TRACES OF THE STORYTELLER

Located in central Morocco, the city of Fes sits in a wide valley stretching from the Atlas Mountains in the south to the Rif Mountains in the north. The city is composed of two main sections: the old walled town—the medina—established in the 9th century, and the new town—the Ville Nouvelle—founded by the French in 1912 and developed extensively since Morocco gained independence in 1956.Footnote ²⁰ This duality replicates an earlier division of the medina into Fes al-Bali (Old Fes), founded in 789, and Fes al-Jadid (New Fes), founded in 1276.Footnote ²¹ The temporally differentiated sections of Fes are further broken into distinct quarters and neighborhoods. These time-space divisions seep into narratives about the city. The urban cityscape and the telling of the city and its inhabitants (its “storyscape”) both employ the heavy-laden concepts of “old” and “new” to create an elaborate living and expressive amalgam.

My research focuses on the medina, a vibrant hub of local and international economic, commercial, and tourist activity. Housing some 160,000 people in an area of 300 hectares, the medina is densely populated.Footnote ²² In addition to residential quarters, it boasts numerous public structures, artisanal workshops, and monumental architecture representing its long history. In this confined area, about 50,000 workers produce shoes, clothes, pottery, furniture, lamps, wares of copper, silver, and gold, and many other objects in small workshops. The crafts sector in Fes directly and indirectly provides a living to more than 25 percent of the city's population and more than 75 percent of the medina's population.Footnote ²³ An atmosphere of dignity and grandeur pervades the medina due to its acclaimed antiquity, its foundation-myth centered on Mawlay Idris—the city's founder, a descendant of the Prophet, and the patron saint of Fes—its status as a former imperial capital, and its large number of longstanding and influential religious institutions.Footnote ²⁴ Safarin Square in the center of Fes al-Bali transmits this atmosphere most palpably. The workshops of the ṣafārīn (coppersmiths), from whom the square gets its name, inhabit the place. Towering above are the Qarawiyin mosque and madrasa, which were founded in 859 and are considered to be among the leading Islamic educational and spiritual institutions in the world.

Walking in and around the square, one feels the exceptional presence of the Qarawiyin mosque, the sheer size of which demands the attention of passers-by. Many of the passages between quarters and markets are located next to the Qarawiyin's walls, which enclose the gaze and create a sacred privacy interrupted only by the activities of daily life. High learning, prayer, craftsmanship, and trade occur simultaneously and in close proximity to each other. The shared environment, the back and forth movement of people from the workshops to the Qarawiyin complex, the noise of processing and hammering copper, the chat of customers and tourists—all of these connect the sacred and the profane.

The Qarawiyin complex has the additional effect of baraka, that spiritual power which produces a special blessing.Footnote ²⁵ The sense of baraka percolates into the adjoining square and mingles with the longstanding moral values of the craftspeople: commercial dignity, professional integrity, and apprentice obedience and loyalty to the master.

In the past, the square's economic, religious, scholarly, and social significance made it a place of political importance. This and similar central squares in the Middle East and North Africa had a reputation of “making the news” as the origin points of resistance and civil unrest.Footnote ²⁶ As one artisan told me: “Once, if you wanted to know what was going on you had to go to the Safarin. You could understand everything there.”Footnote ²⁷ Currently, however, an air of sadness and loss pervades the space. Many share a sense that things have changed. As coppersmiths in the square told me, time has elapsed and old traditions are lost: “People in the past did everything in the family, and did it together. One cooked this thing, the other that thing. Today it is the opposite way around—it's for the décor. Once, four families lived together. Once, there was wellbeing. Today, there's no wellbeing.”Footnote ²⁸

In my examination of the complex and intricate storylines around local crafts and the ways these storylines are told, I draw on Margaret Somers’ observations on the role of interacting personal and collective narrative forms in the construction of social identities:

In the case of Fessi artisans, personal narratives interact with the history of artisanship to forge a collective discourse on labor and society that transforms through time. A narrative, much like a craft product, contains centuries of experience and knowhow, thus bearing the marks of countless storytellers from the past. To use Walter Benjamin's powerful metaphor: “Traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.”Footnote ³⁰ I argue that the crisis discourse that dominates the narration of crafts in Fes is not a novel phenomenon but rather one whose present form both draws on past narratives and anticipates future meanings.Footnote ³¹

In line with the observation that “everything we know, from making families, to coping with illness, to carrying out strikes and revolutions is at least in part a result of numerous crosscutting relational story-lines in which social actors find or locate themselves,”Footnote ³² my research treats narratives and associated discourses as joint social productions that are interrelated to each other and to the historical, economic, and cultural contexts from which they emerge. Thus, I shall first highlight the emergence, expansion, and sustainability of the crisis discourse around crafts in Fes, which was constantly in dialogue with other storylines, and then evaluate it as a constituent element of the practices and tellings of colonial modernity.

NARRATING FESSI CRAFTS AND CRAFTSPEOPLE

In order to explore Fessi artisans’ current conceptions of society and economy, and more particularly the artisanal crisis, I examine textual representations of crafts in Fes from the 11th century to the present. The texts that I have selected convey the intricate processes through which artisanal narratives are formed. The imprint of prior conceptions, however obscure, can be found on current narratives, and recent historical and political contexts anticipate novel narrative forms. Accordingly, my discussion of the texts proceeds chronologically, though in the case of the older texts I weave in discussion of modern archival material and recent interviews in order to capture the longue durée of narratives. The aim is to highlight significant moments in the history of the urban artisans with a focus on the emergence and transformation of the artisanal crisis narrative and its relation to other storylines.

Published in 1068, Abu ʿUbayd al-Bakri's Kitab al-Masalik wa-l-Mamalik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms) is the first work to mention Fessi artisans in its description of Fes, though it does so only briefly.Footnote ³³ More detailed depictions of the urban crafts and craftspeople appear several centuries later in Ibn Abi Zarʿ Abu al-ʿAbbas Ahmad al-Fasi's 14th-century volume, Rawd al-Kirtas (The Garden of Pages).Footnote ³⁴ Based to a large extent on Kitab al-Masalik wa-l-Mamalik, the book provides more detailed information on Fes and its craft corporations as well as the author's impressions of them. Describing the city effusively, Ibn Abi Zarʿ comments that, “since it was founded, the city of Fes has been the home of law, science, goodness, and religion; it has also been the basis of the Maghrib region and its axis, center, and pole.”Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, “The inhabitants of Fes are the smartest, the most gifted in terms of intelligence and reason . . . the least in conflict with the kings, the most obedient to their governors and rulers . . . and they surpass all the people of the Maghrib region in matters of work, law, and religion.”Footnote ³⁶

Although the sociopolitical realities of today's Fes are different in almost every respect from those of the city described by Ibn Abi Zarʿ, the observations in this 700-year-old text serve as a source of authority for present narrations of Fes. In current Moroccan society, and especially in Fessi self-telling, being a Fessi means belonging to an elite class of people who are educated, rational, and appreciative of knowledge and music. Accordingly, they perceive themselves and are often perceived by others to be superior to the “uneducated” and “irrational” peasants—the ᶜarūbī of the countryside who “invaded” the city in the last century—and to the shluḥ—“primitive” Berbers from mountain villages.Footnote ³⁷ This self-esteem prevails in a current popular joke: “A teacher asked a Fāssi pupil, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ ‘A pilot,’ replied the Fāssi pupil. He then asked an Aroubi pupil, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ ‘I want to be a Fāssi, sir,’ replied the Aroubi pupil.”Footnote ³⁸

Describing Fessi artisans and their workshops, Ibn Abi Zarʿ writes: “On the banks of the river there were the houses of the textile dyers and their shops, the houses of the tanners, the houses of the launderers, and the shops of the tailors, gold thread embroiders, and coppersmiths, as well as mills for spinning wool and other things that need water.”Footnote ³⁹ Ibn Abi Zarʿ’s focus on specific workplaces in his description of the city is strongly suggestive of the importance of crafts and craftspeople to high urban culture. Similar sentiments were expressed several decades later by the famous historiographer Ibn Khaldun, who writes in his al-Muqaddima:

And like Ibn Abi Zarʿ’s descriptions of Fessi superiority, Ibn Khaldun's observations on the significance of crafts find their way into current discourses. In Safarin square, one coppersmith explained that crafts endow people with intelligence: “In crafts you study everything. The world is a giant school; you study and then go somewhere else and know nothing. However, the craft teaches you everything.”Footnote ⁴¹ In Najaryn, the carpenters’ neighborhood, I was told: “Artisanat is a library. It is a library of humanity. It is a library of people who have passed away.”Footnote ⁴² The idea also persists in a common representation of the artisan as a “doctor of crafts” who gains intelligence through professional proficiency.Footnote ⁴³ Present-day artisans do not literally cite Ibn Khaldun's al-Muqaddima, but echoes of Ibn Khaldun's voice resonate in their narratives. My interviews thus capture a conceptual dimension that has circulated within the artisanal milieu for generations.

Whereas my interviewees subtly echo the thought of Ibn Khaldun, French colonial discourse reproduces it almost verbatim. French administrators from Louis Massignon, to Jacques Berque, to Marcel Vicaire, to Georges Hardy, to Louis Brunot—all of whom simultaneously performed as researchers—frequently referred to al-Muqaddima in their ethnographic writings on Morocco and the relationship between sedentary and nomadic populations and between Arabs and Berbers.Footnote ⁴⁴ Ibn Khaldun's binary logic fitted very well the colonial categorizations of subjects. Thus, his writings have infused not one but multiple tellings of Morocco, Fes, and its craftspeople, serving as an existing ideational reservoir from which modern and contemporary narrators have borrowed—even copied.

A century and a half after Ibn Khaldun, Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, also known as Leo Africanus, wrote extensive descriptions of Fes and its artisans.Footnote ⁴⁵ In his History and Description of Africa, which was translated into English from the original Italian version in 1600, he writes:

Al-Wazzan's glorious representation of Fes and its artisans continues for many more pages and includes references to products and places in Europe and Asia, all of which are surpassed by the splendor and quality of Fessi crafts and shops. This description had an enormous impact upon much later texts and narratives on the subject, including Louis Massignon's work on Moroccan artisanal corporations, Horace Miner's research on the weavers of Fes, Laila Miyara's description of the Fessi porters’ corporation, and Amin Maalouf's historical novel Leo Africanus, which depicts the adventures and life story of al-Wazzan in the form of personal memoir.Footnote ⁴⁷ Al-Wazzan's descriptions also shape the Fessi cityscape and practices within the city: the medina's Maristan hospital, where al-Wazzan once worked, prominently displays a commemorative plaque of him on the wall; walking around the medina one often encounters tour guides citing excerpts from al-Wazzan's text and reviving his figure while leading their groups through the city streets; groups of students follow his travel itinerary while voyaging around Fes to study the early modern history of North Africa.Footnote ⁴⁸ Al-Wazzan's admiration for the Fessi artisans continues to circulate within the medina.

A counterpart to al-Wazzan's description is Luis del Mármol Caravajal's Descripción general de África, sus guerras y vicisitudes, desde la fundación del Mahometismo hasta el año 1571 (General Description of Africa, Its Wars and Vicissitudes, from the Foundation of Mohammedanism until 1571). Published in 1573, several years after the appearance of al-Wazzan's book, Caravajal largely repeats al-Wazzan's observations on Fes and its inhabitants and artisans. Like al-Wazzan, the Spaniard describes “the city of Fes, capitol of the kingdom of Fes,” as “the most beautiful among the cities of Africa.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Writing shortly after the reconquista in Spain, both authors express an admiration for Fes that exudes nostalgia for Andalusia.Footnote ⁵⁰ The memory of Andalusia lives on not only in their and other texts, but also in the current discourse of artisansFootnote ⁵¹—another storyline that has contributed to shaping the urban identity of Fes and its inhabitants.

The premodern textual evidence suggests that Fessi artisans played a critical cultural and economic role in the city: their talent, morals, and knowledge enriched its spirituality; their mastery of arts and exceptional handicrafts—from small pottery vessels to lavishly decorated monumental structures—fashioned its sophisticated materiality and helped to expand Fes’ fame worldwide. Moreover, premodern literary vignettes of Fes continue to inform current narratives through intertextual association—though none of the texts discussed so far indicate the existence of an artisanal crisis of the kind experienced today.

Moroccan texts from the 17th and 18th centuries were largely sponsored by the court. With their focus on dynastic histories and military campaigns, they rarely mention Fessi artisans.Footnote ⁵² In the 19th century, as European powers become increasingly involved in Morocco, textual references to the city's craftspeople reappear,Footnote ⁵³ particularly in works by European traders and travelers in Morocco propagating the notion of a superior Christian Occident the flipside of which was a decadent, sensual, and primitive Muslim Orient.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Italian Edmondo de Amicis’ writings are a notable example. A newspaper correspondent at the Italian consul's residence in Fes and the author of the then well-known novel The Heart, De Amicis repeatedly contrasted a glorious past Fes as described in the older texts with what he saw as a deteriorated present-day Fes.Footnote ⁵⁵ Moreover, he declared that the city's artisans could have been successful if only the Moroccan state had not turned them into a miserable, brainless, and unmotivated crowd.Footnote ⁵⁶

The British traveler Hugh Stutfield conveys similar ideas in his 1886 book, 1200 Miles’ Ride through Morocco. In one section, he describes a shopman in the medina of Fes, which leads to broader conclusions about the “Moors”:

Clearly, European depictions of Fes and its inhabitants from this period are radically different from the predominantly indigenous ones of the 11th to 17th centuries. Whereas the former view Fes and its craftspeople with admiration, the latter view them with contempt and disgust. This discursive topos was the first sign of the crisis narrative that would soon gain prominence within the city's artisanal discourse.

In contrast to the 19th-century European discourse of decline in Fes, Moroccan texts of the same period,Footnote ⁵⁸ while recognizing Morocco's gradual surrender to European imperialism and criticizing the leaders who enabled it, describe Fes’ craftspeople—and especially the tanners—as a well-organized and self-confident body. The tanners are often praised for the 1873 Tanners’ Revolt against tax-collectors, the city-governor, and the Sultan.Footnote ⁵⁹ The revolt took place in the context of Mawlay al-Hasan's accession to the throne. Having demanded from the new Sultan the abrogation of certain taxes they deemed unfair, the tanners rose up when this demand was refused. The Sultan's army soon arrived in the city to suppress the revolt, and the tanners were eventually forced to surrender.

The Tanners’ Revolt belies the European depiction of Moroccan craftspeople as apathetic and indolent. In fact, in the eyes of the local community the tanners became icons of strength, endurance, and integrity. This image did not fade with time. Fifty years after the revolt, the French scholar Louis Massignon wrote that the tanners make up a large part of an urban militia protecting Fes against Berber attacks. Referencing earlier texts (particularly that of al-Nasiri), he went on to say that: “generally the revolutions in Fes were the work of three corporations: tanners, butchers and dyers.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, in my own interviews, which were carried out long after the urban militias were disbanded, tanners emphasized their role in various struggles—particularly the struggle for Moroccan independence.Footnote ⁶¹ Their self-image and the image of them held by others resonate with the ethos of the 1873 Tanners’ Revolt, a national model for popular uprising against institutional unfairness,Footnote ⁶² and with the tanners’ militia past. The discursive arc on the tanners and their ethos thus evolves through intertextuality whereby past narrations are reformulated in the present and anticipate future practices.Footnote ⁶³ Their story has become a “public narrative”Footnote ⁶⁴ that continues to exist side by side with other storylines, such as the crisis narrative. Together, all of these crosscutting plots shape the craftspeople's image as well as their share in the creation of Fessi urban identity.

Yet by the turn of the 20th century, descriptions that praise Fessi crafts and craftspeople disappear even from Moroccan accounts. These are replaced by what appears to be a metanarrative of all-encompassing artisanal economic disaster that has come to encode ideas about social actors, denying them any significant agency. Although calamities in the artisanal realm likely occurred from time to time prior to the onset of European colonialism in Morocco, they are absent from precolonial texts, which focus instead on the splendors of local crafts. Beginning in the late 19th century, depictions of Fessi craftspeople that emphasize their dignity, skills, integrity, and honor fade away, except when used as counterimages to a problematic present. Yet these storylines have not totally disappeared; they continue to exist within a “reservoir” of themes that shapes “the Fessi artisans,” but the choice of what to extract from that reservoir depends upon the prevailing discourses of each historical moment.

Having noted the spread of the crisis narrative at the turn of the 20th century, I turn to the French Protectorate period that started in 1912. Five years after its establishment, the Protectorate government issued a set of urban regulations in an alleged attempt to repair the “malfunctioning” management of Moroccan cities. A large number of these regulations related to the urban crafts sector, which the French perceived to be in a state of disorder.Footnote ⁶⁵ Even after these amendments were put into practice, however, the shared sense of an artisanal crisis continued to build. For example, the proceedings of the 1923 Fes city council meeting states: “The members declared that since the beginning of the French Protectorate the artisans of Fes have lost the good taste that accounted for the reputation of the Fessi industry to such a degree that some industries might be lost.”Footnote ⁶⁶ One year later the same impression is echoed in an extensive report on Moroccan crafts,Footnote ⁶⁷ and in the years ahead the administration continued to make similar observations. To quote a 1937 report about the Moroccan crafts:

In parallel with this discourse, colonial texts dealing with the artisans frequently contrast the “glory” of previous centuries with the “gloomy ” present. A 1938 French report addressing “the rescue of the artisanal sector” comments that the inspiration for the Moroccan crafts comes from the Berber tribes. This Berber inspiration, the text continues, was enriched by artistic traditions of the Maghrib's grandes siècles (great centuries), namely the 13th through 15th centuries.Footnote ⁶⁹ The report points out that at present the crafts are in decline, adding paternalistically that only Europeans (i.e., French administrators) can protect and save the Moroccan people from their incompetence.Footnote ⁷⁰

The telling of Fessi artisanat during the Protectorate period is not restricted to governmental reports, but can also be found in historical works. Among the latter is Roger Le Tourneau's Fès avant le Protectorat (Fes before the Protectorate),Footnote ⁷¹ a detailed study of the city. Typical of French colonial discourse on Fessi crafts, Le Tourneau portrays them as an economic tradition resistant to change and innovation. The local artisans, he surmised, lacked any motivation to change their centuries-old operational and management methods. To Le Tourneau, this inertia was exemplified by the observation that crafts and workshops have continued to operate at the same scale and place since the times of Leo Africanus.Footnote ⁷²

Writing about Fes at the same time as Le Tourneau was Titus Burckhardt, a Swiss German scholar who arrived in the city in the 1930s, converted to Islam, was initiated into the Darqawiyya branch of the Shadhiliyya in Morocco,Footnote ⁷³ and studied at the Qarawiyin. (The French later suspected him of collaborating with Moroccan nationalists and expelled him from the country.)Footnote ⁷⁴ Unlike the ethnological reports of French administrators, Burckhardt's text about the city of Fes is infused with an interest in Islamic theology and mysticism, particularly as they bear on New Age ideas such as philosphia perennis. In addition to discussing theological issues and the compiled works of local Sufi masters, he examines spiritual aspects of Fessi crafts. To Burckhardt, the crafts represent a stable and universal truth that resists modernity and its obsession with innovation. Nevertheless, he shared with other European observers the feeling that the local artisanal industry was in crisis. This crisis emerged, in his view, due to craftspeople's loss of transcendental values after they abandoned hand-made production for mechanized work.Footnote ⁷⁵

Le Tourneau's and Burckhardt's “voices” echo earlier concepts and enter the pool of possible descriptions of Fessi crafts. In the interviews I conducted, Le Tourneau is specifically mentioned by current craftspeople as an authority on their trade,Footnote ⁷⁶ while Burckhardt's ideas about wisdom and tradition, which interconnect with broader universal philosophies, resonate in other conversations in the medina. As one artisan told me, exceptional craftspeople are like Sufi masters in that they may reach transcendental levels in which their souls leave the body, travel to heaven, and return with visions that inspire the forms they create.Footnote ⁷⁷

Fessi artisans are not the only people to reflect colonial and precolonial attitudes in their discourse on Moroccan and Fessi crafts. One of the latest academic works on the artisanal sector in Morocco—though with many references to Fes—is Hamid Irbouh's Art in the Service of Colonialism, a decidedly anticolonial monograph on French Art education during the Protectorate period.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the spirit of current academic writing, Irbouh sets out to retrieve the voices and critical perspectives of Moroccan and French female artists and artisans whose own accounts have all too often been written out of history. While he deals with long-ignored evidence and offers many new observations, Irbouh does not problematize the perception among French administrators that Moroccan crafts was in decline, a perception that served as a major pretext for their establishment of vocational trade schools.

The compendium of texts described above enables various insights into the Fessi artisanat and offers answers to some of the questions posed at the beginning of this article. Despite current gloominess about the state of Fessi crafts, they are not exceptionally worse off today than they were in prior periods, a point corroborated by the sheer volume of current practitioners and production. During the many upheavals it experienced throughout its history, the crafts industry always found ways to adapt to new realities. Although certain professions within the industry disappeared over timeFootnote ⁷⁹—a fact that prompted themes of loss in the storytelling about local crafts—the artisanat managed to cope with changing socioeconomic conditions.

Today, approximately 50,000 artisans in FesFootnote ⁸⁰ still actively produce a range of products for both the local and tourist markets. These artisans play a major part in urban life and in many national and international programs for crafts revitalization.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet in spite of the ongoing vitality of Fessi crafts, the perception that it faces an immense crisis dominates personal and collective discourse.

The texts discussed here display continuity between old and new depictions and conceptualizations of Fessi crafts and craftspeople, with new narratives anticipating the appearance of future narratives (and practices). Together, these narratives form a large cognitive collection from which themes and explanations are chosen and communicated, usually in accordance with the dominant sociopolitical discourses of the time. The artisanal crisis narrative surpassed other narratives with the involvement of European powers in Morocco and the emergence of modernity in the 19th century. In this article, the social change of that period is demonstrated not primarily as political or socioeconomic but rather as dialectic in nature, with new metanarratives and their relationship to various actors and storylines being brought to the fore.

UNTANGLING THE CRISIS NARRATIVE

For the past century and a half, the notion of Fessi crafts and craftspeople in decline has become a central trope irrespective of their actual circumstances. The discourse of artisanal crisis, I have suggested, came to the fore in Morocco in the context of European imperialism and evolved over time through intertextual dynamics. Yet the crisis that has been perceived in Morocco over the past century and a half is not particular to that country. Simonetta Zamponi claims that the notion of a “crisis of modernity” was widespread in Europe during the 1800s. At the turn of the 20th century,

Europeans who arrived in Morocco during that period were undoubtedly imbued with this metropolitan melancholic mood.Footnote ⁸³ In addition, they viewed the local population and Morocco more broadly as degraded versions of past glory. Essential to this view was the perception of an artisanal crisis in Moroccan urban centers such as Fes. Imperialism and its colonial apparatus readily adopted the discourse of decline to justify what it deemed to be benevolent intervention. Meanwhile, the colonized subjects, who bore the brunt of European imperialism, employed the Orientalist series of oppositions—backwardness versus progress, stability versus innovation, and so forth—to their own social imaginaries, as they waxed nostalgic about the past.

The encounter between Orientalist narratives and colonized subjects thus enabled the emergence of a crisis narrative and its idioms. The broader context for this crisis was the materialization of modernity, the features of which appeared as part of the encounter between colonizer and colonized.Footnote ⁸⁴ Theorists of colonial modernity such as Tani Barlow have demonstrated that modernity does not follow colonialism in time; instead, the two are simultaneous expressions of capitalist expansion. They have also shown that this expansion reconfigured not only colonized spaces but rather all space. This article supports this hypothesis by pointing to another domain that affects and is affected by colonial modernity—the storytelling of crafts in Fes.Footnote ⁸⁵

However, the crisis narrative is much more than an act of telling. It fulfilled actual and specific needs for both ruler and ruled under the French Protectorate as well as in postindependence Morocco. The theme of crisis appears to be a viscerally powerful trope. In fact, the history of Fessi crafts over the past century and a half (in both colonial and postcolonial contexts) shows that the declaration of a crisis by the authorities inevitably leads to a series of actions.Footnote ⁸⁶ One oft-repeated action has been the formation of governmental committees. Time and again, these governmental committees blame the crisis on previous policies and current economic conditions, raise fears over the future sustainability of various professions, and ultimately justify policies that enable the state to exercise greater control over civil society. For example, a 1937 committee organized by the Protectorate government to examine a perceived crisis in the Moroccan artisanat stated emphatically that, “[t]he crisis forces us to intervene urgently! . . . Immediate aid is required for the artisans and their crafts . . . Systematic research must be conducted in order to efficiently attack the old factors of the crisis.”Footnote ⁸⁷

“Saving the crafts” has tended to involve improving and modernizing artisanal techniques, organizing craft corporations, searching new markets, improving product quality, and revamping vocational training. These schemes are consistent with the logic of colonial modernity by which old concepts, techniques, and objects are replaced with new ones that are claimed to be up-to-date, cleaner, and better.Footnote ⁸⁸

Rudyard Kipling, a brilliant storyteller who simultaneously disseminated and criticized colonial thought, fully grasped the tendency of the modern state to appoint committees that invariably repeat previous committees’ actions in a seemingly endless cycle. In How the Camel Got His Hump, Kipling describes the efforts of a fictional administration to confront a certain imagined crisis: “and they held a palaver, and an indaba, and a punchayet, and a pow-wow on the edge of the Desert”Footnote ⁸⁹—a set of actions that would seem to lead only to more ineffective actions. Kipling's point is to criticize recourse to actions that unwittingly prolong rather than resolve problems, and that simultaneously produce and maintain practices and metanarratives. However, one would be amiss to assume that such committees are pointless, for their actual purpose may diverge from their publicly stated goals. The state relies on these committees to produce knowledge that empowers it to control and reshape the public domain in the ways it sees fit.Footnote ⁹⁰ Committees and their operative modes thus represent a form of modern governmentality.Footnote ⁹¹ In the case of the Fessi artisans, the language in which the state of the crafts is described, the interpretation given to this (dire) state, and the choice of actions to be taken, all justify modern projects of reform to instill rationality, discipline, renewal, technology, and efficiency.

A similar but more recent case is the Moroccan state's formation of a governmental committee in 2005 to explore the question, “[w]hat is the strategy for saving the artisanal sector?”Footnote ⁹² The committee suggested: research; quality control; education; credit and loans; fairs, exhibitions, and tourism. These are seemingly good solutions to the problem of a collapsing economic sector. However, “saving” the crafts proves a justification for the total management of the public—its practices, ways of thought, and vocabulary. In other words, the state creates a “public-narrative”Footnote ⁹³ that is disseminated through a variety of avenues in order to achieve a particular set of goals.

The crisis discourse is not a preplanned governmental strategy. The project of modernity first promoted under European imperialism and later in postindependence Morocco produces a sense of dissatisfaction and crisis that enables the persistence of asymmetrical power relations between government authorities and craftspeople. Indeed, dissatisfaction and crisis are highly productive modes, giving rise to a perpetual aspiration for something better. The logic of modernity states that what one has is always insufficient and that through modern economic management one may achieve, exploit, and produce more and better. Obscured is the point that this goal can never be fulfilled and that crisis is produced as a technique of governmentality rather than merely the result of mismanagement.Footnote ⁹⁴

A PERPETUAL CRISIS

In his commentary on modernism, the anticapitalist researcher Don Milligan remarks that “Marxists more broadly identified it as a period in which the frantic drive for profits expressed itself in new forms and intensities of global domination, resulting in interimperialist rivalry that in turn led to the sclerotic degeneration of capitalism into a monopolistic phase characterised by permanent crisis.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Drawing on Marx and Engels, Milligan goes on to elaborate that capitalist society is characterized by perpetual upheaval, change, and crises. For Marx and Engels, he notes, the Capitalist Age—or the “Bourgeois Epoch,” as they often called it—was a period of “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation.”Footnote ⁹⁶ In a similar vein, Simon Clarke, a scholar of labor and employment relations, remarks that rather than seeking out crisis, capitalists are repeatedly surprised by it, unable to understand that their socioeconomic practices are at the root of it.Footnote ⁹⁷

While Marxists blame capitalism for its continual production of crises—regardless of whether these are premeditated—political conservatives understand the discourse of crisis as a dialectic device through which various kinds of authority can promote their own agendas by raising levels of fear. For example, in an article titled “The Strategy of Perpetual Crisis,” the political commentator and blogger Rand Simberg blamed the Obama administration for using “the current economic crisis as justification for his radical agenda. Call it policy-making by perpetual crisis.” Simberg compared this alleged strategy to the policies of “Communist titans like Stalin and Mao.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The same idea appears in the journalist and writer Damon Linker's slightly earlier article entitled, “The Age of Perpetual Crisis,” where he explains the crisis as follows:

Thus, despite their ideological differences, left- and rightwing essayists both observe that a sense of crisis infuses modernity, even though they explain this crisis differently—be it a built-in failure of the capitalist system, a political strategy, or part of Communist policy. Furthermore, this type of crisis and its dialectics, they both insist, are inherent to and perpetual within modernity.

Although these observations address political and geographical settings dissimilar to those studied in this article, they apply to the story of Fessi artisanat because the narration of perpetual crisis is deeply interconnected with the modern condition. As products of modernity, capitalism, communism, French colonialism, the postindependence Moroccan state, American political parties, and the current artisans of Fes are likely to manipulate and be manipulated by specific crisis narratives. This is not to say that all of these actors are similar. Rather, they all have played an active role in the grand, global production of colonial modernity. Each affects it and is affected by it. This article has singled out a particular aspect of this broader production of colonial modernity that comes pointedly into view in the case of Fessi artisanat—the crisis narrative and its dynamics.

An important insight gained from my research in Fes is that governments do not have sole monopoly over the crisis narrative and its deployment in the public sphere. Citizens, such as the Fessi craftspeople, deploy the concept to make claims and counterclaims in order to attain certain goals. The crisis narrative can therefore serve as a field of resistance. The following cases from the artisanal sector in Fes illustrate this point.

In the 1930s, at the height of the national struggle against the French Protectorate, the Fessi artisans participated in various antigovernment demonstrations and riots. The French declared that the Fessi artisans’ dissatisfaction resulted from “an artisanal crisis” but knew full well that the actual reason for the unrest was related to national aspirations. Claiming to save the craftspeople, but actually trying to avoid “their falling into the wrong hands,” the French authorities offered a range of benefits to the artisans including extra loans, credits, and permits. In response, the artisans publicly acknowledged the severity of the economic crisis.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This was a quid pro quo: the artisans’ active participation in the crisis narrative for the French bestowal of economic benefits.

As another example, during the 1930s and after World War II, the Protectorate authorities suggested that one solution to the artisanal crisis was to boost sales of crafts by organizing local and international fairs.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Following the dictates of the government, Moroccan artisans and craftspeople increased the volume of their exports through these events.Footnote ¹⁰² However, artisans who had the opportunity to travel to the metropole also used it to present their anticolonial views to the French public.Footnote ¹⁰³ In other words, Moroccan craftspeople used the conceptual framework devised by the authorities to respond to the crisis in order to resist French rule. Needless to say, these actions embarrassed the French administration, which consequently banned the participation of Moroccans in forthcoming exhibitions.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

A final case is furnished by a 1946 incident involving the manufacture of Moroccan carpets. The government, in its periodic campaign to save the crafts, suggested attaching quality labels to regional carpets. The idea was that government officials would assign a specific artistic style to each region and grant quality-assurance labels only to those artisans following government directives. The administration believed that the labeling system would have the effect of increasing prices and therefore profits for the carpetmakers. To the administrators’ great surprise, the decision actually maddened the carpetmakers. The latter wrote a letter of protest to the resident general Eirik Labonne stating that the new policy would only exacerbate the carpetmaking crisis because numerous styles were being produced in each urban center as a result of massive migration from the rural hinterland to Morocco's cities.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ An excerpt from their petition reveals the power they wielded by weaving the crisis discourse into their demands:

This poetic description of a pending crisis as well as the author's reference to Marshal Hubert Lyautey—the first resident-general in Morocco between 1912 and 1925 and a frequent champion of the local population and private initiative—reveal how the artisans deployed the crisis narrative to achieve their objectives. Three elements of colonial modernity—Lyautey, as the founding figure of French colonialism in Morocco, capitalism as a quasi-sacred force, and the threating crisis—were grouped together to support the carpetmakers’ point. Furthermore, this case shows ways in which the shaping of the crisis narrative intersected with the shaping of the craftspeople, their products, and their agency within a single historical process. Artisans, narration, and crisis formed an inseparable theme within Moroccan colonial modernity.