The diaspora and the cemetery: emigration and social transformation in a Moroccan oasis community

Abstract

This essay explores the history and social consequences of emigration from the southeastern oases of Morocco, which since the 1940s have functioned as a veritable demographic pump, sending streams of labour migrants to northern cities and across the Mediterranean. It examines the close symbolic and material relations between physical and social mobility, as migrant remittances transform embedded hierarchies based on property ownership, irrigation rights, and economic independence. The essay situates these micro-level dynamics in the larger political tensions around 'harrag' (overseas undocumented migration), Berber (Amazigh) ethnic activism, tribal land rights, and racialised violence that have recently struck rural Morocco - tensions that have made Amazigh militants, often based in the diaspora, particularly concerned about the cultural fate of their homeland oases communities. In underlining these political frictions and ambivalences, the essay critically intervenes in a larger...