Katherine E. Hoffman

Berber Law by French Means: Customary Courts in the Moroccan Hinterlands, 1930-1956

As the French conquered Muslim lands in their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century quest for empire, they encountered multiple and sometimes mixed judicial systems among the native populations. In many places, legal codes were shaped by either fiqh , meaning Islamic law, one component of which is customary law, or by non-Islamic custom, or some combination of the two. To administer native justice in French colonies and protectorates, officials sorted through this multiplicity in order to standardize procedures, principles, and punishments. The standardization of customary law codes, whether written or oral prior to submission to the makhzan (the central Moroccan government, lit. “storehouse”) under the Protectorate, required that French officials both maintain pre-contact codes and create new institutions to administer and monitor them. Through new judicial bureaucracies, the French transformed indigenous law. Customary law was a “residual category” in the sense that it consisted of what remained after colonial powers ferreted out what they considered morally offensive and politically objectionable. Legal codification involved what Vincent calls “a compromise between those recognized as leading elements in indigenous societies and the colonial administrators who co-opted them.” Yet customary law, “if understood as allowing local people to do their own cultural ‘thing,’ should also be understood to have been a carefully restricted fragment of ‘tradition.’” This tradition when manifest as customary law “implies that there is a different kind of law with which it can be contrasted,” making customary law “the ongoing product of encounters between subordinate local political entities and dominant overarching ones.” In such encounters the distinction made between custom and law has long preoccupied legal historians, as well as anthropologists, colonial administrators, and importantly, lay people. Throughout French African colonies and protectorates, this distinction was key to the French usurpation of social institutions, as was true in British overseas territories as well.

Administering identities: state decentralisation and local identification in Morocco

In Morocco, the contemporary emphasis on regionalisation and increased tolerance for ethnolinguistic diversity belie state attempts to dissipate pre‐Independence ‘tribal’ allegiances among citizens for whom they hold sway. Ever‐refined rural administrative boundaries and the new place names that accompany them suggest new models for group organisation ‐ challenging indigenous understandings about the links between different locations, and about links between people and places. This article argues that Tashelhit speakers of the Souss region engage in information management by selectively revealing and concealing personal information, thus challenging state attempts to eliminate family and ‘tribe’ from place and personal names. Civil registries, school records, and national identity cards document the discrepancies between indigenous and state naming practices, raising difficulties for citizens who must increasingly rely on documents over oral testimony to pursue legal and administrative ends.

Culture as text: hazards and possibilities of Geertz's literary/literacy metaphor

This paper considers the conceptual, ethnographic, ethical, and methodological implications of Geertzs influential metaphors of culture as ‘text’ and of fieldwork as ‘reading.’ In Morocco, one of Geertzs two long-term field sites, large segments of the rural population, Berber-speaking even more than Arabic-speaking, are unschooled and nonliterate. Womens rich expressive culture, including religious culture, is oral. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among Tashelhit-speaking Berber women in southwestern Morocco, I consider the language ideologies that shape womens attitudes toward the production and dissemination of religious oral texts. These ideologies complicate the supposed transparency of Geertzs literary/literacy metaphor. The paper reconsiders the possibilities of this metaphor for the anthropology of language, and locates Geertzs contribution and critical responses to it within the history of ideas and ethics shaping ethnographic research.