Georgetown University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Arab Studies
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BLED, SWEAT, AND TEARS: YOUTHHOOD, RURAL LIVELIHOODS, AND SPATIO- TEMPORAL PRECARITY IN THE MOROCCAN COUNTRYSIDE A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Arab Studies By David C. Balgley, B.A. Washington, D.C. April 7, 2020 Copyright 2020 by David C. Balgley All Rights Reserved ii BLED, SWEAT, AND TEARS: YOUTHHOOD, RURAL LIVELIHOODS, AND SPATIO- TEMPORAL PRECARITY IN THE MOROCCAN COUNTRYSIDE David C. Balgley, B.A. Thesis Advisor: Fida Adely, Ph.D. ABSTRACT This thesis addresses the experience of male youth living in the rural Gharb region of northwestern Morocco through the lens of livelihood practices and aspirations. Drawing on three months of ethnographic research in seven rural communities, I use a spatio-temporal framework to explore how youth emerged as a relevant social category in the countryside, the current economic practices that constitute youth as a period of life, and the ways in which rural youth affectively relate to their own futures. I argue that processes of agrarian change, including land scarcity, shifting livelihood possibilities, and state economic reforms have transformed the spatial and temporal experiences of young people, with implications for youthhood, conceptions of rural identity, and notions of precarity. The combination of rising material expectations and structural limitations on feasible livelihoods have constituted youthhood as an enduring social category in the countryside. This process has pressured youth to engage in economic activities outside of their place of origin, marking an expansion of human mobility within Morocco. However, youth maintain close ties to their place of origin by engaging in itinerant labor patterns that are predicated on periodic returns to the community in which they grew up. The mobility of youth interacts with the emergence of other mobilities including flows of capital, commodities, and the spread of technologies such as smartphones that facilitate the re-spatialization of socio- economic life and the blurring of urban/rural boundaries. At the same time, youth see these livelihood practices as insufficient to gain the capital necessary to transition to social adulthood iii because of their precarious labor positionality. While the aspirations of young rural men demonstrate a deep connection to place and a normative desire to reproduce households in their villages of origin, youth articulate a disconnect between the livelihood practices they can access and the aspirations that they hold. The gap between material realities and imagined futures produces an atmosphere of affective precarity, as youth in the Gharb are deeply uncertain that structural pathways exist for them to build stable lives and become adult members of their communities. As a result, despite significant spatial mobility, youth experience a deep sense of temporal immobility as their future aspirations perpetually recede out of reach. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A writing project of this magnitude can be an intensely solitary process, and I am grateful to the many people who generously provided personal support, scholarly critiques, and helpful advice. First, I would like to thank Fida Adely and Karen Rignall, who respectively served as my thesis advisor and reader, for their insightful suggestions and encouragement during my research and writing. My fellow thesis writers, Emma Tveit and Tariq Adely, helped shape this project into its current form over the course of numerous discussions. Mimi Kirk, who ran our thesis workshop, is the kindest and most thoughtful overseer one could wish for to stay on track through each iteration of the drafting and editing process. Sarah Wagner and Dylan Baun provided helpful feedback on an earlier version of Chapter 3 and prompted me to further explore the literature on temporality and youth studies. Ammar Hamdache generously shared his deep knowledge of the Gharb’s history with me, and gently directed me to critically think through the diverse implications of agrarian change in Morocco. I also acknowledge the financial support I received from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies for my summer fieldwork, as well as the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship that gave me the freedom to focus on writing. Finally, I am immensely grateful to all the people I met in the course of my fieldwork, many of whom opened their homes to me and patiently answered my numerous questions. Without their generosity and willingness to share their lives with me, no amount of labor on my part could have materialized this project. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ...................................................................................................................................1 Theoretical Framework ............................................................................................................8 Methodology ..........................................................................................................................17 Chapter Synopses ...................................................................................................................30 Chapter 1: A Time and Place for Agrarian Change ....................................................................32 Place, Narrative, and Agrarian Political Economy ................................................................41 Rural Notables and Inherited Legacies ..................................................................................44 The Rise and Fall of Statism ..................................................................................................49 Localizing Neoliberalism .......................................................................................................57 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................59 Chapter 2: The Economic Practices of Rural Youth ...................................................................61 Situating Youth Labor............................................................................................................66 Mobility, Space, and Rural Identity .......................................................................................71 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................79 Chapter 3: Aspirations, Place Connection, and Future Affects .................................................81 Youth Aspirations and Transitions ........................................................................................83 Building a House, Starting a Business ...................................................................................86 The Spatio-Temporality of Place Connection........................................................................94 Affective Precarity and the Future .......................................................................................102 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................107 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................110 References .................................................................................................................................115 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The Gharb region ........................................................................................................ 19 Figure 2. A state-owned tertiary irrigation canal ....................................................................... 34 Figure 3. Repairing a cracked canal ........................................................................................... 35 Figure 4. A large private agro-business ..................................................................................... 37 Figure 5. Collective land near Dar Gueddari ............................................................................. 38 Figure 6. A closed state-run facility for cattle feed production ................................................. 51 Figure 7. Abandoned canal segment replacements .................................................................... 52 Figure 8. A decaying open-air storage facility........................................................................... 52 vii INTRODUCTION “Youth have no interest in agriculture, and most of them want to go to cities. They see how their parents and grandparents struggle to farm and make a livelihood off their land – how can young people see this and want the same life?” In July 2018, I heard this while interviewing an elected representative of a lineage group with rights to collective land in the Gharb region, roughly 100 kilometers northeast of the capital city of Rabat. This was a familiar narrative to me after nearly eleven months of speaking with farmers from over 30 communities with collective land rights in the Gharb. As I interviewed farmers – who were primarily older men – I repeatedly heard about the difficulties that their sons and grandsons faced in finding stable livelihoods. Some emphasized that youth no longer had a connection with the land of their forefathers. Others stressed that youth wanted to migrate, either to cities or Europe. Many farmers believed that youth would sell their land once