We Share Walls: Language, Land, And Gender In Berber Morocco (blackwell Studies In Discourse And Culture)

We Share Walls Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco Katherine E. Hoffman Additional praise for We Share Walls “A beautiful and deeply researched ethnography that elucidates how performance genres like talk, song, and poetry create a sense of place and a particularly Berber (and gendered) response to modernity.” Deborah Kapchan, The Tisch School of the Arts at New York University “At last we have an account of Berber Morocco that probes space, culture, and people in a highly sensitive and eloquent style. Hoffman brings to the forefront a long marginalized language and an almost forgotten community. This is indeed ethnography at its best. Readers will be inspired by the breadth and depth of Hoffman’s treatment.” Enam Al-Wer, University of Essex “With compassion and intellectual acuity, Hoffman’s study of the Berber-speaking Ishelhin of Southern Morocco evokes a society where the spoken word has molded a deep attachment to place. Her observations glow with the intensity of lived experience, distilled from a total immersion in the land, language, and people of this remote region. Using speech, poetry, and song as keys to understanding social process, We Share Walls represents a major contribution to contemporary Moroccan Studies and to the wider field of ethnolinguistics.” Susan Gilson Miller, Harvard University “An excellent in-depth study of the gender and language dynamics in Berber communities. A highly readable and timely addition to the emerging and promising scholarship on language, gender, and women in Morocco.” Fatima Sadiqi, Harvard University Linguistic anthropology evolved in the 20th century in an environment that tended to reify language and culture. A recognition of the dynamics of discourse as a sociocultural process has since emerged as researchers have used new methods and theories to examine the reproduction and transformation of people, institutions, and communities through linguistic practices. This transformation of linguistic anthropology itself heralds a new era for publishing as well. Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture aims to represent and foster this new approach to discourse and culture by producing books that focus on the dynamics that can be obscured by such broad and diffuse terms as “language.” This series is committed to the ethnographic approach to language and discourse: ethnographic works deeply informed by theory, as well as more theoretical works that are deeply grounded in ethnography. The books are aimed at scholars in the sociology and anthropology of language, anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics and socioculturally informed psycholinguistics. It is our hope that all books in the series will be widely adopted for a variety of courses. Series Editor James M. Wilce (PhD University of California, Los Angeles) is Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, where he is currently Director of Asian Studies. He serves on the editorial board of American Anthropologist and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. He has published a number of articles and is the author of Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh (1998) and Language and Emotion (forth