Associate Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern University, USA - EURIAS Laureate
Septembre 2012 à juin 2013
Linguistic and cultural anthropologist, professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, United States, Katherine E. Hoffman specializes in the relationship between expressive culture, ethnicity, law and political economy in history and in contemporary times. Her research field is based in Morocco, where she studied the process of French colonization, anti-imperialism, nationalism, and post-nationalism. She is author of a monograph, We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber Morocco (2008, Wiley-Blackwell) and is, with Susan G. Miller, co-editor of Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (Indiana University Press, 2010). Katherine Hoffman is currently writing a book on French policy in Morocco and native customary courts in the mountains of the Anti-Atlas, Mirror of the Soul: Language, Islam, and Law in French Native Policy of Morocco (1912-1956). She also serves as an expert on Morocco to the National Geographic Society.
" Mirror of the Soul : Customary Law and Islam in the transformation of the judiciary in Morocco since 1930 "
Mirror of the Soul is an interdisciplinary investigation of legal transformations in rural Morocco under the French Protectorate (1912-1956) in light of both colonial designs and Berber community internal struggles over the relationship between legal practice, religion, gender, and collective identity.
The project's methods and analysis draw on ethnography, linguistic anthropology, history, and legal studies, and the data is both archival and oral historical.
The archival material is both classified (storied primarily in military archives in Vincennes and diplomatic archives in Nantes) and unclassified (stored in a rural administrative outpost in Morocco established by the French in 1928 and never exploited for scholarship or other purposes).
The project brings together these diverse textual sources with oral histories collected in southern Morocco, focusing on the collective memories and biographies of rural Berbers involved in French administration, in the preparation of legal deeds, or in the administration of rural lands just after Independence during which the customary courts had been dissolved for political purposes but no other system had yet replaced them.
Of particular importance are the renderings of the customary courts, legal process, and administration that have been passed down, and the ways these differ from official accounts in the archival correspondence.
Disputes in the customary courts may seem inconsequential – concerning use of a particular plot of land, or inheritance, or disagreement over divorce terms – but collectively they constituted encounters through which law and collective identities began shifting for rural Berbers under French rule and with the consolidation of a Moroccan nation grounded in an Arab identity.
The period raises questions as well about the role of custom in Muslim societies across historical periods.
Through this micro-study and the macro-level Protectorate policymaking that framed it, information emerges about a previously unstudied judicial institution long considered important for polemic reasons but never examined from the inside, through its practices, or for the ends of its rural and largely impoverished users.
The book also examines how "native policy" measures (politique indigène) designed to potentially bolster the Protectorate's influence instead helped lead to its demise, even while they provided new opportunities for rural women, in particular, to obtain rights long denied them.
HOFFMAN, Katherine E. Le serment, les marabouts et la mosquée dans le droit coutumier berbère au Maroc. In colloque pluri-disciplinaire Paris-Ouest Nanterre (1, 2010, Nanterre), Puissances de la Nature, Justices de l’Invisible: du maléfice à l’ordalie, de la magie à la sanction, Nanterre : Centre d’Histoire et Anthropologie du Droit, 2012.
HOFFMAN, Katherine E. Berber Law by French Means: Islam and Language in the Moroccan Hinterlands, 1930-1954. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2010, vol. 52, no 4, p. 851-880.
HOFFMAN, Katherine E. Internal Fractures in the Berber-Arab Distinction: from Colonial Practice to Post-National Preoccupations. In HOFFMAN, Katherine, GILSON MILLER, Susan (éds.). Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. p. 39-61.
HOFFMAN, Katherine E. We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber Morocco. Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley Publishers, 2008.
HOFFMAN, Katherine E. Purity and Contamination: Language Ideologies in French Colonial Native Policy in Morocco. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2008, vol. 50, no 3, p. 724-752.