Political ecology of shifting cosmologies and epistemologies among berber agro-sylvo-pastoralists in a globalizing world

In this article, I examine how local religious traditions and environmental management interact with each other, as well as how both relate to new globalizing inmuences such as emerging State structures and ideologies, mass media, migrations, market integration, tourism, NGOs, modernist conceptions of nature, and present Islamic movements. Through an ethnographic study of the Berber Mesioua tribe of the Moroccan High Atlas, I focus on the agdal, a locally produced agro-sylvo-pastoral governance system prohibiting access to particular natural resources for a given period in order to optimize its yield and assure its sustained and equitable use. The integration of agdals into local religiosity and their associated ethics entail a local conservationist and egalitarian set of principles. I conclude that, strained in great part by the socio-economic and cultural-political forces implicated in the globalization of cosmologies and epistemologies, the replacement of local worldviews and the decline of the agdal governance system are interlinked. The consequences include increasing environmental degradation and social inequality.