Abstract

"Collective Granaries and the Genealogy of Management Practices: Beyond the Grain, Beyond Oral Histories"

Laurent Beduneau-Wang, Africa Business School (lbeduneauwang@gmail.com), Majda Soumane, Africa Business School (majda.soumane@um6p.ma)

For more than a thousand years, communities in the arid Atlas Mountains of southern Morocco, specially Souss Massa Drâ, have survived each winter by storing grain in collective granaries called igoudar, or agadir. These constructions may be underground, troglodytic, or erected on rock or earth. They had to be accessible to the community and at the same time protected from external attacks. They play a strategic role in the life of the community, encapsulating strategic and managerial practices as they evolve over time. How to study them?
Few local archives exist. They describe these collective granaries and the practices that make them functional. Accessing them requires building a relationship of trust with the local population over time. We also draw on collective memory and oral history through focus groups and individual interviews. Collecting maps, going into the field and conducting an ethnography of one or more granaries are necessary, but it is not enough. How can we write about the history of these collective granaries?
To write the history of these granaries, we collaborate with architects in to capture the memory encapsulated in the materials used to construct these buildings (stone, earth and wood). But the material is not rigid; together with all the documents and other data collected (fieldnotes, maps, photos, videos, etc.), it conveys the living history of the granaries. Far from being a rigid and uniform object, the history and memory of the granaries are part of a network of memories on different scales.
Collective granaries appear not only as multifunctional structures for food, military and aesthetic purposes, for mountain communities, but also as the artefacts of the political and religious regulations that have operated over the long term in these territories and beyond.