Media and the scaling of ritual spaces in Morocco

Abstract

The author explores how members of the Moroccan Sufi brotherhoods of the ‘Isāwaand Ḥamadša shape their activities and transnational networks through the use of technical media. Trying to think beyond notions of the local, regional and transnational, the article focuses on the mediators and practices by which actors understand the scope of their actions and redefine their agency at different locales through ‘scaling’. More particularly, he explores how actors engage in ‘downscaling’ complex issues into ritual procedures, and in ‘upscaling’ these procedures by inscribing them into a media chain and a more encompassing network of people, signs and things.

This paper explores how members of a Moroccan Sufi brotherhood, through their media practices, engage in processes of deterritorialization and reterritorilization. ¹ In line with Pnina Werbner’s (1990, 2002, 2003) trilogy on the acolytes of a Pakistani Sufi saint, it approaches these processes as the dismantling of territorial boundaries through the circulation of persons, things and signs through space. These flows take place; they extend, link and delimit locales. This analysis, then, tries to think beyond notions of the local, regional and transnational: it focuses on the mediators and practices by which actors understand the scope of their actions and redefine their agency at different locales through ‘scaling’ (Latour, 2005: 183–184). More particularly, it explores how actors engage in ‘downscaling’ complex issues into ritual procedures, and in ‘upscaling’ these ritual proceedings by inscribing them into media chains and a more encompassing network of people, signs and things.

Agency should be understood as the capacity to act and give meaning to action; it takes place in socio-technical arrangements that extend through space (Callon, 2005: 4–5). Even though these arrangements are constantly restructured through the circulation of persons, signs and things, they are shaped in situated activities and at certain places. Sacred sites are of special significance in this context. They function as boundaries and thresholds to other social, religious and ontological worlds where one’s social existence is detached and reattached to geographical places, spiritual forces, other worldly beings, ritual experts, religious communities, friends and factions in various ways. Richard Werbner (2009: 59–65), for instance, ascribes a ‘cardinal agency’ to highly sacred places, crucial as they are in directing human traffic, and in the de- and re-localization of sacred items, supplicants and their social networks. Increasingly, however, these religious centres are being (re-)defined and (re-)built with the help of technical media. Hence, this article asks how media practices alter and redefine the conceptualization of religious spaces. What happens to religious landscapes when people move and when their engagement with sacred places is increasingly mediatized?

Drawing on his long-time work on regional cults, Richard Werbner (2004: 390–394) challenged recent discussions focussing on boundary crossing and other ‘trans-interests’ by emphasizing the importance of sacred centres for the channelling of flows of goods and people. Highly sacred places structure mobility and define regions, their boundaries and their interrelation. In the following analysis, I explore how adepts of Moroccan trance cults transmit religious topographies and how they invoke a ‘sacred centrality’ by ritual mediation at different locales. Sacred centrality is not contained within places: it is produced through ritual practices and sacred technologies. This is why the following section presents the media and media actors among trance brotherhoods in Meknes, and discusses the dynamics I observed there. ² The second section zooms in on the various media technologies by which the actors connect their social worlds in transnational space, and explores how agency is established and continuously re-defined through the mediation of persons, signs and things. The third part then examines a video recording of a ritual and its trajectories between Morocco and Europe.

Restructuring religious spaces: sacred centrality, media and mediation

The rural and urban landscapes of Morocco are ‘literally dotted’ with sanctuaries, ‘where a saint, a walī, a sayyid, a holy man endowed with great blessing, or baraka, is said to be buried’ (Crapanzano, 1980: 16). The significance of these sanctuaries varies over time: between 2003 and 2011, for instance, several smaller sanctuaries in the city of Meknes fell out of use. But the region remains a sacred centre, as it harbours the tombs of Moulay Ismail – the founder of the ruling dynasty – and of the founding saints of two popular religious brotherhoods, the ‘Isāwa and the Ḥamadša. The first traces its origin to Sīdī Muḥammad ben ‘Isā, a pious, miracle-working man of the 15th century whose remains are kept in a sanctuary in Meknes. The founding saints of the Ḥamadša brotherhood, in contrast, Sīdī ‘Alī ben Ḥamdūš and Sīdī Aḥmad Dġūġī, date from the 18th century and rest in sanctuaries in the adjacent Zerhoun Mountains. Both tombs have developed into major pilgrimage sites for people suffering from spirit possession. ³

The ṭarīqa al-‘isāwiya (literally ‘way of the ‘Isāwa’) has always superseded the tariqa al-hamdušiya in national and international importance, and claims to have zāwiyas (branches) all over North Africa and the Middle East that function as ‘sub-centres’ at different locales. Fairly recently, at least one zāwiya was built in Europe (Andezien, 2001). Zāwiyas of the Ḥamadša can be found in several Moroccan cities, two of them in Meknes. Both brotherhoods have developed rural branches, whose practices differ significantly from the urban traditions. These Ḥamadša and ‘Isāwa ‘of the Western plain’ (diel ġarb) lack built sub-centres. Instead, they perform their ecstatic rituals in the homes of their members or clients. With the migration to the cities, however, several groups have continued to perform for the migrants and their families in Meknes’s former shanty towns (Crapanzano, 1973: 101–113). For all of these groups the founding saints and their sacred places are at the centre of their sacred practices, invoked in their rituals and translated into the production of baraka ⁴ at different locales.

Even if in recent years the number of confraternities paying their annual mawāsim (tributary visits, singular mūsim) to the sanctuaries has been on the decline (Nabti, 2010), this does not mean that ritual and festive practices are vanishing. On the contrary: along with the brotherhoods, tens or even hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and visitors gather in Meknes or the Zerhoun Mountains for the saints’ celebrations. Furthermore, especially for the ‘Isāwa, the main season for ritual activities is the summer, when Moroccans living abroad – about 10% of the population – return to the country. Often, my interlocutors in Morocco and Europe referred to their aṣl when they commented on performances of the ‘Isāwa at family parties, on public stages or on TV. According to Abdellah Hammoudi (2001: 148), aṣl is ‘a difficult word conveying the senses of origin, root, and place where the group manifested its existence first, all of which converged in a genealogy and its unfolding from an original ancestor and a place of origin’. Through these ‘stagings’ the ‘Isāwa have thus come to signify tradition and origins (see Morris, 2000). As Victor Turner once noted, they have become ‘culture incarnate’ (Smithsonian Institution, 1982). This triggers a strong competition among ritual entrepreneurs in and around the city of Meknes as they convene their brotherhoods on an ad hoc basis and try to offer their services to wealthy migrants and national elites alike. This ‘transnational division of ritual space’ (Salih, 2002) goes hand in hand with a diversification of the brotherhoods’ activities and of their clientele, and with increased competition in the ritual marketplace: brotherhoods include various trance performances in their repertoire, or sometimes engage musicians and trance dancers. Ritual entrepreneurs set up ‘associations of folklore’ and distribute cartes de visite. They craft their own internet sites (on MySpace or Facebook) or upload small clips of their activities on YouTube.

In 2003, when on my first field visit, I tried to cover the religious topography of the brotherhoods in Meknes. Travelling on foot, with Crapanzano’s (1973) study on the Ḥamadša in hand, I took the central holy site of the ‘Isāwa in Meknes and the nearby Ḥamadša zāwiya (the meeting courtyard) in the older part of the city as my points of departure. When I reflect on media spaces, I start out from these two sites: there I met the media actors; there we can observe the translation and cyclization of: (a) signs found on the internet or on transportable media like CDs; (b) people who bring these signs into circulation or are depicted by them; and (c) objects and places that are brought into relation through these media and mediations.

At the time of my first visit to the pilgrimage centre of the Ḥamadša in 2003, one could purchase audiocassettes with the music and singing of these groups, but on the Prophet’s birthday in 2005 the shops and stands were full of DVDs and video CDs (VCDs). Suspiciously inspected by relatives, professional cameramen slunk around in the tents set up by the brotherhoods and tried to capture spectacular scenes of the trance dances. Quickly, these videos were multiplied on VCDs and offered for consumption at home. More recently, short video clips taken with mobile phones have found their way onto the internet and have sometimes caused public outrage. But even though the publication of intimate pictures in the local sūq was feared, the overwhelming majority of the rituals I attended were filmed, whether at public shrines or in the privacy of people’s homes. Many adepts of the brotherhoods kept recordings of their trance rituals in their homes or circulated them among selected circles of the brotherhoods or among family members. The video producers often spliced in the image of the sponsors of the rituals, or credited the leader of the brotherhood.

Media technologies

When dispersed, people need to find ways to cooperate through time and space and uphold the bases of interpersonal obligation (Rosen, 2002: 15). To enable ritual cooperation in transnational space, the ‘Isāwa and Ḥamadša employ technical media. Many of their trance rituals, for instance, are funded by migrants, who contribute money or animal sacrifices to have their ailments treated, even when they cannot be present themselves: they are integrated into the ritual through mobile phones, or attendees may extend offerings on their behalf. This ritual space hence proves to be a transnational space that is triadic in character. First there are the individuals who live scattered around the world but identify themselves as members of a ritual community of cooperation; second, there are the (ritual) contexts of the countries of origin; and, third, one has to consider the contexts of the respective sites of residence (Vertovec, 1998). In these rituals, the circulation of people (Meknessis, migrants, patients and healers, the possessed and onlookers), signs (music, singing, ritual practices, blessings) and things (money, mobile phones) iscondensed – only for these people, signs and things to be recirculated in transnational space through media technology. By joining in by phone, people position themselves in relation to each other in the social space of the cult community; they are funders or ritual principals, clients and patients, both in the local moral economy and in that of the diaspora. ‘We were all there’, my informants in Brussels often told me the day after they called their relatives during a ritual and their call, along with other calls from, say, Paris and Verona, was made part of the ritual.

As Steven Vertovec (2004) pointed out, telephones are the ‘cheap glue of transnationalism’. But other technologies (such as digital cameras and the internet) also connect the everyday life of people in different places, creating ever new constellations of things, signs and people. With the aid of the video camera, for example, rituals are recorded for absentees who perhaps fund the events, or these absentees are directly ritually addressed and integrated in the ritual proceedings. In this way, ritual experts mediatize ritually produced baraka for their clients across time and space (Zillinger, in press). In the terminology of actor–network theory, these technological media are ‘quasi-objects’: they create their own contextuality and are ‘indissolubly interwoven with the history of the collective, which without [them] would look completely different’ (Rottenburg, 2008: 410).

Hence, technological media must be understood as an aspect of media practices in the broader sense. In my research among sans-papiers in Brussels, I noticed how places themselves are sent on a journey to the foreign land. In their journey towards a residence and work permit, the paths taken are determined by social relationships: contacts and telephone numbers from brokers are circulated or sold through neighbourhood networks, tried and tested paths to Europe are taken, and people head for first stops where help can be expected and strategies for place-making can be tried and developed. This journey sometimes lasts years – for example, from Meknes to Libya, with a ship to Lampedusa, then to the Moroccan broker’s family in Rome; from there to one’s former neighbour who is now in Verona, to members of the trance brotherhoods in Paris, and finally to Brussels. En route, symbolically charged items like high-quality olive oil, region-specific pastries for use in religious celebrations, pieces of traditional clothing, photos, and CDs or DVDs are circulated. With the aid of these media – in the broader sense – the actors situate themselves within ethnic networks and relationships of mutual obligation and, by means of the traditional clothing, the jillaba, in relation to the community at large.

Bruno Latour (1986) gave the name ‘immutable mobiles’ to things that are movable and at the same time harbour an inscription in which situations or social relationships materialize: movable things whose constancy of form can transport traces and messages across space and time. If we regard these recording media (such as CDs and DVDs) as part of a ‘media chain’ (Behrend, 2002) that also includes clothing or olive oil, we get a glimpse of the technologies by means of which artefacts, signs and complex social relationships are bundled and become transportable. This unfolds yet another new complexity in faraway places and contexts, develops new levels of meaning and creates new pathways for action.

Thus, if they can afford it, families send high-quality olive oil to Europe to improve the status of new arrivals, and to bind them to the contexts of their home country. Olive oil is not merely a foodstuff and medium of exchange, after all; it also is a remedy, a gift from God praised in the Koran, a ritual marker of holy places, the symbol of the city of Meknes (which bears the nickname ‘rich in olives’), and a symbol of trustworthiness – as people know that other oils are usually mixed with cheaper variants. High-quality olive oil is a sign of trust and social closeness (qaraba); it means being able to trace the path from the harvest in the landscapes around Meknes to the olive press, to the bottling facility, and through transport and distribution. In an analogous way, members of the trance networks carry with them CDs or DVDs of ritual recordings whose content is made significant through the film’s recording context, through the people, places and objects they depict, through the modes of mediation (who has brought me this film?); and through its reception (with whom shall I view these recordings?). On the way through Europe, these films are brought out for Meknessis from the same district and watched together. People show each other their acquaintances and their spiritual and biological kin and forebears, thus presenting who they are. The techniques of ritual socialization are thus translated into inscriptions and, together with various artefacts, transported and unfolded anew in the streets and living rooms of Verona or Brussels.

Media spaces

It is noteworthy that the actors of the brotherhoods maintain trance media archives in which films, photos and objects are kept – for their own prestige, for ritual-economic reasons, to demonstrate ritual genealogies, as a means of remembering, and not least to examine and further develop the ritual practices that, using this collection, can be adapted to differing needs and requests. They serve to demonstrate one’s own abilities to ritual clients, to enhance one’s status for ethnologists, and to establish one’s position as a broker of ritual services for religious entrepreneurs. Bruno Latour (1987: 238–281) coined such archives ‘centres of calculation’ in which information is gathered and further processed. Following Latour, complex matters need to be turned into ‘complicated’ procedures. These procedures order knowledge, and thus break it down to a level that is accessible for new translations, thus unfolding new complexities. These he calls ‘inscriptions’, referring ‘to all those transcriptions through which an entity is materialized in a sign, an archive, a document, a paper, or a trace’ (Latour, 1999: 375). These inscriptions make complex matters transportable. But which media or, speaking more generally, which mediators and (quasi-)objects do the actors themselves favour? Which do they deem best to bundle information and enable cooperation across time and space?

Through circulating these media, ‘Isāwa adepts circulate a ritual topography of their holy places, practices, relationships and expectations. The ritual procedures themselves break complex matters down into ‘complicated’ procedures: experiences of social deviance, personal crises, magical encounters and traumatic losses are brought into a ritual, sequential order. Ritual techniques bring all these things together into ritual space by ‘downscaling’ them.

One of my informants in Brussels gave me a video that he had received from his parents (his father being an important ritual expert in Meknes). The video shows a procession to the sanctuary of Sīdī Muḥammad ben ‘Isā during the annual mussim (the saint’s feast day). At the beginning, the procession seems to the uninitiated viewer like a confusing chaos of musicians, spectators, ecstatic followers and media users, raising their mobile phone cameras to capture the ritual on video. At the end of this sequence the camera pans to a woman and films her raising her hands for a blessing and chanting several fuāteḥ (intercessional prayers) for her son, who has lived in clandestine migration for the last five years. In these blessings of a mother for her son, the ritually evoked baraka is translated through space and time with the aid of a camera. The next day, the video is already burned onto a CD and sent with a trustworthy person travelling to Brussels to give to her son.

The ‘Isāwa trance rituals revolve around a genealogically framed baraka, whichdates back to its 15th-century saints and is tied ever anew to social spaces through ritual techniques – through the simultaneous processing of social, material and mediatic spaces. A whole city district is captured on video and its ritual practices are socially andgeographically located. The camera inscribes this complex arrangement of people, signs and things in a transportable medium and translates the ritual production of baraka into the conveyance of blessing from a mother to her son. In the above example, the video is distributed through social networks in the diaspora. Thus it expands the ritual space of mediatic exchange and connects it with the social spaces of the son. Receiving, watching and further circulating this video, he translates the ritual arrangement into social relationships of mutual obligation and modes of cooperation at his place of residence.

Conclusions

To a certain extent, the Sufi networks of the ‘Isāwa and Ḥamadša provide a protective ‘home away from home’ (Adogame, 1998) for their acolytes on the move, converting their ritual engagement into a resource. By mediatizing their sacred sites, social networks and ritual practices, the ‘Isāwa and Ḥamadša bring their ritual involvement, the legitimacy and significance of trance and the social networks of the cult community into an exchange of people, signs and things (Schüttpelz, 2006). Thus they restructure agency in ‘transactions through which elements of the actors’ interests are reshaped and translated, while non-human competences are upgraded, shifted, folded or merged’ (Latour, 1993: 22). This mediation takes place at and between different locales. However, the basic conception of media as overcoming space and time needs to be reconsidered: media spaces should be researched at the interfaces of their formation – along the situated activities of inscribing, distributing and reintegrating media (or, in the parlance of actor–network theory, mediators) in the socio-technical arrangements that shape human practice. Media, then, are quasi-objects that create, shift and translate agency. CDs with ritual videos, for instance, are integrated into ‘media chains’ between Europe and Morocco. Together with symbolically charged olive oil, clothing or ritual foods they circulate along the clandestine migration routes and are crucial in strategies of place-making ‘on the move’. Newly arrived migrants carry the VCDs with them and show the recordings to their hosts on their way to Europe. Hosts and guests negotiate their social positioning and their respective claims for mutual help. The ritual as ‘indexical occasion’ (Werbner, 1977: xxv) is thus translated through space and time: it includes people from different locales not only after the rituals, but also in the rituals themselves, for instance when people in these videos are addressed to convey baraka across the Mediterranean or when specific ritual deeds are performed for them. These media, therefore, create their own contextuality: they instantiate cooperation and constitute social relations. In creating and shaping media spaces, actors engage in boundary-crossing and place-making alike, producing centrality in certain places and on the move. It is, as it were, the actors who define relative scale.