Suq: Geertz on the Market

SŪQ

GEERTZ ON THE MARKET

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SŪQ

GEERTZ ON THE MARKET

Clifford Geertz

Edited and introduced by Lawrence Rosen

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Chicago

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Sūq: Geertz on the Market, edited and introduced by Lawrence Rosen, is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

Sūq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou, by Clifford Geertz, originally published in Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society: Three Essays in Cultural Analysis, by Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz, and Lawrence Rosen, Cambridge University Press, 1979; republished by permission of the estate of Clifford Geertz.

Cover: Detail from Figure 5, Sūq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou by Clifford Geertz.

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ISBN: 978-1-914363-14-6 [ePub]

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Contents

Introduction

On Sefrou: the market in context

Transcription note

Sūq: the bazaar economy in Sefrou

Notes

Annexes

Introduction

Lawrence Rosen

Sefrou, Morocco, 1965: In his search for an appropriate venue for his anthropological fieldwork, Clifford Geertz arrived in Sefrou, Morocco, and proceeded to the office of the local pasha to inquire as to the possibility of doing his research in that small city. The pasha’s secretary said that the mayor was busy. Professor Geertz responded that he understood and that he would be happy to wait until the pasha was free. He then sat down and waited patiently.1

Sefrou, Morocco, 1987: The town of Sefrou organized a symposium celebrating the work of Clifford Geertz. A banner announcing the event was strung over the main street of the Ville Nouvelle, lectures were delivered in the riad (small palace), which had been built by a ruler in the late nineteenth century, and festive meals and performances took place in various locations over several days. The town administration later published two books with the lectures delivered during the event.

Two vignettes about Clifford Geertz and his work in Morocco. The first may seem rather anodyne, but I have heard it told and retold by many in Sefrou with wonder and approval. Why? Because, knowing that Geertz was an important American professor, they are amazed that he simply waited for the pasha to be free to receive him. Any Frenchman, they say, would have insisted on seeing the official immediately. The story of Geertz’s deferential behavior is of a piece with stories that used to be told of Prince Muhammad VI (now king) who, so it goes, once pulled into a gas station and actually paid for his fuel (rather than demanding it for free, in line with his status as a royal personage) or who allowed a woman driver to pass ahead even when he had the right of way and could have asserted his noble prerogative. For both prince and professor, humility and respect were taken as signs of admirable character.

The second vignette is equally striking, albeit in a different way. Anthropologists have been honored by nations depicting their portraits on postage stamps — Bronislaw Malinowski (New Guinea), Franz Boas (Chad), Paul Rivet (Ecuador), Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict (USA) — while David Aberle was honored by Navajo elders participating at his funeral and Keith Basso by Apache chiefs. But where else has a small town allocated resources for a public event and several publications relating to an anthropologist’s work among them? Where else have they brought the king’s close advisor and other high-ranking officials to participate in the seminars? It is a mark of both the town’s respect for Geertz’s work and the way in which he engaged people in the region that his modesty and his accomplishment should have received such notice.2

Clifford Geertz first arrived in Morocco in the early 1960s. Following years of research in several parts of Indonesia, he and his wife, anthropologist Hildred Geertz, had sought a field site somewhere in the Muslim world as the basis for a comparative study. They had considered Pakistan, but with two young children they needed a place that was both safe and accessible. After a survey of various sites, they settled on the small city of Sefrou, located fifteen miles south of Fez on the edge of the Middle Atlas Mountains, a town of some 25,000–30,000 inhabitants that also served as central market and administrative hub for a large, mainly Berber tribal hinterland.3 The work stretched over a number of years, included the independent studies of several students working in the region and elsewhere in Morocco, and came to embrace a wide range of topics with which both Geertzes had already established their reputations.4

Clifford Geertz had focused his Indonesian work on two substantive domains and a broad theoretical arc. His research in Java concentrated on religion, particularly the ways in which nominally Muslim believers divided into three groups representing varying degrees and forms of syncretism. He also studied the Javanese marketplace at a time when American development theory was asking why certain countries (e.g., Japan) were able to take off while others seemed to be held back. Together with his book Agricultural Involution on the agricultural history of the archipelago, Geertz suggested that the intensification of Dutch colonial extractive demands allowed for absorption into the rural labor force of ever-increasing numbers of people and the subdivision of tasks that resulted in a form of shared poverty. The marketplace not only reflected the economic aspects of relative stasis but, from the perspective of a cultural anthropologist, enfolded and animated a wide array of concepts about persons, relationships, and the symbolic meaning of their presentation.5

It was on the basis of these highly detailed studies that Geertz constructed his more extended theoretical work. Arguing that our species developed the capacity to generate symbols that serve both as models of and models for our relationships and worldview, Geertz showed that through intensive on-site studies it is possible to unpack the ways in which people grasp both the mundane and the ineffable. By the time he arrived in Morocco these more theoretical essays, later collected in The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz 1973), had already marked him as a major figure in and beyond the discipline of anthropology.

As with his Indonesian studies, in Morocco Geertz took a very wide view of the social and cultural life arrayed before him. In his extensive fieldnotes, his letters to friends and colleagues, and the recollections of his students and interlocutors, Geertz’s belief in the interconnections among all aspects of a culture showed him eager to study everything from kinship and marriage patterns to demographic changes, political history, and the impact of local poets, Jewish traders, and saintly lineages. Thus when Geertz began a detailed examination of the marketplace (souk, Ar. sūq), after years of intensive study of colloquial Arabic and with numerous connections to informants from very diverse backgrounds, it was with the broadest of cultural knowledge and curiosity that he approached his subject.6

Fairly early on in his fieldwork Geertz had sought out an elderly man named Moulay Rachid al-Adluni, himself a descendant of the Prophet, scion of an old Sefroui family, and, as head of the café owners in town, the man to whom disputants in that market arena turned for counsel and mediation. Through him Geertz not only began to study the structure of the marketplace but to sort through, in extraordinary detail, the players and relationships that marked this critical public domain. Combining similarly meticulous work on the charitable mortmain system (ḥabus) that controlled numerous marketplace structures and resources as well as spending many weeks transcribing land records at the central registry in Fez, Geertz was prepared, on his return to Sefrou in the fall of 1968, to undertake a full-scale survey of the souk. In a letter to me dated October 27, 1968, he wrote:

As far as projects go, the main one has been a store-by-store mapping of all the stores and craft ateliers (as well as major institutions — mosques, zawias [Sufi brotherhoods], hammams [Moorish baths], ferrans [public ovens], etc.) in town with their type, owner’s name, and his origins, which I have been doing with a literate Sussi storekeeper [people from the southern part of Morocco, noted for their entrepreneurship] who goes around and asks, and then we work it out together. … [A]side for [sic] the hard data on shops and shopkeepers, it is giving me a detailed physical knowledge of the Medina [old walled portion of the city] such as I have never had before (I also go around after we’ve mapped with Sussi to see what we’ve been doing concretely). After I finish it — I’m almost done — five or six hundred stores or so, so far — I want to choose representatives on the basis of it and get occupational histories, organization of the trade, etc.7

Two points stand out from this brief passage. First, Geertz was assiduous in collecting detailed information from numerous sources. Indeed, given his preferred form of writing — the extended essay — he had, on occasion, been questioned as to the extent of the data upon which he based his ethnographic interpretations. Thus, when the time came to prepare the volume in which his work on the market first appeared, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society (co-authored with Hildred Geertz and myself), one reason for the book’s very detailed content was to demonstrate the high level of minutiae on which he based all of his work and to free each of us to write more interpretive pieces later while pointing to the mass of data contained in the collective volume (Geertz, Geertz, and Rosen 1979).8

Unlike in the study of the Indonesian marketplace, in his Moroccan work Geertz was not bound by a dominant theory of the day (e.g., take-off theory), even though he was attentive to a variety of economists’ theories. Nevertheless, many of the themes he struck have profound implications for economic theorists. A key feature of the market study was what Geertz called the search for information. Where prices are not fixed, where multiple systems of weights and measures operate simultaneously, and where the ordinary buyer is constantly challenged to learn about the quality and timing of the goods on offer, it is essential for Moroccans to cast a wide net in their quest for relevant data. But where economists may have focused solely on a narrow band of market information, Geertz, having already learned so much about other facets of Sefrou society, appreciated that a similar quest for information also informed each Moroccan’s search for reliable persons with whom to establish a wide range of relationships. He wrote:

The very difficult of [obtaining reasonably reliable information] in a diffuse, highly personal, highly fractionated setting without the aid of settled standards, unambiguous signals, or believable statistics raises the natural enough desire not to operate in the dark to the level of a ruling passion and heightens enormously the utility of even partially succeeding. … [S]earch is the paramount economic activity, the one upon which virtually everything else turns, and much of the apparatus of the marketplace is concerned with making it practicable. (Geertz 1979: 215–16)

In the constant negotiation of their social ties, Moroccans thus give evidence of the proposition uttered by a Muslim figure in a Joseph Conrad novel: In the variety of knowledge lies safety.

While the market may, in certain respects, look (as Geertz says) like an unbroken confusion, a place characterized by the promiscuous tumbling in the public realm of varieties of men kept carefully partitioned in the private one, the ever-present search for information finds meaning not only in the quest for secure socioeconomic ties but for consonance with the broader sphere of morality and religion. The point of entry for Geertz into these connections resides in language. Combining his own intellectual heritage in the works of the American pragmatists, Wittgensteinian linguistics, and a personal penchant for creating a world of meaning through the terms by which we seek to capture it, Geertz focused on the concepts that inform the search for information in social and economic life. He sought not a simple vocabulary of marketplace concepts but what he called a communication model of the bazaar economy, whether in his quest for the implications of the root term for truthfulness (ṣ-d-q); in the overtones attendant on klam, the concept of control through language (not just an attribute people have; it is a force they wield [Geertz 1979: 202]); or in the multiple terms used to appraise another’s credibility and reliability. And it is through the tangle of such concepts that he saw the marketplace as a sphere of enacted beliefs, moral propositions, and social evaluations that extend beyond and are themselves rendered comprehensible by the multiple domains they conjoin.

Thus, for Geertz the boundaries of a cultural system — like our means for trying to grasp it — are necessarily blurred yet brought into greater focus precisely by their socially pervasive overtones. He could, therefore, argue that the Muslim umma (Community of Believers) is the bazaar, that by stabilizing occupational groupings the zawia (religious brotherhood) and the souk were separated only by a doorsill, or that, in the larger cultural system, the zeṭṭāṭ (protection) afforded a rural trader so condensed the personas of big men as to constitute a veritable fusion of their public selves. Like those he was studying, Geertz did not concentrate on such concepts as abstract propositions but as the very tools through which, in the hustle-bustle of everyday engagement, act and word give meaning to one another.

In his comparative work, Geertz observed the strengths and the vulnerabilities of both Morocco and Indonesia — whether the repressive Days of Lead occasioned by the king in the former or the massacre of political/ethnic opponents in the latter.9 In his self-reflective Frazer Lecture he could therefore write:

Such, indeed, are the perils of trying to write history as it happens, as I was, in part, attempting to do. The world will not stand still till you complete your paragraph, and the most you can do with the future is sense its imminence. What comes, comes: the important thing is whether, when it comes, it makes any sense as an outgrowth of the directive processes you think you have seen. History, it has been said, may not repeat itself but it does rhyme. And from that point of view, looking back from what I see now to what I saw then, though I am both worried and disheartened (I had hoped for better), I don’t feel particularly embarrassed, chastened, defensive, or apologetic. Sensing rain, I may have gotten a flood; but it was, at least, a corroborative one. However unformed and gathering the clouds where then, and however uncertain I was about what to make of them, they were real. And so, it now turns out, was the storm they portended. (Geertz 2005: 10)

Nearly sixty years have passed since Geertz arrived in Sefrou, but while much has changed, much has remained familiar. A city that numbered 25,000–30,000 upon his arrival now numbers over 80,000; a countryside that was beginning to be depopulated has now become strikingly so. Sefrou is now a larger administrative center and, emptied of its substantial Jewish population, somewhat less diverse.10 But it is also still the market center for its people and their hinterland, and a key source of urban experience for those who enter and exit it with great ease. More to the point, the conceptual apparatus to which Geertz directed our attention continues to inform the perceptions and relationships he so elegantly analyzed. His words still have resonance, as when he noted: Nothing if not diverse, Middle Eastern society, and Moroccan society as a frontier variant … copes with diversity by distinguishing with elaborate precision the contexts (marriage, diet, worship, education) within which men are separated by their dissimilitude and those (work, friendship, politics, trade) where, however warily and however conditionally, men are connected by their differences (Geertz 1979: 141). And it is in those differences — within Sefrou and the reader’s grasp of it — that the fascination we share with Clifford Geertz and the people he so deeply respected continues to reverberate.

Acknowledgements

Particular thanks for assistance in preparing this volume go to Karen Blu and Hylton White for all their help in making this seminal work available to a new generation of readers.

References

Assaraf, Robert. 2005. Une certaine histoire des Juifs du Maroc, 1860–1999. Paris: Brodard & Taupin.

Assaraf, Robert, and Michel Abitbol, eds. 1998. Perception et réalités au Maroc: Rélations Judéo-Musulmanes. Casablanca: Crim.

Association Marocaine pour la Recherche Historique (Rabat). 2000. Archives et écriture de l’histoire du Maroc: XIème Colloque de Sefrou (19–21 Mars 1999). Publication du Conseil Municipal de Sefrou 10. Sefrou: Association Marocaine pour la Recherche Historique.

Bar-Asher, Shalom. 2010. Ovadia, David, In Encyclopedia of Jews of the Islamic World, edited by Norman A. Stillman. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

Benhalima, Hassan. 1987. Petites villes traditionnelles et mutation socio-économiques au Maroc, le cas de Sefrou: Étude de géographie urbane. Publications de la Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines de Rabat, Série thèses et mémoires 14. Rabat: Imprimerie de Fédala.

Boum, Aomar. 2013. Memories of absence: How Muslims remember Jews in Morocco. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cefaï, Daniel. 2003. Le souk de Sefrou: Analyse culturelle d’une forme sociale. In Le souk de Sefrou: Sur l’économie du bazar, by Clifford Geertz, 1–58. Paris: Editions Bouchène.

Développement local et aménagement de l’espace au Maroc: Le cas de Sefrou et de sa région, organisé des 17, 18, 19, 20 mars 1988. 1989. Fez: Imprimerie al-Balabil.

Geertz, Clifford. 1963. Peddlers and princes: Social change and economic modernization in two Indonesian towns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1965. The social history of an Indonesian town. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1968. Islam observed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1969. Agricultural involution: The processes of ecological change in Indonesia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Geertz, Clifford. 1978. The bazaar economy: Information and search in peasant marketing. American Economic Review 68 (2): 28–32.

Geertz, Clifford. 1979. Suq: The bazaar economy in Sefrou. In Meaning and order in Moroccan society: Three essays in cultural analysis, edited by Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz, and Lawrence Rosen, 123–313. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local knowledge: further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Geertz, Clifford. 1995. After the fact: Two countries, Four decades, One anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 2003. Le souk de Sefrou: Sur l’économie du bazar. Paris: Editions Bouchène.

Geertz, Clifford. 2005. Shifting aims, moving targets: On the anthropology of religion. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11 (1): 1–15.

Geertz, Clifford. 2012. Life among the anthros and other essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Geertz, Clifford, Hildred Geertz, and Lawrence Rosen. 1979. Meaning and order in Moroccan society: Three essays in cultural analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guibbert, Jean-Jacques, and Hassan Benhalima. 1982. Sefrou de desserte locale au relais pour le drainage. Dakar: Enda.

Inglis, Fred. 2000. Clifford Geertz. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Jennan, Lahsen, and Mohammed Zerhouni, eds. 2000. Sefrou: Mémoire, territoires et terroirs, des moments, des lieux et des hommes: récits et témoignages: hommage à Clifford Geertz. Fez: Commission Culturelle.

Kapchan, Deborah. 1996. Gender on the market: Moroccan women and the revoicing of tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Lahbil, Achour Bekkaï. 1999. Si Bekkai: Rendez-vous avec l’histoire. Rabat: Imprimeries Mithaq al-Maghrib.

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Rosen, Lawrence. 2018. Islam and the rule of justice: Image and reality in Muslim law and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rosen, Lawrence. 2023. Encounters with Islam: Studies in the anthropology of Muslim cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shweder, Richard A., and Byron Good, eds. 2005. Clifford Geertz by his colleagues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Slyomovics, Susan, ed. 2010. Clifford Geertz in Morocco. London: Routledge.

Stillman, Norman A. 1973. The Sefrou remnant. Jewish Social Studies 35 (3/4): 255–63.

Stillman, Norman A. 1988. The language and culture of the Jews of Sefrou, Morocco: An ethnolinguistic study. Manchester: University of Manchester.

Waterbury, John. 1972. North for the trade: The life and times of a Berber merchant. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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1. Si Bekkai Lahbil was the pasha of Sefrou and the first minister of the interior of an independent Morocco. His biography is recounted in Lahbil (1999).

2. The celebration of Geertz’s work by the city of Sefrou resulted in several publications by the municipality (Développement local et aménagement 1989; Association Marocaine pour la Recherche Historique 1999; Jennan and Zerhouni 2000).

3. Sefrou has been the subject of several studies by geographers, including Guibbert and Benhalima (1982) and Benhalima (1987).

4. Writings of the saint whose shrine is located in a nearby Middle Atlas village to which Geertz refers have recently been translated in Yusi (2019).

5. Geertz’s study of the Indonesian market was the subject of Peddlers and Princes (Geertz 1963) and figured as well in The Social History of an Indonesian Town (Geertz 1965). His response to critics of the Indonesian market studies can be found in Geertz (1978). His book on the agricultural history of Indonesia is Agricultural Involution (Geertz 1969).

6. Geertz’s souk essay was translated into French (Geertz 2003) and preceded by an introduction by Daniel Cefaï (2003). In addition to Islam Observed (Geertz 1968), Geertz wrote a number of pieces that elaborated on the findings contained in his souk essay (see, especially, Geertz 1983, 1995, 2012). Market studies in Morocco that are valuable additions to the subject include Kapchan (1996) and Waterbury (1972).

7. This letter is part of the Clifford Geertz Papers, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. The Geertz papers housed at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, contain mostly internal documents, though a few entries relate to seminars touching on Geertz’s work in Morocco.

8. Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society was aptly subtitled Three Essays in Cultural Analysis (Geertz 1979). It contained a general chapter on social identity, which, like the volume’s introduction, was written by Lawrence Rosen, and Hildred Geertz’s essay on family ties, together with her detailed analysis of the 1960 Sefrou census for which all of the original census forms, like the land records for the region, were collected by all three authors. A photo essay by Paul Hyman also graced the volume. Sefrou forms the basis for much of the work by the present editor, Lawrence Rosen (see, for example, Rosen 1984, 1989, 2000, 2002, 2008, 2016, 2018, 2023).

9. Among the useful accounts of Geertz’s overall work, including discussions of his Moroccan studies, are Inglis (2000), Shweder and Good (2005), and Slyomovics (2010).

10. A number of scholars, Moroccan Muslims among them, have focused attention on interfaith relations, referring at times to the Jewish community of Sefrou. Among them are Kenbib (2016), Boum (2013), Assaraf (2005), Assaraf and Abitbol (1998), and Stillman (1973, 1988). For the life and works of the former chief rabbi of Sefrou, Rabbi David Ovadia, see Shalom Bar-Asher (2010). An online source for conversations and remembrances of the Sefrou Jewish community can be found at Dafina.net.

On Sefrou: the market in context

*

The study

The movement of anthropologists toward a concern with complex agrarian societies has accelerated over the past quarter century until now it probably accounts for the bulk of the work in the field. Yet many problems of method, theory, and data presentation remain, and the sense that the classical monograph forms of anthropology - the people study (Nuer, Tikopia, Trobriand, Navajo) and the community study (Chan Kom, Amazon Town, Ramah, Lesu) - are awkward and ungainly in this context grows steadily deeper. Studies of the Chinese, the Brazilians, or the Arabs, though suggestive, seem to claim too much for local findings; studies of this or that village, town, or settlement as such, though informative, seem caught in a kind of data parochialism. Committed by training and heritage, and in most cases by conviction, to micro-sociological investigation, anthropologists working in places like India, Mexico, or (the case at hand) North Africa find themselves faced with what looks like a Hobson’s choice between dissipating the circumstantiality their narrowed focus provides in order to escape a sense of inconsequence