Episode 224: Squaring the Circle: Individual Rights and Collective Property in Rural Morocco

This project examined changing norms regarding pooling and material obligation within Moroccan households and families. It does so in the midst of a political economic shift from agrarian production to a mix of informal wage labor and rentier/remittance economies, one with profound influence on practices of collective pooling in villages and in families. How have changes in individual access to income influenced how people share wealth and risk, and how they allocate these shared resources? I examined divergent understandings of a moral and ethical obligation to contribute to shared pools, and to provide for others in two collective contexts: rangeland commons and household budgets. Shared ownership of collective grazing commons has become a live issue in many communities in the Middle Atlas Mountains as rights to these lands became, for the first time, alienable to outside investors in 2019. Highly-contested shifts in the management of grazing commons, then, led to numerous discussions as to how best to ‘invest’ in these lands so that all rightsholders might benefit, bringing to the fore many debates regarding equity. These debates indexed a number of tensions regarding social mobility and the possibility of a secure livelihood in this shifting political economic context, as well as questions of equity in allocation of rights and shares of the collective pie. My research examined these debates and the sometimes contradictory logics of distributive politics and collective obligation, drawing out tensions between logics of egalitarian inheritance rights, those of ‘earning’ a share through collective participation or presence, and those based on need.   At the same time, I explored the ramifications of these economic shifts on household economics, considering parallel but markedly distinct tensions regarding resource allocation, governance, and obligation within families, themselves spaces of collective pooling. While agropastoralist livelihoods encouraged certain kinds of material and labor pooling within households, an increase in wage labor and in reliance on outmigration and remittances has reconfigured norms of familial cohabitation, sharing of resources, and material provision locally. What’s more, available income streams are increasingly available to those who might not historically have been responsible for providing for their natal families (like adult daughters, and unmarried children who have migrated away), reshaping the material basis of family relations, and the boundaries of (patriarchal) family structures. In addition to public debates regarding equitable governance and allocation of commonwealth, then, this research examines similar tensions within families, with similar tensions relative obligation based on individual ‘earnings’ models, need, or gendered and generational norms of dependance. I examined, then, how these changing economic realities were taken up within collective practices of pooling and allocation, reconfiguring individual relations of provisioning, obligation, and ownership.

Amelia Burke is a PhD candidate in Anthropology & History at the University of Michigan. She has worked since 2015 in the Middle Atlas mountains of Morocco, where her research centers on the management, access, and ‘ownership’ of collectively-held resources, looking at practices of redistribution of wealth and labor through inherited access - to grazing commons and family inheritance. She relies upon oral historical, archival, and ethnographic approaches to examine changes to communal land management, household labor regimes, and norms of individual and collective obligation. She uses these empirical materials to consider shifting practices of distributive politics and the navigation of inequality within spaces of collective belonging, both among rangeland rights-holders and within families. She has taught in the Anthropology, History of the Middle East and North Africa, and Women’s Studies.

This episode was recorded on January 12, 2023, at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM). 

Recorded and edited by: Abdelbaar Mounadi Idrissi, Outreach Director at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM).