RGP Cycle 5 Grantees and Projects

Principal Investigator: Jamal Said Fezza, University of Mohamed V, Rabat

 

Co-Investigator: Hassane Mostapha Hjij, National Radio and Television Company

 

Country: Morocco

 

Research Project: The Environmental Degradation of the Oases and the Growing Impoverishment of its Population in Morocco: Ethnographies of the Lived Experiences

 

This research is built on a simple question: "Why do state-led development projects in oases further exacerbate the situation?" This question has led us to dedicate the first part of this project to conducting an assessment of the various official interventions undertaken to develop the oases, whether they are led by the State, or civil society and non-governmental organizations. This does not mean that we are overlooking the environmental degradation of the oases in Morocco and the growing poverty of its inhabitants. On the contrary, we would like this assessment to contribute to our preliminary understanding of the issue, in the hope that it will either enrich and deepen it, or correct and revise it.

 

Our understanding of the problem is based on the idea that state-led development interventions in oases are predominantly techno-economic and partitive, juxtaposing development problems. In addition, they are implemented in haste and as emergency cases, which makes them rely on immediate solutions, instead of carefully thought out plans. We believe that the problem is not technical, but rather social. In this sense, the deterioration of the oases is a testament to an ever-growing divide between sustainability plans and the specificities of the soil. Even if there was a genuine political will to achieve sustainable development in the oases, the question of how to respond to sustainability challenges in ways that meet the clear specificities of the land, remains and pushes us to find appropriate and adaptable solutions.

We believe that the environmental degradation of the oasis cannot be separated from the disintegration of the oasis community, and the proliferation of unsuitable social and land practices. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin. We must respect and commit to addressing both problems through a dynamic historical approach. With such an integrated approach, the fight against desertification is the same fight against the impoverishment of the inhabitants of the oases. Similarly, addressing the needs of the community is the same as addressing the needs of the oasis and ensuring its preservation.

 

This brings us to the second part of the project. After completing the assessment of development projects in Moroccan oases, and mapping the various development actors in the region - be they local, national, or international even - we will conduct an anthropological study to understand the lifestyle of oases inhabitants, as well as its relationship to the environment and sustainability challenges. Before we speculate about the solutions to stop the deterioration of the oases, we will take the time to reconstruct the problem in collaboration with the people, chronicling the ways in which they articulate it. Of course, we will start from a guiding theoretical model to uncover and analyze the problem, but we made sure the framework had a blank slate, because we do not want to imbue the project with a ready-made assumption which our fieldwork would either corroborate or refute. Our research will not be empirical as we will not have to introduce a theoretical model, which will be tested through fieldwork. Instead, we will modelize and reveal the interactions as we go. In this study, we focus on the way in which a group of people experience the oasis as their “natural place,” that is, where they “naturally” belong. From this perspective, we expect our sociological analysis of the ways in which oasis inhabitants are aware of the environmental situation of the oases to identify what is known as the “oasis spirit,” that is, the structure and meanings of the oasis.

 

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Jamal Said Fezza has a PhD from Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdallah University, Fez. He is a sociology professor at the University of Mohammed V, Rabat, where he has been heading the Department of Sociology since 2016. His main research interests are organizational sociology and anthropology. His most prominent works include two books titled Organizational Sociology: Foundations and Trends published by Dar Abu Abraqq in 2013, and Anthropological Methodology: Between Edward Festermark and Evans Pritchard published by Dar Al-Aman in 2013, followed by the second issue of The Anthropological Methodology Series: The Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss or Towards the Phenomenology of Kinship. He also contributed chapters to collective books and published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals.

 

Hassane Mostapha Hjij is a researcher and translator from Morocco with a PhD in organizational sociology and contracting. He is in charge of communication and public relations at the National Radio and Television Comapny. He teaches sociology at the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences at the University of Mohammed V in Rabat. His research interests include sociology of religion, and the epistemology and methodology of social sciences. Hjij translated a number of works, including The Individual and Society: Fundamental Sociological Problematics (2017), History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (2015), Capacities and Competencies in Philosophy (2005), and Psychological Analysis (2004), as well as other texts in the fields of philosophy and social sciences. He has also published various sociological articles in specialized peer-reviewed journals. He is currently working on two books titled “Theory of the Social World: Pierre Bourdieu’s Rules of Sociological Practice (Mouminoun Without Borders) and Qualitative Research in the Social Sciences: Theories and Practices (Nohoudh Center for Studies and Publications).