Detours of life: space and bodies in a Moroccan village

Abstract

This essay is an interpretation of the internal logic of a way of imagining space, movement and the body in a village in pre‐Saharan Morocco. I begin with the analysis of an informant's graphic representation of his village and then spin its threads in terms of a local discourse of structural insufficiency and symbolic ambivalence, which I pursue ethnographically through a number of domains, while suggesting at the same time the contours of a dialogue with issues in European thought , [the body, space, movement, symbolism, poststructuralism, North Africa]