Fellowship: Rocca Pre-Dissertation
Fellowship Year: 2025
Project Theme/Title: The poetics and politics of property in the Algerian Sahara (1000-1600)
Abstract: I intend to examine discursive negotiations of property rights through oral traditions, notary records, title deeds, land registers, chronicles, and hagiographic manuscripts in local archives that I have experience navigating during my time in the cradles of Sha‘ānbī social organization in the Algerian Sahara. At a granular level, I am eager to explore notions of mustaghraq al-dhimma in the extant source material. At an extrapolative level, I am interested in assessing if the veracity of potential evidence points to a shared legal vocabulary between Arabs and Berbers in the region who viewed ‘the commons’ as a space that relied on shifting alliances, reputation and reciprocity. My oral history research will involve collecting anecdotes of amiable compromises (sulḥ)
concerning property among community leaders and local notables across my field sites. I will seek informants knowledgeable about property disputes and customary law practices that have been passed down intergenerationally. This will give the necessary texture to my study of the intersections of Mālikī and Ibāḍī approaches to communal land ownership, usufruct rights, and oral agreements. This study will thus draw on a wide range of primary sources and ethnographic field notes to reveal emic articulations of sovereignty and the unique poetics and politics of territoriality among the Sha‘ānba.
