Fabrication d'une tradition montagnarde marocaine berbérophone : singularisation d'une fête dans le Haut Atlas marocain
In a village of the High Atlas in Morocco, a celebration which has been abandoned for more than fifteen years has been renewed in 2010, bringing along journalists, anthropologists and militant associatives. The study of the renewal of tradition in this celebration, through discourse, performances and social interaction, allows us to put into question the models on the fabrication of tradition. The underlying process of this renewal is singularisation, a specific form of resistance to the nationalist culture or any other cultural hegemony. Singularisation is present in every element of the celebration.  It determines a specific link to the past by which it appears as the reversed image of the present, staged as object of loss. It also determines cultural choices such as the one between two musical traditions. Such mechanisms respond to a new spatial organization which is a direct consequence of the recent economic and political changes in Morocco. In this organization, power is no more in the local but outside the community’s territory. Women are marginalized and intermediary figures become the center of the renewal of tradition. The study of singularisation enables to explain how identity is made, to determine conditions for the cultural survival of a group, to characterize the relation between a cultural event and social change, and to bring new elements to the theories of tradition.
tradition singularisation festival Hobsbawm berbère ritual oral tradition cultural minority resistance ethnomusicology cultural anthropology