NOSTALGIC LIVES

237 Pages·2010·7.13 MB·English

NOSTALGIC LIVES:
MEMORY AND PLACE IN SIDI IFNI

A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Cornell University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

by
Annarose Yamuna Pandey
February 2010
© 2010 Annarose Yamuna Pandey
NOSTALGIC LIVES: MEMORY AND PLACE IN SIDI IFNI

Annarose Yamuna Pandey, Ph. D.
Cornell University 2010

This dissertation is about the role of space and memory in Sidi Ifni,
Morocco. Through analysis of stories I was told during my stay, I argue that
multiple temporal frameworks can coexist in the present as a way of
reproducing the past and re-conceptualizing the future. These stories are the
product of a dialectic that is itself structured by such social structures as
kinship and gender. I use personal accounts of townspeople to discuss the
ways that social identity is produced and contextualized in this town. Sidi
Ifni’s history is located in the nexus of Moroccan nationalist goals, Spanish
colonial ideals, and local Berber ways of life. Beginning with nostalgic
memories of a particular Spanish woman, Maria, I work to show the ways that
people’s imaginings of the past are quite present in quotidian life. The second
chapter is an exploration of the construction of “otherness” in the context of
multiple readings of history and memory. People’s control of authority and
power is reproduced through the work they do to establish meaning and
memory. The third chapter is concerned with a polyvocal historical account of
Sidi Ifni’s relationship to the Western Sahara. King Hassan II’s claim to
“Greater Morocco” was in direct opposition to Franco’s notion of a Spanish
“embrace of Africa”. Sidi Ifni was the center of these competing nationalist
ideologies. People’s stories about the war and its ongoing presence in lives
frames this chapter. The fourth chapter turns to a more detailed discussion of
the connections between gender, kinship and place. These are shown to be
mutually constitutive and located in the myriad representations of propriety
and historicity found in Sidi Ifni. The conclusion synthesizes the dominant
themes of the dissertation: place, memory and storytelling. I argue that
through nostalgia, the processes of daily life come to have meaning in Sidi
Ifni.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Annarose Pandey received her B.A. in Social Anthropology from Reed College
in Portland, Oregon in 1995. She then attended the University of Toronto’s
M.A. program in Social Anthropology. After completing this degree she
moved to Ithaca to attend Cornell University in the Department of
Anthropology. In 2001, she received a Fulbright Islamic Civilizations Grant to
do her fieldwork in Sidi Ifni, Morocco. Upon returning from the field,
Annarose returned to Portland, Oregon where she earned an M.A.T. degree
from Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education. She has been working at
Westview High School teaching courses including Social Anthropology since
2006.

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This dissertation is dedicated to Professor Gail Kelly and Professor Thomas Kirsch. I
would not have loved learning as much were it not for them. As Professor Kirsch
always said when he finished his comments on my papers, “Onwards and Upwards!”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research for this dissertation was funded by the Fulbright Islamic
Civilizations Grant, the Mario Einaudi Center at Cornell University and the
Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. I would also like to
especially thank the Department of Anthropology for their patience with me
in this process.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Biographical Sketch iii

Dedication iv

Acknowledgments v

Introduction:
The Imponderabilia of Sidi Ifni 1

Chapter One:
Nostalgic Space and Memories of Maria 33

Chapter Two:
Constructing Otherness: The Politics of Memory 66

Chapter Three:
On “Greatness” and the “Embrace of Africa” 92

Chapter Four:
Gender, Kinship and Space 139

Conclusion:
When Places and Memories Coalesce 190

Appendix I: Images 210

Appendix 2: List of Personages 217

Bibliography 219

Glossary 228

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INTRODUCTION
THE IMPONDERABILIA OF SIDI IFNI

“Si l’on devait decrire Sidi Ifni aujourd’hui en quelques lignes, on pourrait dire que
c’est une ville a l’abandon, peuplee de vieux, que vivent des pensions versees par
L’Etat espagnol” with the footnote that “C’est, le trait la sensation qu’ont les
etrangers en arrivant” (Souali 2001: 22).

“If one had to describe Sidi Ifni today in a few words, one could say that it is
an abandoned town, peopled by the elderly, who live on retirements paid by
the Spanish state”… “This is the sensation which strangers have on arrival”
(Souali 2001: 22).

During my fieldwork in Sidi Ifni, Morocco I was told that a “town
without a history is not a town at all.” The history of a town transforms it
from a “space” to a “place” that has meaning, holds experiences and is part of
people’s memories, daily lives and sense of the future. There is a story about
two physicists, Bohr and Heisenberg, who visited Kronenberg Castle. Bohr
apparently asked Heisenberg, “Isn’t it strange how this castle changes as soon
as one imagines that Hamlet lived here” (Tuan 1977: 4)? Obviously the castle
itself doesn’t change, only our perception of it. But this implies that in
meaningful ways, it is a different castle for those who know its past than for
those who do not. This dissertation is about Sidi Ifni, Morocco. It is about
those aspects of the past, nostalgically remembered today, that make the town
a different place for those who know its past than for those who do not.
1
I arrived in Morocco on September 6, 2001. A few days later the Twin
Towers were hit and I became entirely too conspicuous. At the time I was
living in Rabat, the capital city, with a group of Fulbright grantees while
attending an intensive Moroccan Arabic course. I was walking through the
medina when I saw that people were crowded around those storefronts that
had radios. By the time I got to the school, a television was set up and people
were crying. As many others have also said, my first impression was that I
was watching a bad movie. For the rest of the week wherever I went, people
would stop and ask me if my family was healthy, if everything was ok. Even
the groups of women in the local hammam (bath house) would strike up
conversations whereas previously there had been only stares and smiles
between us. Meanwhile, the covers of every newspaper showed the towers
and angry, hurt faces. By October, when the Americans started bombing
Afghanistan, similarly angry and hurt faces were being turned towards me. It
was at this time that I left for the south of Morocco to Sidi Ifni, a place I had
been before and had found charming.
Before turning to a theoretical presentation of the arguments which
frame my argument, I think it is important to set the scene of Sidi Ifni. This
approach is itself motivated by a theory of the importance of place and space.
As Stewart and Strathern note, “[E]thnographers have realized from their field
experiences how perceptions of and values attached to landscape encode
values and fix memories to places that become sites of historical reality”
(Stewart and Strathern 2003: 1). The role of place is not to be taken for
granted. To this end Hirsch writes of anthropological perspectives of place,
“…despite its ubiquity it has remained largely unproblematized” (Hirsch
1995: 1). I present and problematize the space of Sidi Ifni throughout this
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