no simple answer available, to analysts or to citizens. Those who demand the total victory of individualism and free choice forget their own need for security — I have more than once observed Norwegian anthropologists at international conferences, huddled together around their own table and enjoying themselves quite a bit — and they also tend to forget that rights imply duties. Yet, those who romanticise the intimate, tradition-bound communities are guilty of an equally grave error, since they tend to forget that such communities are no more natural than other ways of organising social relations; and that it is by virtue of courageous leaps into the unknown, into risk and insecurity, that the world changes.

Humans, in other words, have both roots and boots. We have considered the literary characters Brand and Peer Gynt, Zambian miners and Somali women in exile. This man is initially a migrant without worries who regards the world as his oyster. In the famous opening sequence of The Satanic Verses Rushdie In Hindi, the number has connotations of sin and treachery.

The kinship with Peer Gynt is clear! In an essay written a year or two after becoming the victim of an Iranian fatwa, Rushdie explained the deeper meaning of the book. Both of them can be seen as absolutist, both demand purity, and both prefer simplicity to complexity. Rushdie, thus, does not only criticises religious fanaticism, but also cultural intolerance and nationalist homogenisation. Rushdie might, in the same breath, have criticised multiculturalism, as an ideology which prefers security to insecurity, and which — according to its critics — thereby sacrifices freedom.

Rushdie prefers the impure hybrids to the clearly delineated groups, which is not an uncontroversial option in a world where there is a great demand for simplifications. A few years later, Ulf Hannerz suggested, in a friendly critique of Gellner, that perhaps Kokoschka had a future after all, thanks to the emergence of new, changing cultural mosaics. Whatever the case may be, the contrast between Modigliani and Kokoschka may offer a better metaphor for the tensions characterising group integration and disintegration in the present era, than simplistic contrasts between individualist neoliberalism and fundamentalist collectivism.

A world characterised by many small differences was, in the modern era, reshaped into a world consisting of a few major ones — the ethnic, religious and national ones — but the development hinted at by Hannerz shows that the last word is by no means said yet. Naipaul, who is far less sanguine about the actual freedom involved in so-called free choice than Rushdie. He sees it as a concept of the privileged few, which seems to say that the opportunities of the individual are limitless, that movement is enriching, and that one is somehow placed in an exalted position as judge and jury if one is fortunate enough to be in exile.

Sir Vidia regards the condition of the exile as a punishment, not as a release. The condition might give increased insight, but the price is stiff: Although Naipaul, like many other postcolonial writers, deals with fragmented and dislocated identities in his work, he never celebrates them. To him, the loss of community, security and roots is solely tragic. In Rushdie, the reader encounters a world where insecurity is just another word for freedom, where the right to create and re-create oneself by mixing this and that is enriching and liberating.

The span between Brand and Peer Gynt can easily be recognised in the relationship between Naipaul and Rushdie. This book is a beginning, showing that the debate not only continues in all continents, but also that human security could be an eye-opener for a social anthropology which struggles to find its place in a post-cultural-relativist, thoroughly disenchanted world. A Conceptual Framework for Human Security. Towards a New Modernity.


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An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge and Kegan Paul. A Study in Sociology. Identitet i en omskiftelig tid. Identity in Turbulent Times]. Anthropology of the Self. Security Dialogue 35 3: The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Human Development Report Human security, when taken as a perennial attempt, a steady orientation, a never-withering goal of all human endeavour, will obviously not do.

In the many cases in which we witness deliberate risk-taking, preparedness to engage in social unrest and decisions to step out of well-trodden routine, it is frankly of little help. People, for instance, often demonstrate a desire to avoid or escape forms of community and security that they experience as stifling or oppressive.

People may, moreover, want to engage in insecure and even dangerous action if they no longer want to tolerate injustice or exclusion. Much individual and group action can be interpreted as conscious risk-taking rather than as a quest for an immovable state of security, and thus invites us to reconsider the taken-for-grantedness of the very dichotomy of security and risk. What we need is a more sophisticated and polyphonic version of human security. Attempts to carve out such a notion are already under way in much of the recent literature Boholm , Eriksen , Mani , Schwartz Notions like empowerment, rights, risks, freedom and awareness are, in a critical mode, connected to and confronted by the idea of human security, thus enriching and complementing our understanding of its potentials and limitations.

I believe that recent events in Bolivia are a case in point. Bolivia experienced a persistent series of street protests, especially in the period —05, that exposed many of the participants to considerable danger. Bolivians paid a high price for their perennial protests against successive governments and their policy proposals. The protesters were confronted with tear gas, batons, trigger-happy police 70 victims in October alone , food shortages in the cities, societal polarisation, political and economic instability, and loss of income.

The participation of many tens of thousands of people in these protests goes against the conventional wisdom in social movement research that people are likely to engage in hazardous collective action only when their options for coping with the existing order and life conditions have shrunk to the point where conditions have become unbearable.

So why did so many Bolivians repeatedly take to the streets during these years? And why did he, too, have to go on 9 June ? And from what historical learning process did this perception stem? He broke the spell: Morales had been a key figure in the innumerable protests the country had witnessed since However, he regained his seat in the elections, and three years later won the presidential elections with an absolute majority. After he took office as president, many felt that the protesters had finally taken over, and many had unrealistically high expectations.

How did this negative spiral start? What it did lead to was an unstable country: Bolivia has gone through more presidents both authoritarian and elected in the twentieth century than any other country in the region.

In the s, a radical indigenous movement — the Kataristas — emerged in Bolivia and advocated the return of the Inca empire Tawantin Suyu. It entered public space by means of some spectacular actions, but soon became caught up in internal frictions and lost most of its appeal. By then, the party had become much more conservative and had embraced the neoliberal recipes suggested by the Washington Consensus, the IMF, the World Bank and others.

The MNR, however, had also become more sensitive to the multicultural discourse. He was the first indigenous Bolivian to obtain such a high position in Bolivian politics. The subsequent government — that of former dictator Hugo Banzer — — made things worse: The resultant persistent poverty and exclusion of the indigenous peoples over the decades is one of the ingredients of the current disposition to protest in Bolivia.

The system is characterised by the predominance of a petty intra-party and inter-party logic, and the inability of the political parties to build a bridge to society. Political parties are absorbed in internal and mutual squarings of accounts, and in recruiting their cadres from unrepresentative population sectors. To make things worse, new political contenders are met with chicanery on the part of established parties, which introduce legislation and contrive underhand pacts to protect themselves.

They have come to realise that neither governmental nor opposition parties will ever genuinely defend their interests. Although the level of trust in politicians and parties is traditionally low in Latin America see Camp , it reaches dramatic depths in Bolivia: The authors add that the 1. The effect is twofold: Instead, people have developed growing confidence that street protests would influence politics and make their demands heard.

A third important feature of Bolivian politics that might help understand its continuous political havoc is neoliberalism. Bolivia returned to democracy in Its —85 left-wing administration ended in gloomy failure. Hyperinflation and broad protest against its devastating effects forced the government to step down before the end of its term. The government that assumed power in started on a path of neoliberal reform that has held sway ever since, despite the fact that it was never explicitly put to the ballot.

There was no consulting of civil society. McNeish suggests that strong international pressure underlay the reluctance of subsequent administrations to really discuss their macro-economic agendas. The neoliberal reforms are thus insulated from debate: In the end, the government gave in. In the protests, various social movement leaders and politicians developed or reaffirmed their national profiles. I will elaborate the adventures of two of them — not to suggest that, individually, they made any decisive difference, but because this allows us to reflect upon the motives and vicissitudes of the protesters and their actions.

Evo Morales, who is of Aymara origin, is the undisputed leader of the coca farmers in the Chapare region, close to Cochabamba. This only strengthened his position. His party — the leftist MAS — became the second largest party in Congress, and Evo Morales became one of the two front runners for the presidency in the June elections.

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It was Goni who was eventually selected by Congress. He assumed office on 4 October Evo Morales became the catalyst for a new series of protests, but was neither the organiser of nor the main agitator in all these events. The main protagonists were varying coalitions of protesters, most of whom were opposing measures that would affect their livelihoods. On 12 February , for instance, a fatal series of events led to heavy gunfire in the very centre of La Paz, and forced the president to withdraw a crucial tax bill, to change his entire cabinet and to struggle desperately to regain his authority.

Among the most prominent protesters, not surprisingly, were the police. They took to the streets on 12 February to reject the proposal and insist on the pay rise they had been demanding for a long time. As usual in situations of street protests, the presidential palace in Plaza Murillo was guarded by a small group of military police. The police were joined in the plaza by a group of secondary school pupils, who were there to demand the dismissal of their school principal and to air their rejection of government policy in general and of the tax bill in particular.

When the pupils started throwing stones at the palace, smashing most of its windows, the military opened fire. As the pupils immediately ran away, the first victims were the police demonstrators. They, in turn, opened fire on the palace. In the ensuing chaos, the president was evacuated and rapidly negotiated the withdrawal of the police from the streets of La Paz. They then progressed to the offices of ElectroPaz, to the customs offices and to the town hall in the adjacent city of El Alto, where they ended up looting shops in the city centre.

Remarkably, in these events the most powerful and consistent opposition party — the MAS — was not the protagonist. The MAS was, however, paramount in the events that unfolded in October A government proposal to export natural gas to the USA via Chile became the flashpoint for weeks of violent protests. As had been the case in February, the roots of the conflict extended beyond the issue at stake — although an earlier sale of gas to Brazil on terms unfavourable to Bolivia certainly made this particular powder keg more explosive.

For many Bolivians, the idea of exporting the gas via a Chilean port that had been Bolivian territory until the Pacific War years earlier was infuriating, as Chilean—Bolivian relations have been tense ever since that war. But the measure stood for more. In this case, the gas issue culminated in riots first in the city of El Alto, and then in the city of La Paz and other major cities.

What ultimately motivated the protesters was their overall rejection of everything the government stood for. All this culminated in the demand for the president to step down. The virulence of the protest led to a crisis within the coalition. When the vice-president, Carlos Mesa, withdrew his support, the president decided to abandon his gas export proposal. But it was too little, too late. Evo Morales, meanwhile, had become one of the major spokespersons for precisely this demand. The presidency was assumed by Vice-President Carlos Mesa. However, it put him in a quandary, because, in the longer run, the parties would not let themselves be sidelined.

On 9 June , protesters won the day: He was a crucial factor in the wave of protests that Bolivia experienced during these years. But, of course, he cannot help us to account for the disposition of the Bolivians to rally, even for the umpteenth time and even though there was increased exhaustion about the ongoing protests in the country.

Before we examine this issue of the disposition towards protest, let us first meet another crucial protest leader in Bolivia: Quispe is the leader of the rather small, but in the elections surprisingly strong, Movimiento Indigenista Pachacuti MIP party. In the s he assumed the Aymara honorific title of Mallku. On the Altiplano the Bolivian highlands, which are the home of the Aymaras , the Mallku on various occasions mobilised the chronic grief of the highlanders, who are always poor and always outcast.

There were efficient, carefully organised roadblocks, and men, women and children mobilised together, sometimes even with a sense of Andean wayka, that is, of collective competition to find out which community or organisational unit was stronger and more efficient. The figure of the Mallku was magnified by the mass media. Quispe also did his part in January , when the series of protests that finally brought down Mesa started.

And his radical brand of Katarism also resonates among sectors of the urban population of El Alto. Quispe is the second most salient opposition leader in Bolivia, who one has to take into account to understand the eruptions of protest in the country.

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Of course, many more protest leaders emerged during the later years in Bolivia. Remarkably, these leaders often clash and call each other every name in the book. Hence, presenting Morales and Quispe is merely to focus on two of the most prominent protest leaders. Although the role of these leaders is important and their moves are followed closely by the media, they do not of course create the protests: So who are these people who are willing to risk so much, time and again, to fill the streets with their presence?

What is the background to the disposition towards protest? In the eastern part of the country — which has a distinct ethnic make-up and political culture, a notably differently structured economy and a greater geographical proximity to the controversial gas reserves the rapid exploitation of which it hoped to benefit from — an outright counter-movement arose. On the contrary, the ongoing conflicts have created increased controversy, both in the country and in academia, regarding demands and the priorities, leadership, and regarding the range and scale of the disputed issues: In the end, however, all these qualifications only make more pertinent the question why such a large portion of the Bolivian people continued to reproduce a shaky, unstable situation, if each and every individual and specific group agreed about the troubles and insecurities it created.

Where these majorities begin to envision the governmental plans as downright threats to their livelihoods, and in addition have little confidence in their ability to change these plans by electoral means, at least one precondition for the astonishing preparedness to persist in protests seems to be fulfilled. The first of these mismatches is the simultaneous ongoing self-enclosure of politics and political parties versus the growing self-awareness of the indigenous population.

Like many other Latin American countries, over the last 20 years Bolivia has witnessed an increasingly self-confident indigenous population that is demanding an end to unofficial discrimination, an effort to lessen indigenous deprivation in such fields as education, health care, access to services, etc. In Bolivia, as in most other Latin American countries, various concessions have been won. However, the opening up of the political system did not occur, or occurred only symbolically.

This helps to account for the fact that this somewhat nasty tone prevailed in the identity politics adopted by various indigenous voices, and by Quispe in particular. A second mismatch is the already mentioned imposition of the neoliberal economic model without any genuine consultation and against the views that many Bolivians hold of the role of the state in economic development and the protection of the weak. Fragments of such a state have historically been realised in Latin America and also in Bolivia, in populist modes: Rather than being rooted in a code of universal inclusion, access to benefits derived from a system of occupational stratification.

Revenues were thus restricted to sectors that have legally defined, recognised occupations. Despite its unequal implementation, the practice has become favoured by many Latin Americans. This takes a more concrete form in the third mismatch, namely that between the political and the societal images of the risks and items that the state ought to cover.

Health risks and the risks of old age provision, because of the mechanism mentioned above, have come to be viewed as risks that the state should help to mitigate. Something similar applies to unemployment risks and protection. The state, meanwhile, is moving in the opposite direction Tironi Only a minority have formal, stable jobs and incomes. Private education, private health clinics and other privatised services are available to the wealthy; the run-down state services are there for everyone else.

In a way, this means that risks have been privatised. No-one will or can cover the risks of the poor. For the have-nots, it simply means higher risks. The referendum on the hydrocarbons issue organised by Carlos Mesa in is a case in point. Before the referendum, many protested against it, because it included no less than five, rather half-baked and complex questions. Because of this, many people distrusted the whole affair, and, rather than try to decipher the Byzantine wording of the questions, they preferred to demonstrate.

Their fear of being deceived won out over their awareness people are not that stupid that they could not answer the question about what precisely could be done about the referendum, or exactly what snake they had discovered in the grass. What many Bolivians had learned from their experiences with politics was: According to a poll carried out by Ruizmier Consulting and Research in La Paz, El Alto, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz y Tarija in March the month in which the first referendum proposals were made public , the government scored only 4.

La Patria newspaper, Oruro, Bolivia, 13 April This suggests that something beyond a single unequivocal confrontation on a specific issue was at stake: Bolivia was characterised by a political culture in which distrust between the polity and society had become the most salient feature Drake and Hershberg This distrust was strengthened in the period —05, during which numerous protests were initially ignored by the authorities, and then often repressed.

The latter element brings us to one of the baleful consequences of an illegitimate political system: Apparently, then, Bolivians perceive the current political and economic arrangements in their country as a greater risk to their livelihoods and futures, than the chancy business of resisting these arrangements on the streets. Three axes of insecurity infuse the Bolivian configuration. For many Bolivians, and especially for the indigenous Bolivians, their livelihoods are insecure both immediately and in the future. People were clearly not confident about the effects of their democratic participation.

As a result — and this is the third axis — people engaged in other, non-parliamentary and often risky activities in order to try to make a difference. Because of the endemic disbelief, Bolivia will encounter great difficulty in returning to a modus operandi in which a minimum of trust guides the sorting out of political controversy: Bolivia is an example of a worst-case scenario.

The potential for a process of democratic consolidation seemed inverted: Recent events seem to counter this assertion; after all, Evo Morales was elected president because he seemed to embody and unite both discontents and hopes. But, taking into account the —08 developments, it seems too soon to conclude that trust in democratic dialogue has triumphed over generalised frustration. The Bolivian party system and political culture have affected not only governance but also the opposition to governance.

No adequate civil interlocutor has been construed, because no adequate sparring partner at the level of political institutionality was available. Instead, the state, represented by parties and politicians, failed to perform and to convey its viewpoint, and consequently civil society failed to articulate reactions in a politically settled way, failed to enter into politics and has ended up completely disrespecting the state as such.

To state that people, in a transcendental, cross-cultural mode, always strive for security and always try to reduce the degree of insecurity, is only as revealing as it is to state that people always try to fill their stomach or always long for affection. As culturally empty affirmations, they tell us little about the meaning that people attach to these pursuits, or about the concrete shapes of threats or the strategies to assuage these threats.

Moreover, such a proclamation tends to suggest that people always strive for calm and immobility. The analysis also suggests that insecurity comes in many different shapes and forms. See Raschke , Salman It is a piece of wisdom that is often criticised nowadays: In the s and s, the Katarista movement had made a strong case for a reawakened indigenous self-consciousness. In that sense, it went against the policy of downplaying ethnic difference with which the MNR had tried to emancipate the indigenous population since the revolution. By the early s, however, the Katarista movement had dispersed and moderated.

The commitment to multiculturality, however, was partly merely an electoral strategy. A redistribution process that also exemplifies the institutional weakness of the state: It is important to keep in mind, though, that the critique of the monomaniac pursuit of neoliberalisation of the economy was not confined to the indigenous population.

Coca is a traditional crop in Bolivia, which is chewed in order to optimise energy-use and to counter tiredness, and which is used in small amounts for industrial products. Which took place in December In the run-up to the elections, Quispe and the MIP were regarded as despicable and as disqualified from government, because they ferociously expressed the discontented Indian voices in Bolivia. This is an important reminder that a diverse collective of people, struggling against the authorities but also disagreeing among themselves, produces a result that no single component of the collective initially intended.

And that, at the same time, these parties are aware of this and cannot do anything about it, or only at the cost of forsaking their own interest; or they hope fruitlessly the other party will come to the same conclusion. But the Bolivian state, the obvious entity to facilitate such a development, did not deliver — at least not until Morales took power. Violencias encubiertas en Bolivia. The Cultural Nature of Risk: Can There Be an Anthropology of Uncertainty? Hoekema eds The Challenge of Diversity: Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America.

University of Pittsburgh Press. Plattner eds The Global Resurgence of Democracy, 2nd edn. The Johns Hopkins University Press, — Struggles for Social Rights in Latin America. New York and London: Paradoxes of Social Cohesion inaugural lecture. Journal of Latin American Studies Wickham-Crowley eds What Justice?

Fighting for Fairness in Latin America. University of California Press, — UN Centre for Regional Development. Stones on the Road: Bulletin of Latin American Research 25 2: Democracy and Development in Latin America. Latin American Research Review 40 2: Sussex Academic Press, — Paradigms Lost — An Paradigmen vorbei. Investigar movimientos sociales urbanos: Journal of Urban History 30 6: Anthropology and the Study of Social Movements.

Accountability in the Transition to Democracy. Interview with Bernadette Muthien and Charlotte Bunch. Se impuso la diversidad. Democracia de alta intensidad — Apuntes para democratizar la democracia. Liberal-culturalism in Indigenous Studies. Focaal — European Journal of Anthropology Democracy in Latin America: Towards a Citizen Democracy. Abastaflor Frey and F. Poverty in Latin America: Trends — and Determinants. The central question posed here is how these people have constructed and used social and cultural repertoires to create security in a globalising world.

Competition may develop between different ideas and practices, with one form gradually undercutting and replacing the other. We shall argue that these new perceptions and practices are derived from new power constellations centred on state formation and capitalist market forces. For local Berber societies this implies that security comes to depend on transactions and institutions outside the community.

Due to economic and political insecurity local societies feel threatened in their livelihood and therefore they develop defence mechanisms. Feelings of economic and political insecurity may lead to the affirmation of autochthony, resulting in boundary-making and a sense of belonging and exclusion see also Geschiere and Nyamnjoh , Lentz and Nugent The emergence of this type of defence mechanism cannot be assumed automatically. Rather, we argue that it is mostly cohesive communities that respond in this way.

In fragmented communities there are multiple forms of social control and external forces will be dealt with in different and even in opposite ways; in disintegrated communities integrative mechanisms are absent and society is in crisis. Abbink shows this process in his study of an agro-pastoral society, the Suri people in Ethiopia. This seriously affects the social structure and cultural norms in their society.

As a result Suri culture, as a repertoire of shared values, norms and behavioural rules, is slipping away. He argues that this happens in other East African pastoral societies too. However, in communities which, for one reason or another, are still cohesive, normative systems and methods of control are well established and core notions of tradition reassert themselves more easily. As has been argued by several authors, in such communities the maintenance of or return to traditional practices is rational because it offers protection for all Salemink , Scott , Wolf The aim of this chapter is to identify the threats encountered by the Berber tribes of Beni Mguild and Ait Ndhir, and the countervailing pathways they have developed as a response in order to create security.

The Sultanate had tried to subject the tribal areas in order to gain control of trading monopolies and to levy taxes. The Sultan, as a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, had traditional religious authority. However, although the successive Sultans sometimes were able to establish garrisons, this was only for quite short periods.

The tribal system had to be cohesive and able to defend its autonomy to safeguard livelihood security. The first question is: This chapter deals with the process of state incorporation and the capitalist development of land privatisation to allow the creation of a settler colony. Rural Berber leaders collaborated with the colonial government in its endeavour to build a Berber block against the growing nationalism among the urban Arab elite.

This resulted in impoverishment of the common Berbers and the undermining of political security. The second question is: In the postcolonial period the Sultan was able to establish his hegemony in the religious and secular domain. The third question is: Do the the tribesmen remain attached to old institutions and customary land access arrangements?

Or do Muslim leaders organise a religious movement because people look for security in religious reform, and this subsequently converts to or merges into a political organisation? The tribesmen have sheep breeding as their main base of existence. They move camp between the highland summer pastures and the lowland winter pastures that can be dozens of kilometres apart. In addition they practise agriculture, most often on plots near the winter camp. From the s they started to sedentarise. The tribes developed institutions to guard their resources and to provide for security for their members.

They had viable political institutions at different levels for a flexible approach towards providing security. The tribal council divided pastures and agricultural land among the tribal segments that had participated in the conquest of the land. The tribal segment dealt with the day-to-day affairs of resource management, such as redistribution of pastureland among lineages and ensuring adequate access to water for the flocks of sheep. At the lineage level decisions were taken regarding the timing of agricultural operations and of moving camp Bruno , , Abes , The lineage was the mutual aid group on a day-to-day basis.

The lineage members trekked together to the camps and assisted each other to safeguard their flocks against raids and to ensure an adequate food supply. The lineage council solved local conflicts, imposed fines and offered assistance during life-cycle ceremonies. In addition, he advised the lineage council on religious and legal matters. Before Morocco became a French Protectorate, feuding between tribes in the Middle Atlas was the normal state of existence.

The feuding and associated feelings of honour and combativeness originated in the pastoral economy. Because there were no clear boundaries of pastures and ownership of flocks, men had to assert their influence in order to maintain access to the resources. Feuding often disrupted economic life because the agricultural activities stagnated. Harris, a correspondent of the London Times and an agent of the British government, observed: Although the tribes enumerated above [Gerwan, Ait Ndhir and Beni Mguild] came from the same stock and are closely allied, forming a distinct branch of the Berber race in Morocco, it must by no means be thought that they live at peace among themselves.

Feuding could involve a decrease in the male population; therefore men from neighbouring tribes were allowed to settle down in a community if they could find a protector. The stranger would sacrifice a sheep at the door of his intended protector as an entreaty; this ceremony was called tamghrouste. If the man accepted the offering he became the guardian of the stranger. The ceremony offered dispossessed individuals and their families an opportunity to secure a livelihood.

Due to their sense of combativeness and honour, it was difficult for these tribes to create peaceful alliances with neighbouring tribes. As has been demonstrated by Gellner , holy men played a central religious role, and a political role as well. These holy men were descendants of saints and had much prestige due to their sanctity baraka.

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Some claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammed and were conceived as having inherited baraka as well; this group of holy men was called shorfa. They helped make peace, arrange the payment of blood money and provided assistance to traders and visitors travelling under their protection. As compensation, the tribesmen granted them land or provided for a shepherd. The village of Zaouia Ifrane in the Beni Mguild area conforms with the classical example of a shorfa group as described by Gellner: They form the oldest settlement of the tribal segment of the Ait Abdi.

When the Ait Abdi arrived they were not chased away; this was because the village was respected being a place of Koran learning. The graveyards of the ancestors served as neutral grounds for negotiation during times of conflict, while the descendants themselves were held in great esteem and, apart from some agricultural and pastoral activities, lived from gifts and sacrifices from visiting Berbers see also Bakker From that time onwards, this Alaoui dynasty tried to subdue the tribal areas, in order to monopolise toll-money, taxes and trading monopolies.

The holiness of the Sultans did not imply that their secular authority was accepted when the autonomy of the Beni Mguild and Ait Ndhir was at stake. These tribesmen regularly attacked the army of the Sultan. The authority of the provincial governors appointed by the Sultan was weak. Most often they were recruited from among the tribesmen and took their authority not from the Sultan but from the latter Harris The conclusion is that the Beni Mguild and the Ait Ndhir formed tribal societies, in which cohesion was maintained through collective ownership of land and a decentralised and flexible political organisation.

Autonomy was maintained by force if necessary, while saintly families were looked to for mediation. People from elsewhere were allowed to settle to revitalise tribal society. However, it took the French army until to defeat the tribes of the Middle and Central Atlas, who vigorously defended their autonomy. After the conquest, the territories of the Beni Mguild and Ait Ndhir became a military region under a French military officer who was assisted by a caid, a local tribal leader willing to cooperate with the French authorities.

Civil legal affairs were dealt by a tribal judiciary council composed of members of the tribal segment council under the supervision of a French official. Penal affairs remained under the courts of the Sultan, but the French military officer and the caid dealt with many cases informally. Immediately after the First World War there was a massive influx of immigrants from France, all hungry for land. This posed a problem for the French authorities because, in most of Morocco, land was held as collective property and thus was deemed inalienable. Men who had cleared land for cultivation had only permanent usufruct land: However, land titles were not registered due to absence of judges and notaries in the rural areas Bendaoud Land titles could then be registered at the land registry office or the tribal judiciary council.

Among the Beni Mguild, land grabbing by colons and traders from Fez and Meknes occurred too: The authority of the administration over land became a powerful weapon for the punishment of those who were hostile to the regime and the reward for those who cooperated. Many caids and their assistants khalifas, shaykhs collaborated with the French authorities to enrich themselves to the detriment of common tribesmen.

The enforcement of private property and the stealing of collective land weakened the Berber institutions. The tribal leaders had become corrupted due to collaboration with the French administration. The councils of the lineage and tribal segment lost authority because their control over land had been curtailed by force. Colons and Moroccans from elsewhere could settle independently, without performing the ceremony of tamghrouste by which foreigners were integrated in Berber society. As a result this ceremony fell into disuse.

Newcomers seeking to work as labourers for the Berber farmers simply became labourers for the Berber farmers. During the Protectorate, the role of the brotherhood lodges and saintly families as arbitrators had also weakened because now the French administration and collaborating caids were fully in command. Later on, the saintly families started to resist the colonial administration. As stated by Vinogradov: It is clear from the above that during the colonial period both tribes experienced great economic insecurity due to exploitation by French colons, Arab merchants and tribal leaders.

Forced introduction of private property resulted in the development of a class of rich farmers, among them tribal leaders, and the weakening of the tribal councils and cohesion. Directly after independence in a hegemonic state was created. As well as representing secular authority in Morocco, the Sultan is, as the representative of the shorfa, the head of the Islamic community too: This had been included in the constitution of and However, it was especially under King Hassan II that religious leadership was emphasised by the ceremony of alliance baya through a communication of 12 February of the Royal Protocol Department of the Palace.

This ceremony reproduces the pact that was traditionally established between representatives of a given tribe and the holy lineage they had appointed as their permanent arbitrator Morsy High officials, members of parliament, political leaders, guardians of mosques, brilliant students and young investors — all selected by the administration — present themselves. They wear the sacred and unifying white robes, and they bow four times and together call for the divine grace of His Majesty, while the servants of the Palace, wearing red conical hats, call out, giving them the message of the blessing of the Sovereign.

This is an occasion for the king to underline his traditional role, not only as head of the state but also as the religious leader who participates in sacred performances. In this situation actors in the religious periphery have hardly any power left. At present the mosque is under heavy surveillance. It is the Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs that appoints imams, after consultation with the regional council of scholars in Islam, which itself is supervised by the Ministry of Interior.

Since the decree of March , endowments to the mosque habous are managed by the state in the person of an official of the Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs instead of by the community itself. As a consequence, in the research area the community members have ceased their endowments because of fraudulent practices and loss of control by the community see also Dilrosun Famous saints receive state support and media coverage, among others Moulay Idriss in Fez, or Moulay Idriss of the Zerhoun.

Royal gifts are bestowed on their shrines and sometimes members of the royal families grant them visits at the occasion of the annual festival of the saint. The Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs keeps an eye on local lodges and saintly families, and permission must be asked to organise the yearly pilgrimage and to improve the upkeep of the shrine.

Since independence, but especially since , this ministry has put a stop to the number of people claiming to be of a saintly family. Below follows an example in the research area. It was disappointing that they had lost the paper because they had to deliver to Rabat.

Before independence we used to have a paper where Dada Moussa came from — it was from the region of Fes and he was a sherif Idrisside — and also who his descendants were. You know, it was a complete family tree. But then it was seized by the King and he never returned it to us. The central government decided that access to tribal land was no longer a matter for the lineage council and traditional overseers but for the government.

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From now on it was the caid and the governor who decided who had access to the commons. Mostly this meant that immigrants who had stayed at least one generation in the area were allowed access to the commons, although the original settlers did not agree with this at all Venema This also meant that forests in the area were regularly closed for grazing in order to allow the king and his friends to have hunting parties. Until the herders regularly set fire to parts of the forest as protest against this restriction on securing a livelihood. As recounted by locals, the police always responded by rounding up several people in randomly selected villages and putting them in jail for several days.

The conclusion is that in the postcolonial period the central state was hegemonic in the religious field as is exemplified in the ceremony of baya. So the mosque became controlled by the state, and the mosque as a mutual aid institution was undermined. In the secular field, the state as a hegemonic actor has created insecurity by allowing strangers access to land. As will be shown below, the Beni Mguild and the Ait Ndhir developed ways of resistance towards the central state.

The elected representatives are inclined to endorse whatever the government wants endorsed, especially in the rural areas. There is no trust at all in the elections because it is generally believed that votes can be bought. Since there are elections there is no trust in the elected members. Those elected in the rural councils are just profiteers and even the baraka has diminished in the village. And this is why the members of the jemaa lineage council believe they can best solve the problems among themselves. And if the jemaa decides to take matters into their hands they have to solve the problems whatever the conditions are.

Caids come and go, so it is better that we continue our work. We are the ones who know who has the right to graze their cattle and we know the importance of the tribe to manage our affairs and not a youngster at the desk of his office who is going to guide us with papers and pencil. The village council has a watchman naib recruited to supervise access to and use of the collective pastures.

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