Formation of a Middle Class? Social Cohesion in Rural Morocco

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The proposed project deals with processes of social formation in rural North Africa. Knowledge about rural areas in this region has been largely inadequate to date, as evidenced in particular by the reappraisal of recent protest movements in North Africa, which often had their starting point in marginalized provincial towns. In this project, the encounter of neoliberal globalization processes with agricultural livelihood systems will be examined with regard to social transformations. In particular, the effects on the cohesion of society will be examined. The focus is on an agro-pastoral community on the northern slopes of the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco: the municipality of Asni. For the local society, whose members were largely homogeneous until the 1970s and made their living predominantly as farmers and mobile livestock keepers, fundamental and diverse processes of societal differentiation have since emerged, giving rise to new forms of work, investment, interactions, and institutions. Three guiding questions structure the study: (1) What processes of distinction take place in this rural area? (2) To what extent are new lifestyles and milieus forming, manifesting themselves in new middle-class structures? (3) Is upward social mobility necessarily accompanied by socio-economic polarization? The project is part of a longitudinal historical investigation. It builds on its own 20 years of preliminary work, while the research of the Moroccan cooperation partners goes back to the 1980s and the first available study on the community is almost one hundred years old (1928).