(2020) Archival Ethnography in the Customary Courts: Legal and Linguistic Pluralism under the French Protectorate (original) (raw)
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This study discusses how scripts, or orthographies, are selected based on social and ideological factors rather than linguistic and scientific grounds. A Moroccan government committee was appointed in 2003 to determine whether Latin, Arabic, or Tifinagh scripts should codify Amazigh/Berber. Tifinagh was officially selected, stirring debates between different groups with opposing views and complex affiliations. Informed by theories of language ideologies, this article examines the ideological motivations for the selection of Amazigh script, and investigates the social implications of Amazigh codification. This study shows that despite the official decision to support Tifinagh, the script issue is far from settled, given enduring questions of identity, political ideology, and linguistic differentiation. The outcome of this study has implications for other communities facing similar decisions and competing script choices.
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Kabylia, a Berber-speaking region in north-eastern Algeria, looks back on a long tradition of customary law. Yet despite extensive nineteenth-century interest in these law-codes, few recent study of these codes exist, as their study has been subordinated to that of local ‘practices’. Yet even if customary law codes do not necessarily provide accurate descriptions of local actions, they nevertheless give insights into notions of legitimacy, justice and the relation of villages to the outside and to the various bodies of legal knowledge within which they evolve. Moreover, the act of law-making as such appears as fundamental to the constitution and maintenance of community, both in the nineteenth century and, within rapidly changing socio-political contexts, today. Indeed, the last set of village codes in the area was issued in the troubles decades of the 1990s. Local law codes, then, appear as more than just a way of solving conflict; rather, they are a fundamental feature of the ongoing process of the making and maintaining of villages as moral communities.
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The Equality and Reconciliation Commission (IER: Instance Equit. et Reconciliation), created in Morocco in 2006, aims to “establish the truth about several historical facts,” from the date of Moroccan independence, 1956, to the end of the reign of Hassan II, 1999. Faced with a lack of official archives, the IER proceeded to archive recently published prison books. The European Union made a significant contribution to setting up the ERC, both on a logistical and financial level. After Morocco became the first North African country to be granted “advanced status” by the EU, the Union stepped up its cooperation with the ERC. In 2009, Morocco and the EU signed a financing convention aimed “at reinforcing the wider process of democratic transition in Morocco” and “supporting the creation of a working group on history, memory and archives established by the CCDH [Conseil Consultatif des droits de l’Homme] . . . to consider the conservation of archives and the popularization and diffusion of knowledge in contemporary history.” In the course of their investigations, and faced with the absence of “official archives for the years of lead,” the ERC recommended adopting a new law regarding national archives that would impose an “obligation for public bodies . . . to preserve all documents attesting to their actions.” Since then, the ERC has set out to collect “all declarations and witness accounts liable to help in the quest for truth.” It has, for instance, archived all prison literature published in Morocco. This raises a number of questions: How did prison stories shift from the status of literary compositions to that of archives? How has the ERC transformed them into historical documents? In what ways has the EU, and especially France, the former colonial power, participated in the archiving process, and how has it affected local historical production? How is the relationship between “witness accounts,” “narratives,” and “archives” understood and deployed by the different social actors who make use of it (ERC, authors, editors, readers), and why do they use this terminology? And finally, what is the significance for authors of their works becoming archives? These questions lie at the heart of this article, which explores the transformation of prison writings into archives and the effects of the EU’s interventions in this process.