Economic Significance of Cannabis sativa in the Moroccan Rif (1975)
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| Author | Roger Joseph(b. 1938) |
|---|---|
| Volume editor | Vera Rubin |
| Publisher | Mouton |
| Place | The Hague |
| Published | 1975 |
| Pages | 185–194 |
| Language | English |
| Regions documented | The Rif, northern Morocco (Ketama and Beni Seddath) |
|---|---|
| Preparations | Kif (chopped cannabis mixed with uncured tobacco, roughly 0.7 kif to 0.3 tobacco), smoked in a long-stemmed pipe (sebsi) |
| Uses documented | Recreational, stimulant, stress relief, fibre (retted stems) |
| DOI | 10.1515/9783110812060.185 |
|---|
"Economic Significance of Cannabis sativa in the Moroccan Rif" is a chapter by Roger Joseph (born 1938), an American anthropologist, published in Vera Rubin (ed.), Cannabis and Culture (Mouton, The Hague, 1975, pp. 185–194).[1] Based on about eighteen months of fieldwork in northern Morocco, it treats kif (chopped cannabis mixed with tobacco and smoked in a pipe) as an economic commodity, and asks why its cultivation persisted and even flourished in the Rif although it was illegal.
Joseph argues that the poverty of northern Morocco, ecological and political in origin, made kif the rational cash crop of the Rif. He documents the cultivation core around Ketama, the economics of the kif-and-tobacco mixture and its distribution, and attitudes that treated kif as socially acceptable in contrast to alcohol, and he describes a government position that prohibited the sale of kif while tolerating its production.[1]
Author
Roger Joseph (born 1938) is an American cultural anthropologist who carried out fieldwork in the Rif. The study reported in the chapter was sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.[1] With Terri Brint Joseph he later wrote The Rose and the Thorn: Semiotic Structures in Morocco (University of Arizona Press, 1987), a study of two Riffian communities.[2]
The Rif setting
Joseph describes northern Morocco as one of the poorest agricultural areas of the country, for two reasons. The first is ecological: away from the banks of the Ghis and Nekor rivers there is no stable water source, so subsistence farming depends on the dry cultivation of grains and fruit and on adequate rainfall, and drought has periodically brought famine, as in 1947. The problem was compounded by deforestation, which he attributes chiefly to the Spanish administration of the protectorate (1912–1956); citing the geographer Marvin Mikesell, he records that Spain "cut more trees in a decade than the local tribesmen could destroy in a century", leaving slopes exposed to erosion.[1]
The second reason is political. Spanish colonial policy, in his account, extracted what economic value it could from the Rif while investing little, in part because Spain was itself poor and spent much of the period between 1912 and 1956 fighting the Rif rebellion led by Abd el-Krim. He treats the Rif as part of the bled es-siba, the country outside the effective administrative control of the Moroccan state. Given these conditions, kif remained an important cash crop, ranking with citrus, timber, cotton and palmetto fibre, and unlike them illegal. Its cultivation was concentrated almost exclusively in the tribal communities (qabila) of Ketama and Beni Seddath, in Al Hoceima Province, administered through a government-appointed caid at Targuist; kif grown elsewhere was regarded as inferior. Joseph records the local saying that "the land of Ketama likes only kif", a comment both on the poverty of the soil for other crops and on the reputation of the local product.[1]
The kif economy
The harvested female plant was stripped of its leaves by hand; the stems were either discarded or retted in water so that the fibre could be worked into hats, baskets and shoes. The leaves were separated from the seed, chopped fine with a hand sickle and mixed with uncured tobacco. Because tobacco was a state monopoly, kif producers had to obtain their own supply, and Joseph notes that tobacco cost more by weight than kif; the Riffians held that without it kif "doesn't have salt". He gives the admixture as roughly 0.3 tobacco to 0.7 kif, correcting an earlier figure of equal parts reported by Tod Mikuriya.[1]
Within Al Hoceima Province in 1965–1966, uncured tobacco cost about 40 dirhams a kilo, the natural kif plant sold at between 12 and 30 dirhams a kilo, and a kilo of kif ground and mixed with tobacco fetched about 70 dirhams, the difference reflecting the labour of preparation. Prices were higher in the towns, where more middlemen and closer police surveillance added to the cost, and higher again for tourists. The pipe used was the long-stemmed sebsi, with a dismountable walnut-wood stem and a small baked-clay bowl, sold in the local markets (suq) for about three dirhams.[1]
Joseph was frank about the limits of his data. Once kif left the Ketama farms as an illegal commodity, information on its transport to the towns and abroad was hard to obtain, and he was warned that investigating the traffic too closely would be unwise if he wished to remain in the country. He could, however, describe distribution within the Rif, where low-level middlemen carried loads of up to forty kilos by back or donkey along isolated paths at night. The regional market operated on a weekly cycle, each tribe holding its suq on a different day so that a trader could sell at a different market every day but Friday, and the cafés that stayed open between market days served as the terminals of local distribution, selling small quantities packaged in used matchboxes. He counted at least ten cafés catering to kif smokers in the town of Al Hoceima.[1]
On profitability he reports that a net income of 1,000 dirhams took about six months of labour for a barley crop but only about five days for a kif crop, an economic contrast that he treats as central to the crop's persistence.[1]
Attitudes to kif
Joseph found that kif was not regarded as an evil among Riffian men and, unlike alcohol, carried no religious stigma. The difference was written into the courts: a man caught smoking kif might be ignored or held overnight, whereas a Muslim could receive three to six months in prison for drinking, a leniency he attributes in part to the fact that many soldiers and police smoked kif. The westernised literate elite, by contrast, disapproved of kif while themselves drinking alcohol, and stigmatised the kif smoker as poor and backward; kif smokers in turn regarded the elite as poor Muslims. In a 1959 confrontation, cultivators argued that if kif were to be suppressed then the import and export of alcohol should be banned too, and Joseph records that the point was not pressed, which the growers treated as a moral victory.[1]
He notes that within the mountains kif was largely a habit of middle-aged and older men and belonged to the established order rather than, as with cannabis in some industrial societies, to youthful rebellion; younger men who wished to appear modern were more likely to drink beer or wine. Kif was not tied to ritual or mystical practice, was not encouraged by the Sufi brotherhoods and was, he says, mildly disapproved of by the more prominent religious orders; its use was motivated by pleasure and by the relief of everyday pressure rather than by any search for transcendence.[1]
History
Joseph treats the origins of kif in Morocco as too obscure to reconstruct precisely, canvassing introduction during the Arab conquests, by a pilgrim returning from Mecca, or by enslaved people brought from West Africa, and concludes only that its cultivation and use were firmly established by the 19th century. He observes that Spanish chroniclers of the early protectorate did not mention it, and reports being told that Franco paid Riffian recruits during the Spanish Civil War partly in kif. Spain, he argues, made no serious effort to suppress cultivation, despite strict cannabis laws at home, and may inadvertently have entrenched regular kif smoking by creating a class of full-time native soldiers whose all-male professional life, distinct from that of the part-time tribal warrior, gave the habit a settled social setting.[1]
He is sharply critical of the colonial framing, noting that the Spanish treated kif use as evidence of a "barbaric" character that lent a self-justifying motive to their "civilizing" venture. Post-independence attempts at eradication had, he writes, failed: an army campaign against the Ketama fields in the early 1960s came to nothing in the face of the terrain and armed resistance, and he suspected that such campaigns were largely for show, meant to answer international bodies such as the World Health Organization. Producers were well entrenched and politically powerful, an expanding European market lay within reach, and officials were open to bribes. The result, in his account, was a deliberate paradox: the government prohibited the sale of kif but not its production, and the occasional well-publicised arrest of a small dealer served mainly to signal an anti-cannabis position to the outside world while production, distribution and consumption continued unabated.[1]
Significance
Joseph's chapter is an early economic-anthropological account of kif in the Rif and one of the sources for Cannabis in Morocco and Cannabis in the Rif. It documents the kif economy of the mid-1960s, before the shift towards hashish for the European export market and the later replacement of the traditional landrace (the beldiya) by imported hybrids, and its central argument, that ecological poverty and political marginalisation made kif the region's rational cash crop, anticipates the political-economy framing of later scholarship on Rif cannabis.[1]
The chapter is also a period document. Its narrating voice is critical of Spanish colonial attitudes, but it uses the ethnographic vocabulary of its time ("Berber", "native", "tribe"); in this article the communities of the Ketama heartland are described in the current terms, with such usage retained only where it reports Joseph's own wording.[1]
See also
References
External links
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 Joseph, Roger (1975). "Economic significance of Cannabis sativa in the Moroccan Rif". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 185–194. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.185.
- ↑ Joseph, Roger; Joseph, Terri Brint (1987). The Rose and the Thorn: Semiotic Structures in Morocco. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0-8165-0996-4 – via Internet Archive.