"The Place of Language: Song, Talk and Land in Southwestern Morocco" by Katherine E. Hoffman

Katherine E. Hoffman

Deposited 2000

Abstract
This dissertation explores the roles of language and place in the formation and representation of social identity among Ishelhin (Tashelhit Berber speakers) in Southwestern Morocco. Drawing on sociological practice theory and anthropological approaches to language ideology, I argue that identity is situated not only in specific places but in individuals' relations to places, as migrant landowners, wage laborers, or unpaid female agricultural workers. For people who ground their fortunes less explicitly in certain places, the concept of land becomes symbolically loaded. The meanings with which Ishelhin endow land are materially, demographically, and discursively constructed. Indigenous systems of naming and placing people in the landscape differ from those of the state administration which increasingly reorganizes rural roads, markets, and schools. Community boundaries and social identity are themes expressed in sung poetry, both rural-dwelling women's local tizrarin genre and migrant men's mass-mediated tinddamin song. In the Souss Plains, Ishelhin sing in Arabic, reflecting these wage laborers' broader political economy of accommodation with their Arabic-speaking neighbors. Advocates for Tashelhit linguistic parity with Arabic employ the two-fold approach of lexical preservation and enrichment in broadcast and print representations of Tashelhit. As people and goods move between town and country, and among rural areas, women and men negotiate media representations, commercial cassette music, and more indigenous verbal expressive forms. The resulting dynamic is a tension between social identity organized around places (in their social relations) and achieved in part through language, and social identity articulated in terms of language itself—language choices, language practices, and language ideologies. In both configurations, Ishelhin make strong associations between social identity and residence patterns, in which urban-dwelling men earn the money while mountain-dwelling women physically and symbolically maintain the homelands. Individuals disagree, however, over whether Tashelhit language is compatible with modernity or rather is a remnant of the past. In this study of contemporary Tashelhit speakers, I link together material and ideological life to unpack what Ishelhin express as the character of places, the boundaries of communities, and the contours of Tashelhit.