Gifts that Recalibrate Relationships: Marriage Prestations in an Arab Liberation Movement

ABSTRACT

Enduring scholarly interest in the social relations of gift exchange has, following Mauss, emphasised how gifts make relationships. Where gifts break relationships, their ethnographic distinctiveness has reinforced the wider notion that gifts are good at making relations. This article examines gifts which, without the empirical distinctiveness of gifts that break relationships, both make and break relationships. Speakers of the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic in north-west Africa give post-marital gifts from the bride’s to groom’s party; these gifts became highlighted amongst Sahrawi refugees in Algeria, on whom the article focuses. In addition to performing reciprocity, boosting the giver’s honour and making new affinal relations, these post-marital gifts also break the relationship between the bride’s family and the bride. The article argues that gifts’ potential to recalibrate relationships through both making and breaking relationships can be helpfully incorporated into wider thinking about gifts, alongside other distinctions amongst gifts and gift relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Gifts
• marriage
• refugees
• Arabs
• Western Sahara

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to my Sahrawi hosts for their patience and generosity during my fieldwork. I am grateful to the representation of the Polisario Front in the UK for facilitating research access to the refugee camps in Algeria. The British Council in Morocco, the University of Cambridge’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies and Morocco’s Agence du Sud facilitated research access to the Moroccan-controlled areas of Western Sahara and southern Morocco. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose comments greatly contributed to the article. I am likewise indebted to Catherine Alexander, Paul Anderson, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Sébatien Boulay, Michael Carrithers, Abdel Wedoud ould Cheikh, Jon Mair, Magnus Marsden and Marilyn Strathern for feedback and comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I conducted two years of fieldwork with Sahrawi refugees (2007–2009), and shorter trips 2011–2014. I discussed and observed wedding practices, including faskha, with refugees from different backgrounds, tribes and refugee camps. In 2012 during a short field trip to Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara and southern Morocco (where political conditions make longer research trips difficult), I discussed faskha with the women of four households in different towns.

2 For a review of changing discussions of gift relations, see Sykes (2005).

3 ‘Tribe’ is a problematic term in anthropology. For example, see Fried (1975).

4 On the Western Sahara conflict, see Zunes and Mundy (2010).

5 On population figures for the camps, see Chatty et al. (2010:41).

6 In parts of rural Egypt, following the groom’s first gift of marriage gold, the bride’s family send ‘return’ gifts including lamb, fruit, vegetables, flour and rice.

7 Ṣadāq is used elsewhere in North Africa (see Mir-Hosseini 1993). Here I use ṣadāq to refer to the prestation made by Hassanophones in fulfilment of mahr.

8 All names of interlocutors are pseudonyms.

9 The refugee camps are named after cities in Western Sahara.

10 The possibility of widely-sourced contributions means that it is hard to say how much faskha costs a family. The amount is likely to be the equivalent of several hundred euros. Faskha gifts were remembered or discussed as expensive for the bride’s family both in exile and beyond.

11 A refugee bride relied on the mahr gifts from her husband to equip her home. Thus mahr in exile changed in content from pre-exile times (see Wilson 2016).

12 Whether settled in cities or in refugee camps, Sahrawis have modified their marriage prestations, albeit in different ways.

13 On the relationship of hospitality to gift-giving, see Candea and Da Col (2012).

14 Hassanophone wives may nevertheless still claim protection from their families in the case of marital strife.

Additional information

Funding

Field research for this article was made possible by grants from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, Homerton College, Cambridge, and the Prométée research project on property in Muslim contexts.