Salem Ouakari, The Manufacturing of Belonging: A Study of Land Ownership in the Sahrawi Community (the Ait Oussa Tribes 1600- 1958) (Doha/Beirut : ACRPS, 2023), pp. 488.
Land is central to the lived world of the Sahrawi tribes of southern Morocco and to their historical, social, economic, and cultural dynamics. It has generated and sustained forms of interaction, production, solidarity, and conflict, and therefore offers a valuable lens through which to understand these tribes’ conditions, transformations, disputes, and forms of belonging.
Within this framework, Salem Ouakari’s
The Manufacturing of Belonging: A Study of Land Ownership in Sahrawi Society (Aït Oussa, 1600-1958) examines the relationship between people and space through the specific case of the Aït Oussa tribe’s connection to land. In so doing, it addresses a complex subject in which the social, the historical, and the cultural intersect across time, patterns of thought, and human action. The book’s central question concerns the ways in which land-related issues contributed to the formation of the social structures of the Sahrawi society under study. Ouakari approaches this question through three dimensions: the material-technical, the relational-social, and the symbolic-cultural.
* This Review was published in the 21th issue of AlMuntaqa, a peer-reviewed academic journal for the social sciences and humanities. You can read the full paper
here .
