Cairn, borne ou belvédère ? Quand le naturalisme et l'analogisme négocient la limite entre espace cultivé et forêt au Maroc

Abstract

Drawing on the representations and uses that rural communities and forest management services in Morocco entertain about the cairn, a rocky mound used as a marker, this article discusses the way in which the naturalist ontology of forest management codes contrasts with the local analogic ontology regarding the status given to the boundary between cultivated space and forest. In the forest management code, the cairn is a marker to be used in cadastral plans following a topographical and technocratic organisation of space. The way rural communities make use of the cairn is much more polysemic. If one of the purposes of the cairn is to establish boundaries, it is also seen as a saint stop-off, as a middle point between the human world (cultivated space) and that of the genies (forest), as a belvedere, and as a ritual space. While the forest management code considers the cairn as an instrument that transfers a rights-based rationality over the territory, the communities incorporate it in a semiotics of space. Notwithstanding these differences, in practice, the forest's domain-marking cairns are ontological points of negotiation resulting from the encounter between forest rangers and peasants. In the Essaouira region, the symbolic appropriation by Berber-speaking communities of forest rangers' interventions is realised through women's ritual investment in domain-marking. This article illustrates how the negotiation of ontologies around the cairn engenders hybrid modalities of forest management and, thus, of public policies.