Hsain Ilahiane

Interests

Research

Information and communication technologies for development; science and technology; development; poverty; globalization; informal sector; oasis farming; community-based resource management; ethnicity; Islam; applied anthropology; business anthropology; economic anthropology; political ecology; ethnography; Middle East and North Africa.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Ilahiane, H. (2022). The Mobile Phone Revolution in Morocco: Economic and Cultural Transformations. .

Chapters

• Ilahiane, H. (2022). Al-hogra—A State of Injustice: Portraits of Moroccan Men in Search of Dignity and Piety in the Informal Sector. . In Arab Masculinities: Anthropological Reconceptions.
• Ilahiane, H. (2019). Mobile phones, gender switching, and place in Morocco. In Location Technologies in International Context,. Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315544823-5
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  This chapter examines how Moroccans use mobile phones as a way of reframing issues of gender, honor, and shame, and placemaking. It argues that mobile communication enables distance, becoming an invaluable vehicle for inverting and suspending ordinary gender roles and placemaking practices. It also argues that mobile phones are not just objects. Rather, they are “things” and constitute multi-vectored places. Illuminating mobility, place, and gender reversals, this chapter furthers recent analyses of location technologies, gender, presence, and placemaking.
• Ilahiane, H. (2019). Spanish balconies in Morocco: A window on cultural influence and historical persistence in the Mallāḥ (Jewish) community. In Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain. Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315053240-6
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  This chapter traces the influences of Medieval Muslim Spain on the urban and physical layout of the Medina. It discusses ahistorical readings of the Islamic City, and argues that the pronounced distinction between mallas with and without balconies correspond to Medieval Islamic Spanish influence not colonial influence. The chapter suggests that unlike the rest of the Medina’s urban layout and built environment, the Jewish quarter’s urban layout attests to the cultural memory of Medieval Spain preserved by the Jewish communities of Moroccan cities. It explains some of the influences of population movement on the built form of the urban outline of the North African city. The chapter shows that the emergence of the balcony feature in the Medina could be perceived as one way the New Spanish immigrants were remembering or reinventing their Iberian communities. In the theoretical framework of the Maliki School of Islamic Law, a corpus of guidelines is identified as vital to building activity.

Journals/Publications

• Ilahiane, H. (2023). Made for Maids;Female Domestic Workers and the Use of Mobile Phones in the Slums of Urban Morocco. Anthropology of the Middle East, 18(2). doi:10.3167/ame.2023.180206
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  In this article, I am concerned with how female domestic workers use the mobile phone to expand employment opportunities in the shantytowns of urban Morocco. I examine how mobile telephony is a resource for human agency and action, not just a force for culture change. Second, I describe how mobile phone use has resulted in higher revenues by enlarging the circle of economic activity and by enabling supplementary informal income-generating possibilities. Third, I explore how the mobile phone has allowed them not only to generate more revenue but also to escape the stifling conditions of their workplace and renegotiate the gender politics of private-domestic space.
• Ilahiane, H. (2023). Mobile Phones, Farmers, and the Unsettling of Geertz’s Moroccan Suq/Bazaar Economy. Anthropology of the Middle East, 18(1). doi:10.3167/ame.2023.180107
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  In this article, I first examine the ways Moroccan smallholder farmers deploy mobile phones to revise their relationships with markets and roving middlemen. Second, based on a mixed method of participant observation and survey data, I claim that mobile phone use has transformed farmers’ economic behaviour, resulting in deeper market participation and the gradual undoing of the role of middlemen in the agricultural value chain. Finally, I contend that farmers’ use of mobile phones to synthesise market information from different marketplaces does not only unsettle Clifford Geertz’s arguments on information search strategies in the suq economy, but it also renders the centrality of his notions of intensive bargaining and clientilisation far less important than it used to be before the onset of mobile phones.
• Ilahiane, H. (2023). Special Issue on Economic Anthropology in the Middle east and North Africa. Anthropology of the Middle East.
• Ilahiane, H. (2020). Mobile Phones and the Making and Unmaking of Gender and Place on the Fly in Morocco. Hesperis-Tamuda, 55(4).
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  In this article, I examine how Moroccans use mobile phones as a way of reframing issues of gender, honor and shame, and placemaking. I argue that mobile communication enables distance, becoming an invaluable vehicle for inverting and suspending ordinary gender roles and placemaking practices. Precisely, I claim that mobile phones do not only allow users to switch their gender identities to quickly “fill in” the person on the end of the call when they are caught in the wrong place and situational context, but they also allow them to make sure that the domestic space remains a one-dimensional patriarchal domain. I also argue that mobile phones are not just objects. Rather they are “things” and constitute multi-vectored places. Illuminating mobility, place porousness and gender reversals, this article furthers recent analyses of mobile technology, gender, presence, and place.
• Ilahiane, H., & Venter, M. (2016). Introduction: Technologies and the transformation of economies. Economic Anthropology, 3(2). doi:10.1002/sea2.12064
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  In April 2015, the Society of Economic Anthropology held its annual conference, hosted at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, to discuss the theme “Technologies and the Transformation of Economies.” The articles in this volume examine the multifaceted relationship between people and technology across different societies and at different periods in the history of social and economic transformations. This introduction to the volume (1) contextualizes the conference and frames the discussion of social transformations and technology within the larger debates on people and technology, (2) introduces the different articles from archaeology and ethnography that may potentially contribute to the scholarly debates on people and technology within anthropology and related social sciences, and (3) suggests new areas for future research on people and technology.
• Ilahiane, H. (2014). Mediating purity: Money, usury and interest, and ethical anxiety in Morocco. Human Organization, 73(4). doi:10.17730/humo.73.4.2r8161226v175435
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  In this I Mini argue itui deflates ovei wliat coustitulci m/m (usury I and interest engender what I call "lite iinxielv mo ethical and spiritual piintv " ScvtHvd, I contend tli.it this anxiety also reveals how vine people arc "forced" into tui.iitci.il hrn o/.n,v l" recalibrate the principles ol Islamic ethics and morality with the ambiguous realities ol everyday hie and western banking I iiull\, I claim tti.it the innicpl ol nb.i embodies an clatHHalingsymbol ami provide an example ol bow cthicil aiul devotional purily imperatives mediate immclary practices am! seel In ueale symbolically continent social orders.
• Ilahiane, H. (2013). Catenating the local and the global in Morocco: How mobile phone users have become producers and not consumers. Journal of North African Studies, 18(5). doi:10.1080/13629387.2013.849894
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  Over a decade ago, a major intellectual shift occurred in global development thinking, stressing local and 'bottom-up' market-driven approaches to poverty alleviation over top-down, statist planning. Many principles of this shift are embedded in a development approach referred to as the 'bottom of the pyramid'. At the same time, some of the claims and outcomes associated with such approaches have met with scathing critiques. I examine some of these debates in the context of mobile phone use among low-income labourers in Morocco. There is no doubt that access to productive resources and greater access to markets can benefit people with low incomes. As I argue, however, there are a number of factors that limit the success of such top-down interventions, perhaps none more so than the level to which economic actors have the ability to shape the use of productive resources and to build local productive networks via such resources. In this sense, perhaps not surprisingly, economic and social development can never be disconnected from empowerment and participation. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.
• Ilahiane, H., & Sherry, J. (2009). Economic and social effects of mobile phone use in morocco. Ethnology, 48(Issue 2).
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  Mobile phone ownership in Morocco has leapt from zero percent to two thirds of the population in less than ten years of commercial availability. This rate of penetration underscores the degree to which the mobile phone has become part of everyday routines and serves various communicative needs (ANRT 2007). Ethnographic research among urban laborers indicates that mobile telephony is a resource for human agency and action, and its use has resulted in greater personal income by increasing economic activity and enabling informal income-generating possibilities. (Mobile phones, income-generation, social networks, Morocco) Copyright 2010 by The University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved.
• Ilahiane, H., & Sherry, J. (2008). Joutia: Street vendor entrepreneurship and the informal economy of information and communication technologies in Morocco. Journal of North African Studies, 13(2). doi:10.1080/13629380801996570
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  This paper provides an ethnographic and cultural analysis of the 'informal sector' in Morocco. In this age of globalisation, no firm can afford to ignore the vibrant informal sector that makes up the bulk of GDP in many developing economies. And yet, the informal sector is routinely misunderstood and mythologised as 'pimps, drug dealers, counterfeiters and pirates', and is particularly despised by the high tech industry. Based on fieldwork, the authors' goal is to examine this dynamic economic phenomenon and to dispel a few myths by providing an ethnographic description of one exemplary case. While the study focuses on the experience of an articulate entrepreneur, who happens to operate in the highly dynamic underground economy in new, used and black market information and communications technologies, it speaks to such themes as entrepreneurship, global products flows, economic relations, and the implications of the informal sector for global flows of goods and services.
• Ilahiane, H. (2001). The Social Mobility of the Haratine and the Re-Working of Bourdieu's Habitus on the Saharan Frontier, Morocco. American Anthropologist, 103(2). doi:10.1525/aa.2001.103.2.380
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  In this article, I examine the practical relevance of Bourdieu's notion of Habitus in understanding the relationship between the acquisition of land and the transformation of political and social relations of subordination in the stratified communities of southern Morocco. First, I claim that the acquisition of land by the Haratine, a subordinate and low-status ethnic group, means more than just a simple economic transaction, and land serves as the very basis for changing the political relations of subordination. Second, I argue that the Haratine strategy of land acquisition was made possible by the intervention of the central state in the local power structure during and after the French colonial period. When these transformations were coupled with labor possibilities made available by national and transnational migration, the market game was opened to the Haratine, who could draw on the accumulation to improve their political and social standing. This also meant that the autonomy of the local community was lost forever, and the traditional nobility of Berbers and Arabs was no longer able to exclude the subalterns by extra-economic or legal means.
• Ilahiane, H. (2001). The break-up of the Ksar: Changing settlement patterns and environmental management in southern Morocco. Africa Today, 48(1). doi:10.2979/aft.2001.48.1.20
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  In spite of the French colonial intrusion, up to the 1950s, resource management in Saharan villages constituted what some have called the syndrome of collectivity. The syndrome of collectivity was the product of three interrelated factors: the Ksar, or a nucleated settlement pattern, ethnicity, and village-drawn constitutions. Since Independence, however, the Ksar's compact and nucleated settlement began to break up. I argue that the break-up of the Ksar and the emergence of a dispersed settlement pattern have led to significant erosion in village institutions governing the commons. In addition to the appropriate emphasis on environmental strategies in the literature, I also contend that reflection upon settlement change and dynamic ethnic relations is critical to crafting sustainable environmental strategies in the new millennium.
• Ilahiane, H., & Park, T. (2001). Sources for the Socio-economic study of rural Morocco. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 33(2). doi:10.1017/s0020743801002057
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  This paper explores the utility of 19th- and 20th-century taxation and court records as tools for mapping the changing social topography of rural Morocco. Little serious work has been done with such records to date, and it is hoped that this paper will encourage more researchers to use this material. As a subset of the Moroccan official record, legal and tax records obviously have an epistemological character differing from that of private correspondence and even other administrative records. Yet in the post-modern era, it is obvious that this cannot be simply reduced to the official record providing us with truth while private correspondence is a mixture of fiction and possible truth. All sources need to be scrutinized both in the traditional ways of the historian and, more generally, as reflecting social forces conceived broadly.
• Ilahiane, H. (2000). Estevan de Dorantes, the Moor or the slave? The other Moroccan explorer of new Spain. Journal of North African Studies, 5(3). doi:10.1080/13629380008718401
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  Unlike Ibn Battuta and other medieval travellers and explorers who rose to fame and still fire up much imagination and scholarship in North Africa today, Estevan, the first Moor or Black to set foot in the Southwest of the USA, is virtually unknown in his native land, Morocco. Although much has been written about his sense of adventure and exploration on this side of the Atlantic, the historical literature remains deficient in documenting the conditions under which Estevan left Morocco. This article deals with a rereading of Spanish accounts of New Spain and medieval Moroccan historical documents to better understand Estevan's status and the circumstances that led him to join the Spaniards in their conquest of the New World in the sixteenth century, and why he still remains an anonymous character in Moroccan and North African history text books.
• Ilahiane, H. (1999). The Berber agdal institution: Indigenous range management in the Atlas mountains. Ethnology, 38(1). doi:10.2307/3774085
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  This article examines the historical organization of the agdal institution and identifies its constraints and opportunities among Berbers of southeast Morocco. There are many types of agdals at different levels of Berber social organization and conflict is ever present. Analysis of the agdal arrangements for the communal use of pasture demonstrates how pastoral groups manipulate kinship and historical opportunities to negotiate order, grass, and subsistence in the highly variable environment of the High Atlas mountains. Technological innovation has exacerbated conflict among the users of pasture, but agdal management attests to its resilience. The persistence of conflict in the Ait Yaflman confederation over the use of agdals is rooted in the historical and environmental conjunctures of sixteenth-century Morocco, and the amplification of these historical forces by French colonial and postcolonial policies of resource management. (Agdal, Berbers, ecology, history, Morocco).

Presentations

• Ilahiane, H. (2024, August 2-3.). Homo Atlanticus: The Career and Legacy of Moroccan Explorer Estevanico de Dorantes in the Atlantic World. . Mustapha al-Azemmouri: A Mediterranean Culture Bridge and Global Heritage. Azemmour, Morocco.: The General Consulate of the Kingdom of Morocco in New York City and the City of Azemmour, Morocco..
• Ilahiane, H. (2024, February 15.).
  • Estevan de Dorantes (Estevanico): The First Moroccan and African Explorer of the American Southwest.
  . Southwest Center 2024 Spring Lecture Series. Tucson, AZ: Southwest Center, University of Arizona..
• Ilahiane, H. (2024, February 20.).
  • Estevanico: The First Moroccan and African Explorer of the American Southwest.  

   

  . Estevanico: On the footsteps of a Remarkable African Explorer. Staten Island, New York.: The General Consulate of the Kingdom of Morocco and the College of Staten Island, New York..
• Ilahiane, H. (2024, September 4.).
  •   Gift-Giving and Economic Anthropology (Panel Co-organizer (with Anne H. Betteridge). 
  . Commission on Anthropology of the Middle East. Istanbul, Turkey: International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences..