Traditional Water Sharing Practices of the Amazigh of Morocco: Centralised Tribal Polities Vs. Decentralised Tribal Confederations

This paper seeks to expose the various traditional practices of water conservation and sharing among the Amazigh communities of south-eastern Morocco. The remote southeast had remained mostly spared from full-scale French colonial intrusion. Many of the traditional institutions of the Amazigh – both their traditional customary laws and the indigenous constitutional orders of the Ait Yafelman and Ait Atta tribal polities in the region – remained relatively intact at the time of independence. The early decades of independence did not come with much of an intrusion by the modern Moroccan state either. As a result, both tribal polities remained in place as well as the different traditional practices of water conservation. What makes this region an informative case-study for studying indigenous constitutionalism is that the Ait Atta were a centralised tribal polity while the Ait Yafelman were a confederal union of various constituent tribes. Both, however, occupied very similar geographies of vast semi-desert arid plains interspersed by oasis valleys of irrigated agriculture. Both polities also contained communities in the low-lying agricultural valleys and communities in the highlands herding livestock. Both polities also included non-members whose rights and obligations were different than those considered as indigenous. Everything other than their constitutions were similar. How water was conserved and shared followed very elaborate policies and practices in both the Ait Atta and the Ait Yafelman, but the differences in their indigenous constitutions influenced how things worked. One was a centralised tribal polity with the ability to dictate and enforce policies from the centre, the other required compromises reflecting the local context. Anthropologists have studied the Amazigh of the southeast, but this is the first time the scholarly framework of Sociology of Law is put to use with an eye to distil lessons that could enrich the study of non-Western non-state constitutions.