Custom and the Ambivalent Romance of Community

Abstract

This chapter presents the three main fieldwork sites by relating how different groups' efforts to reimagine communal governance simultaneously drew on and challenged customary tenure practices. As migration and other changes transformed agrarian rurality in the region, the chapter argues that customary land tenure remained a key site for contesting these historical inequalities and negotiating new approaches to communal governance. The chapter also chronicles what changed between the time Qlaʿa's notables rejected the French request to turn the village path into a road and the time, nearly a century later, when the residents of el Harte began to use that same path to transport their goods to market. The micropolitics of the path offer a window on the larger transformations throughout the Mgoun Valley. By considering the different ways residents of the valley invoked customary tenure in their struggles over collective life, the chapter complicates a common perception that integration into capitalist markets represents a “powerful solvent of the ties that connect locale and 'community'.”