An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis By Karen E. Rignall, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2021. pp. 264. 125$ (hb). ISBN: 9781501756122

Abstract

What does it mean to live a rural life in Morocco? How do farmers participate in rural politics? How does the transformation of peasant farming inform us about rural life's social and political organization? These central questions guide Karen E. Rignall's book An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and the Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis. At the heart of the argument, Rignall shows how rural dwellers invented new rurality (p. 5) to adjust to the new reality (global circuits of capital and labour) facing rural life. Within this, land and farming became the object of their struggle. An Elusive Common invites the reader to examine southeast Morocco's agrarian political and social transformation over the last century. Furthermore, Rignall attempts to look at the ways in which the integration of southeast Morocco into global circuits of capital, the impact of colonialism on the political landscape, and labour out-migration disorganized the racialized system of farming and sharecropping.

Impressively, the book relies upon 1 year of fieldwork from December 2009 until December 2010 in three villages in the Mgoun Valley in southeast Morocco (viz. El Harte, Rbat and Imzline, and El Bour n'Ait Yayha) and uses qualitative and quantitative methods. The quantitative approach consisted of a survey of 306 households in 2014. At the same time, the qualitative method involves a rich ethnography of land, labour, and community in the field sites, including testimonies of southeast Morocco's oasis inhabitants and the organization of their rural community. This combination of qualitative and quantitative methods has enriched the book's argument.

The first chapter aims to set the scene of Morocco's customary law and land tenure in Rignall's three main fieldwork sites: El Harte, Rbat and Imzline, and El Bour n'Ait Yayha. These three sites show how inhabitants use customary law in their struggles. The first part of chapter one provides an overview of customary governance and its relationship to the legal regime in which the jma'a (community) and individuals own the land. Rignall demonstrates how colonial authority designed bureaucratic and legal opacity regarding the governance of land tenure and collective land, which the post-colonial states inherited. These legal ambiguities, Rignall argues, were used by the three communities to make their claims over land. At the same time, the author makes a claim against the romanticization of customs and the community by showing how labour migration to Europe at the beginning of the 1960s produced a new social and economic landscape. Indeed, through remittances, sharecroppers were able to transition to landowners and develop commercial agriculture. Thus, capital accumulation, in this case, allowed marginalized inhabitants of southeast Morocco to gain upward mobility and “secure their autonomy” (p. 76).

The Mgoun Valley is not limited to its fields of roses. Indeed, at the edge of the region are former French barracks built in adobe, where hundreds of political prisoners were held during the 1970s and 1980s. Rignall starts this chapter by describing the prison in Kelaat M'gouna and its political pluralism “as a metaphor for this plural political landscape, marking the changing presence of the state and the unique relationship of rural areas like the Mgoun Valley to larger national debates about political participation and government accountability” (p. 78). From this, the author uses an ethnography of everyday politics to focus on “political pluralism” and how it shaped southeast Morocco's legal land regimes. Through the Mgoun Valley's political pluralism, Rignall looks at how peasants and communities engage with the state. Rignall defines political pluralism as “the coexistence, even constitution, of different institutions and practices of governing authority”. Rather than looking at it as peasants versus the state, it wants to explore how groups negotiate their relationship with the state. Countering James Scott's argument, she claims that the community of the oasis engages in “a pragmatic willingness to move between different sites of political authority, including the central state, rather than a desire to avoid incorporation” (p. 79). Rignall demonstrates how civil society actors use bureaucratic manoeuvring to create “real ethical spaces” and make a political claim over the land.

Through the mobilization of the residents of Ichihn and El Bour n'ait Yahya, who organized an occupation to protest the dispossession of their communal land, Rignall demonstrates in chapter three how people in southeast Morocco created a new politics of the common. Rignall explains that residents resist the ongoing privatization of their lands by dividing and making individual claims on the land. By doing this, the residents re-forged a new understanding of the commons. In the post-colonial era, Moroccan authorities used customary tenure and tribal authorities to facilitate the expropriation of collectively owned lands. Here, Rignall shows how land “was a strategic terrain through which various groups contested privilege, rights and belonging” (p. 125). In this process, land divisions signalled a new common where the participants in these mobilisations claimed: “new communal attachments that challenged both the state's appropriation of collective lands and historical iniquities embedded in Mgouni social relations” (p. 127). Rignall argued that for the inhabitants of the Mgoun Valley, rallying for land division rights did not entail dismantling and atomising communal land. Rather, it reconfigured the meaning of the commons for the sake of marginalized groups at the Valley. Indeed, this chapter claims how residents in southeast Morocco rallied for individual land rights to develop a new communal identity in order to manoeuvre social and economic transformations and traditional marginalization.

In the fourth chapter, Rignall explains how changing land-use practices reconfigure the “moral and political economies associated with customary natural resource management regimes” (p. 135). Rignall's ethnographic study points to how small farmers and rural dwellers adjust to the changing environmental conditions. She argues that the rural dwellers and pastoralists from the steppe have acquired expertise and knowledge that facilitate their adaptation to climatic variability. Furthermore, the knowledge of the inhabitants of the Mgoun Valley comprehends “land use as a social and ecological question” (p. 146). Within these changing land-use practices, Rignall argues that new geographies of social reproduction impacted these practices. She explains that there is an unevenness in these environmental adaptations and adjustments. If some residents could change locations and farm in different places to cope with water and land degradation, other vulnerable groups were forced to move in search of wage labour. These new geographies of social reproduction show how land-use practices were not only for agriculture extension but, in some cases, for urbanization and people re-settlement. Moreover, Rignall shows in this chapter how the romanticization of nature and the traditional “way of life” is an obsession of state officials and international donors rather than the residents of the Mgoun Valley. Furthermore, this romanticization of nature and customary institutions only occurred when the latter were de-politicized and lost their governance role (p. 158).

Lastly, Chapter Five deals with the transformation on livelihood strategies in the Mgoun Valley. Through a combination of household survey methods and ethnography of people's affective and economic investment in land and communal life, Rignall wants to study the transformation and the meaning of the practice of labour and how it impacted people's social, economic, and political life. Household surveys showed that although agriculture did not contribute extensively to the family unit's income and that wage labour was far more important in supporting families, when calculating farming and including ‘imputed’ values for non-marketed labour and agriculture production, it accounted for 34% of the household's income. She explains that farming is not often counted in household surveys because this work is often done by women and is unpaid, which makes it not counted as wage work. She also explained how residents in the Mgoun Valley used a mix of commercial and subsistence farming, which also relied on different types of labour. Indeed, she showed how the transformation of farming used a mix of un-commodified, commodified, and family labour. Through the example of Mgoun Valley, Rignall shows us that, unlike other agrarian communities where the destruction of family farming by capitalism and globalization has induced rural people to join the labour force and abandon subsistence or commercial farming, here wage work (remittances) has allowed rural people to maintain the region's agriculture. Lastly, she argued that most of the women's labour in the Valley was un-commodified, and the path to wage work was seen as a “path to autonomy” and an independent life.

The book's main point is to explore the impact of the integration of rural spaces such as the Mgoun Valley into globalized capital, goods, and labour circuits. Theoretically, the author situates her work within critical agrarian studies, rural resistance, and political ecology in order to understand agrarian transformations in southeast Morocco and the future of peasant and rural residents. Engaging with these different theoretical schools and Morocco's rich scholarship on rural sociology and pastoralism allows the author to thoroughly examine the politics of rural life in the context of global economic and political changes. She makes two crucial contributions, albeit provocative.

First, she argued that both orthodox theory of development and policymakers, but also critical and radical scholarship and social movement solidarity, fail to comprehend the ongoing changes in rural spaces and study the notion of “rurality”. The former considers rurality as “stagnant” and constantly analysed in relation to the urban. In this regard, mainstream development and economics advocates always see rural spaces as places that continuously need to be developed, modernized, and made more productive. The latter, however, essentialize rurality and rural life. Indeed, this scholarship considers rurality and small farming as “socially just and environmentally sustainable” (p. 7). She argues that in order to grasp the ways in which peasants persist, it is urgent to move beyond the binary between the romanticization of rural knowledge and commons and the dismissal of the rural as backward.

Second, she calls for a deromanticization of the study of the commons and, instead, grounding the commons in a political economy analysis that embraces property regimes and political struggles that do not constantly carry anti-capitalist demands. Indeed, for Rignall, the struggle against capitalism pushes critical scholars and anti-capitalist groups to overly romanticize traditions and the past. In doing so, they construct an ideal of communal governance, collective ownership, and customary practice as inherently egalitarian and just. Through her ethnographic study of southeast Morocco and engagement with historical scholarship, Rignall shows how such an understanding might be false. Instead, she showed how residents of the Mgoun Valley produced a new account of the commons that, although it turned into an enclosure or land division, it was still embedded in institutions of communal governance. This is what she coined as “new commoning”, which she defines as “both as an approach to governing communal resources (tangible and intangible) and as a site for negotiating conflicting interests and social inequalities” (p. 16).

In addition to these thought-provoking arguments and the rich methodology, this book provides an important historical work on the agrarian question of land from the French protectorate until the postcolonial period. Rignall reveals Morocco's politicized customary law and land tenure history throughout the different chapters. Furthermore, she demonstrates the ways in which the French colonial project aimed at changing the various forms of Moroccan collective sovereignty into one unitary juridical category of collective property ownership and designed bureaucratic and legal ambiguities on who can/should govern collective land. This ambiguity facilitated the process of dispossession. Indeed, after Morocco's independence in 1956, Rignall shows the reconfiguration of the logic of dispossession and how it shaped the construction of the postcolonial state, the Makhzen. In this regard, the Makhzen, Rignall argues, enclosed communal lands by keeping communal tenure regimes rather than dismantling them. It portrays itself as “guardianship” of communal lands while creating authorized institutional space for enclosing collective lands. Or, as Rignall rightly puts it, “the common was the easiest, most profitable path to enclosure” (p. 122).

The mechanisms described throughout the books build upon what has been documented by Moroccan scholars such as Soraya El Kahlaoui and Mohamed Mahdi (2014) on the politics of dispossession. El Kahlaoui (2022) has described the logic of dispossession established by the Makhzen, which is rooted in the French colonial rationale, and created, as she argues, “a dichotomy between ‘progress’ and ‘nature’” (El Kahlaoui, 2022). These processes reinforced the assumption of the availability of unused land in Morocco and the inefficiency of small-family farming (Bush, 2016). The rationale of this assumption, embedded in the colonial legacy (Davis, 2006), is to transfer the unused land to efficient private large landowners. Moreover, the politics of privatization is an opportunity to continue its quest for land appropriation, marginalizing peasants and small farmers (Bush, 2016).

While the monograph offers a fascinating study and analysis of rural life and smallholders in the rural periphery, Rignall does not elaborate on the question of racialized sharecropping and how processes of modernization and ongoing economic and political changes have specifically marginalized black rural residents. Rignall argued that blackness for El Hart's residents was constitutive of their inequality. However, she failed to conceptualize the racialized aspect in her argument about their social and economic marginalization in contemporary Morocco. Here, the concept of race is not explained in its historical and materialist understanding. Indeed, Rignall fails to theorize the Black identity of sharecroppers that she notes throughout her book. Moreover, while she developed the role of the French colonial administration in customary legal and tenure regimes and how it shaped the construction of the Amazigh and Arab identity, particularly in relation to access to land, she dismissed to define the material question of race, its implication in Morocco and particularly racial categories and group boundaries have transformed in contemporary Morocco. Here, I would recommend the debate on race, slavery, and ethno-racial politics in Morocco between Hisham Aidi (forthcoming) and his response to Chouki El Hamel's Black Morocco.

Lastly, although Rignall touches upon the question of women's labour, the transformation of gender and labour relations in southeast Morocco is missing. The book does not offer an analytical and theoretical engagement with the question of gender, particularly in the last chapter, where the question of labour was central. It misses an analysis of how rural life and women's labour within and outside the house shifted and how the penetration of globalized capitalism in the agrarian structure impacted women's and men's relationships. Furthermore, Rignall ends her last chapter arguing that for some women engaging in wage labour represented a path to autonomy and freedom. She explained that some women from the Mgoun Valley saw the commercial farms implemented in the region as an opportunity for empowerment. While this is essential, it is important to show how feminized agriculture is crucial to the expansion and accumulation of global capitalism and how international capital depends on a gendered division of labour in which Moroccan women dominate low-paying jobs. Moreover, bringing gender to analyse power relations is important in understanding the shifting mechanisms of hierarchies and how it shapes and is shaped by agrarian and environmental change and rural politics. Thus, in the context of structural changes in economies, nature, and societies, a gender analysis can help us understand the interconnectedness of changes in agricultural systems of production and reproduction.

Overall, Rignall's book sheds new light on the meaning of rurality and the new politics of the common. Although some areas feel under-theorized—as discussed above—it is nonetheless a very rich empirical and theoretical contribution to the rapid socio-economic transformations that are occurring in rural Morocco and the political mobilisations of rural dwellers on questions of lands, communal governance and customary law. Karen Rignall's book is a fascinating and pleasant book that relies on an array of qualitative and quantitative methods. It is a highly original synthesis of existing scholarship across a broad range of disciplines. The structure of the book offers a useful narrative that contributes valuable insights to students and scholars of critical agrarian studies, environmental studies and anthropology.