NOSTALGIC LIVES: MEMORY and PLACE in SIDI IFNI a Dissertation
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NOSTALGIC LIVES: MEMORY AND PLACE IN SIDI IFNI A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Annarose Yamuna Pandey February 2010 © 2010 Annarose Yamuna Pandey NOSTALGIC LIVES: MEMORY AND PLACE IN SIDI IFNI Annarose Yamuna Pandey, Ph. D. Cornell University 2010 This dissertation is about the role of space and memory in Sidi Ifni, Morocco. Through analysis of stories I was told during my stay, I argue that multiple temporal frameworks can coexist in the present as a way of reproducing the past and re-conceptualizing the future. These stories are the product of a dialectic that is itself structured by such social structures as kinship and gender. I use personal accounts of townspeople to discuss the ways that social identity is produced and contextualized in this town. Sidi Ifni’s history is located in the nexus of Moroccan nationalist goals, Spanish colonial ideals, and local Berber ways of life. Beginning with nostalgic memories of a particular Spanish woman, Maria, I work to show the ways that people’s imaginings of the past are quite present in quotidian life. The second chapter is an exploration of the construction of “otherness” in the context of multiple readings of history and memory. People’s control of authority and power is reproduced through the work they do to establish meaning and memory. The third chapter is concerned with a polyvocal historical account of Sidi Ifni’s relationship to the Western Sahara. King Hassan II’s claim to “Greater Morocco” was in direct opposition to Franco’s notion of a Spanish “embrace of Africa”. Sidi Ifni was the center of these competing nationalist ideologies. People’s stories about the war and its ongoing presence in lives frames this chapter. The fourth chapter turns to a more detailed discussion of the connections between gender, kinship and place. These are shown to be mutually constitutive and located in the myriad representations of propriety and historicity found in Sidi Ifni. The conclusion synthesizes the dominant themes of the dissertation: place, memory and storytelling. I argue that through nostalgia, the processes of daily life come to have meaning in Sidi Ifni. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Annarose Pandey received her B.A. in Social Anthropology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1995. She then attended the University of Toronto’s M.A. program in Social Anthropology. After completing this degree she moved to Ithaca to attend Cornell University in the Department of Anthropology. In 2001, she received a Fulbright Islamic Civilizations Grant to do her fieldwork in Sidi Ifni, Morocco. Upon returning from the field, Annarose returned to Portland, Oregon where she earned an M.A.T. degree from Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education. She has been working at Westview High School teaching courses including Social Anthropology since 2006. iii This dissertation is dedicated to Professor Gail Kelly and Professor Thomas Kirsch. I would not have loved learning as much were it not for them. As Professor Kirsch always said when he finished his comments on my papers, “Onwards and Upwards!” iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research for this dissertation was funded by the Fulbright Islamic Civilizations Grant, the Mario Einaudi Center at Cornell University and the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. I would also like to especially thank the Department of Anthropology for their patience with me in this process. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Introduction: The Imponderabilia of Sidi Ifni 1 Chapter One: Nostalgic Space and Memories of Maria 33 Chapter Two: Constructing Otherness: The Politics of Memory 66 Chapter Three: On “Greatness” and the “Embrace of Africa” 92 Chapter Four: Gender, Kinship and Space 139 Conclusion: When Places and Memories Coalesce 190 Appendix I: Images 210 Appendix 2: List of Personages 217 Bibliography 219 Glossary 228 vi INTRODUCTION THE IMPONDERABILIA OF SIDI IFNI “Si l’on devait decrire Sidi Ifni aujourd’hui en quelques lignes, on pourrait dire que c’est une ville a l’abandon, peuplee de vieux, que vivent des pensions versees par L’Etat espagnol” with the footnote that “C’est, le trait la sensation qu’ont les etrangers en arrivant” (Souali 2001: 22). “If one had to describe Sidi Ifni today in a few words, one could say that it is an abandoned town, peopled by the elderly, who live on retirements paid by the Spanish state”… “This is the sensation which strangers have on arrival” (Souali 2001: 22). During my fieldwork in Sidi Ifni, Morocco I was told that a “town without a history is not a town at all.” The history of a town transforms it from a “space” to a “place” that has meaning, holds experiences and is part of people’s memories, daily lives and sense of the future. There is a story about two physicists, Bohr and Heisenberg, who visited Kronenberg Castle. Bohr apparently asked Heisenberg, “Isn’t it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here” (Tuan 1977: 4)? Obviously the castle itself doesn’t change, only our perception of it. But this implies that in meaningful ways, it is a different castle for those who know its past than for those who do not. This dissertation is about Sidi Ifni, Morocco. It is about those aspects of the past, nostalgically remembered today, that make the town a different place for those who know its past than for those who do not. 1 I arrived in Morocco on September 6, 2001. A few days later the Twin Towers were hit and I became entirely too conspicuous. At the time I was living in Rabat, the capital city, with a group of Fulbright grantees while attending an intensive Moroccan Arabic course. I was walking through the medina when I saw that people were crowded around those storefronts that had radios. By the time I got to the school, a television was set up and people were crying. As many others have also said, my first impression was that I was watching a bad movie. For the rest of the week wherever I went, people would stop and ask me if my family was healthy, if everything was ok. Even the groups of women in the local hammam (bath house) would strike up conversations whereas previously there had been only stares and smiles between us. Meanwhile, the covers of every newspaper showed the towers and angry, hurt faces. By October, when the Americans started bombing Afghanistan, similarly angry and hurt faces were being turned towards me. It was at this time that I left for the south of Morocco to Sidi Ifni, a place I had been before and had found charming. Before turning to a theoretical presentation of the arguments which frame my argument, I think it is important to set the scene of Sidi Ifni. This approach is itself motivated by a theory of the importance of place and space. As Stewart and Strathern note, “[E]thnographers have realized from their field experiences how perceptions of and values attached to landscape encode values and fix memories to places that become sites of historical reality” (Stewart and Strathern 2003: 1). The role of place is not to be taken for granted. To this end Hirsch writes of anthropological perspectives of place, “…despite its ubiquity it has remained largely unproblematized” (Hirsch 1995: 1). I present and problematize the space of Sidi Ifni throughout this 2 dissertation drawing upon classical anthropological theory. In addition, I have drawn upon the work of cultural geographers whose insights bring another dimension to my analysis. Sidi Ifni as it is experienced now and as it is remembered are salient aspects of people’s social identities. “These expressions of identity are not reified or locked in time but are historically positioned in the dynamics of temporal space” (ibid.). Much of my dissertation is based upon the theory that social constructions of “temporal space” reflect people’s conceptions of their present life and potential futures. Temporal space is meant to represent the ways that spaces take on meanings that change over time. Such meanings in turn shape the perception of space in its past as well as future iterations. I want to avoid the common misrepresentation of space, which relies upon purely contemporary projections of identity. This is in keeping with Stewart and Strathern’s concern that while the majority of ethnographic studies begin with the setting of place in a certain time, most anthropologists neglect the significance of historical time. As they write,“…one of the criticisms of some ethnographic studies has been a lack of historicity in representation and of details on the intersubjectivity of the peoples being discussed” (ibid.). While those whose explicit focus is historical anthropology certainly engage in questions of historicity, this approach remains taken for granted in much of contemporary anthropology. Such attention to history must be contextualized in the present lives of those whose community is being presented. My access into these representations of social life was primarily through archival documents, interviews and stories. The history of Sidi Ifni as a place is linked to its founding marabout, or Sufi saint. I was told by many who had always lived in the town that it was 3 named after the marabout (Sufi religious figure) Sidi Ali Ifni who was known and respected for his knowledge of the Qur’an. Another story of Sidi Ali Ifni was that he had fought against the Portuguese in the “moyen age”. The third story was that Ifni, a Berber name, refers to the water source (Ain Ifni), which is 6 km up from the Ifni River (Souali: 2001).