Moving and Dwelling: Building The Moroccan Ashelhi Homeland

The tamazirt (homeland, countryside, village) has become an organizing symbol for Anti-Atlas mountain Ishelhin (Tashelhit-speaking Moroccan Berbers) that helps perpetuate Tashelhit language as an index of ethnic identity. Residents render rural spaces meaningful through gendered material practices and discursive representations. They construct place and gender in the course of their movements between the countryside and the city. I suggest that dislocation may be integral to the cultural process of rendering locations as well as identities meaningful. The subjective connection of Ishelhin to place gives less primacy to place as space than as a location in a nexus of mobile relationships.