Presentation short abstract

Small-scale farmers in Morocco’s Drâa Valley sustain sacred, relational practices of water as baraka and amana, despite drought and state-led techno-scientific interventions. Their knowledge elucidate water’s materiality as lived, ethical and communal.

Presentation long abstract

In the past few decades, Morocco's Drâa Valley has seen increased drought conditions along with techno-scientific interventions, such as the El Mansour Eddahbi hydro-dam and the Noor Ouarzazate solar complex, which have further constricted water access for small-scale farmers in the region and intensified the precarity of desert ecologies.

This paper centers the other-world-making imaginaries of water and its versatile materiality in the inherited knowledge-practices of small-scale farmers living in the semi-arid localities of Zagora and Ouarzazate, who despite the continuous re-engineering of waterways away from their known and intricate communal systems and into hierarchical state-controlled technologies, have maintained sacred and intimate relationships with water.

For these farmers, water is seen and treated as baraka (blessing) and amana (sacred responsibility) because of its centrality in sustaining life within their fragile desert ecologies. Their relationship to water appears in the language they use, often assigning human qualities to water; in their daily rhythms, where it structures the cyclical movement between the dār (home) and the jnān (small farmland); and through twiza/tiwizi, the ancient and enduring cooperative practices that organize their lives.

By mapping water’s materiality outside of simplified data points, metric flows, and climate patterns aimed at justifying its extraction and control, this paper demonstrates how water’s materiality lives intimately in the socio-spiritual worlds of small-scale farmers, where it is cared for, loved, shared and grieved.