Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib

Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib. Edited by Katherine E. Hoffman and Susan Gilson Miller. Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. Pp. xi, 225; bibliography, contributors, index. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The somewhat unwieldy title of this collection is intended as a reference to Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa, a landmark volume edited by Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud and published some thirty-five years ago. While the volume under review lacks the heft of its namesake, it remains an ambitious and worthy effort all the same. Edited by Katherine E. Hoffman and Susan Gilson Miller, the nine chapters, which originated in a 2006 Harvard workshop, exemplify what the editors call the "current exuberance" of Berber studies today (p. 1 1).

According to Hoffman and Miller, the resurgence of interest in Berber/Amazigh ethnicity reflects a variety of factors, chief among them "a more relaxed political climate in Morocco and Algeria [that] allows for a greater appreciation of multiculturalism and ethnicity as positive attributes of the modern nation-state" (p. 2). Nationalist ideology in both countries had previously stressed Arabness as central to the struggle for independence. Today's climate of openness also testifies to the vigor of Berber/Amazigh activism. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Amazigh activists successfully framed the issue of Berber cultural and linguistic expression in terms of human rights, a sophisticated strategy carefully explored by Jane E. Goodman in her chapter, "Imazighen on Trial: Human Rights and Berber Identity, Algeria, 1985."

What exactly constitutes Berber identity remains the...