Living in a World Heritage Site: ethnography of the Fez medina (Morocco)
A dissertation by Manon Istasse submitted to the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the Free University of Brussels for the
degree of Doctor in Anthropology
Members of the jury:
David Berliner (University of Brussels) Mathieu Hilgers (University of Brussels) Jean-Louis Genard (University of Brussels) Christoph Brumann (Max Planck Institute in Halle)
Lynn Meskell (University of Stanford)
September 2013
Acknowledgments
Carrying a fieldwork investigation and writing a dissertation is only made possible with the help and support of such a number of people that I can scarcely do justice to all in what follows. Furthermore, words alone are hardly adequate to fully express my gratitude for the kindness and guidance each and every one awarded me during these four years of joy, satisfaction, and difficulties between Fez and Rabat in Morocco, Brussels in Belgium, Halle in Germany, as well as the many cities which hosted conferences and other academic events I took part in. I must begin this list of acknowledgments by thanking the financial support I received from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) in Belgium, without which any research would have been impossible in the first place.
Deep and sincere thanks go to those who, in one way or another, made my research possible: Jawad Yousfi and his family for their warm welcome in their house and for the many discussions and debates we had, Abdelhay Mezzour for his support and help with the Ziyarates families and for the football matches we watched at the Firdaous, Pierre-Marie Roux and his wife Caroline, as well as, among others, Bernard, Kleo Brunn, Françoise, Christian, Jenifer, Josephine, Naïma, Christophe and Vincent, Nordin, Omar, Amina, Vanessa and Vincent, Bonnie and Gilles, Fettah, Anouar, Pauline, Didier, Kenza, Abdelwahed, Stephen, Hugo and his wife, Mohammed, and Zarha for opening the doors of their house to me, and the staff of the Centre Jacques Berque in Rabat, of the Archives Municipales in Fez and of the Institut français in Fez. They gave their time even as their professional and familial lives were already busy.
Special thanks are rendered here to Christine Devictor and Raymond Prieto-Perez, for the numerous dinners they invited me to and for being my "parents" in Fez. I express my gratitude also to Najib, Hamid and Khlifi for the conversations in their shop, Cécile, Frédéric Calmès, Mary, Isabelle and Hassan for their support, and to my dear friend Omar Chennafi for our conversations and adventures in the medina. David Amster, the director of the Arabic Language Institute in Fez, gave me his time and shared his knowledge of Fez and its architecture, which were most interesting and important to me. I also benefited from the help of members of various institutions: Mohammed Idrissi Janati, Abdelghani Tayyibi, Mohcine Idrissi, Kamal Raftani, Rachida Ben Guessous, Abdelbasset Fellous, Saïd Jabri and Rachid Alaoui. Finally, a special thought goes to Yürgen and Olivier, who died during the fieldwork.
Justin McGuinness, Anton Escher, Jean-Louis Tornatore, Antoine Hennion, Nathalie Heinich, Damiana Otoiu, Cristina Golomoz, Maria Gravari-Barbas, Noël Salazar, Christoph
Brumann, Bertram Turner, Ioan-Mihai Popa, Fan Zhang, Pierpaolo De Giosa, Stefan Dorondel, Vivienne Marquart, Esther Horat, Simon Schlegel, and my colleagues at the University of Brussels, Nicole Grégoire, Maïté Maskens, Mathieur Hilgers, Joël Noret, Pierre Petit, Chiara Bortolotto, Annabel Vallard, Marie-Pierre Lissoir, Benjamin Rubbers, Mikaëla Le Meur, Laurent Legrain, Gina Aït Mehdi, Anne Laure-Cromphout and Lisa Richaud supported me with their advice, experiences, ideas and wisdom. I specially thank my colleagues for their help and advice during the seminars, workshops, lunches, days of work together and conversations in the hallways, as well as for the most enjoyable atmosphere they created on the 12th floor of the Université Libre de Bruxelles’ Institut de Sociologie. It would be entirely unfair not to mention Irina Bussoli and Sandrine Levêque, the two successive secretaries at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains. Their availability, experience and cheerful countenances made the administrative work and intricacies of academic life much more agreeable.
My research would have been totally different without the comments, understanding, and presence of my three mentors in Brussels, namely David Berliner, Mathieu Hilgers and Jean-Louis Genard. I wish I could repay them in some other venue for all they brought me.
Their patience, their encouragements, their knowledge, helped frame and direct my first tentative steps and my final writings. The mistakes and loose ends in the present dissertation are not due to any lack or neglect on the part of my mentors, but are entirely my own. Our meetings and conversations pointed out all the work I still had to carry out, but also the ways to define my own voice and to make my messy thought-processes clearer. I have no words to appropriately render thanks to my advisor, David Berliner who saved me on several occasions from getting "lost in theory." I particularly appreciate the rigor, clarity and accuracy of his intellect. I'm grateful for his readings, his reminders about the moral and theoretical issues at the core of this dissertation dealing with heritage, and for the windows of opportunity he opened to me in the academic world. Christoph Brumann, for his part, kindly welcomed and integrated me in his research group at the Max Planck Institute (Halle). The four months I spent there were highly interesting, intellectually stimulating and overall motivating. The good work conditions and the English speaking environment pushed me to write in English, a venture at once rich, risky and exhausting, especially in the non-English speaking LAMC where I continued and finished writing this. As a consequence, I wholeheartedly thank Jeremi Szaniawski and Kate Ashby for the proofreading of my dissertation. Charlotte Joy, Chiara Bortolotto, Nicole Grégoire, Maïté Maskens, Justin McGuinness, Christoph Brumann and David Berliner, as well as Mary Conway were more than useful and relevant in their
comments of my writings, be it on the level of a single chapter, or the entire dissertation. Time being one of the scarcest resource of any scholar, I really appreciate the amounts of this precious resource they gave to me.
Even if I have never met them, I have to underline the influence of William James, John Dewey, Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour in shaping my thinking and intellectual processes.
Their books formed my bedside table and filled my desk during my research. They also helped me finding energy to think of and write the dissertation in least pleasant times. My will – and stubbornness – to create a dialogue between them sometimes lead me to momentary enlightment that I had to temper later while they gave me unexpected energy.Also, the seminar "Attachement" at the École des Mines in Paris helped to familiarise myself with their ideas.
Finally, aside from the academic world, I express my utmost respect and heartfelt thanks to my family and my friends. In one way or another, they participated to make these four years enjoyable, lively and full of surprises through dinners, parties, concerts and other enjoyable events we shared. I address a special thought to Alain Félix who, from privileged informant, has become my partner. I thank him for his support in hard times, and for his precious input in the shape of non-academic perspectives.
Table of content
1. Introduction 1
1.1.Theoretical appetizer 1
1.1.1. Anthropology, architecture and houses 1
1.1.1.1. General approaches 1
1.1.1.2. Houses as material elements 4
1.1.2. Anthropology and heritage 7
1.1.2.1.Constructivist approach of heritage 7
1.1.2.2.Daily life of heritage 10
1.2.Dissertation starter 14
1.2.1.What is this dissertation about 14
1.2.2. Methodology and epistemology 17
1.2.3.The choice of Fez 20
2. Fez 22
2.1.History of Fez 23
2.2.Inhabitants in the Fez medina 25
2.2.1. Presence of foreigners 27
2.3.Cultural heritage in Morocco 31
2.3.1. The Protectorate period (1912-1957) 32
2.3.2. UNESCO and the World Heritage nomination 36
2.3.3. UNESCO: a visible absence 42
2.3.4. Definitions of heritage 46
2.3.4.1. "Moroccans" and heritage 47
2.3.4.1.1. Tangible heritage 49
2.3.4.1.2. Intangible heritage 50
2.3.4.2. "Foreigners" and heritage 54 2.3.4.3. Members of institutions and heritage 59
2.4. Tourism in Morocco 64
2.4.1. Tourism in Fez 65
3. Six main informants 70
3.1. Jawad 71
3.2. Abdelhay 71
3.3.Fettah 3.4. Gigi
72 74
3.5. David 75
3.6.Hassan 76
4. How to engage with the materiality of houses? 78
4.1.A first glimpse at the houses in Fez 78
4.1.1.The Islamic city paradigm 79
4.1.2.North African houses 81
4.1.3.Houses in the Fez medina 88
4.1.3.1. Jawad's house 88
4.1.3.2. Ruth's house 93
4.2.Undertaking works in a house 98
4.2.1. Qualifications of the construction works 102
4.2.2. Values in the construction works 106
4.2.3. Institutions responsible for the construction works 109
4.2.4. Work permits 113
4.2.5. Bypassing the rules 116
4.2.5.1. Bribery 119
4.2.5.2. Legality and ruses 121
4.2.6. Construction works as a learning process 123
4.2.7. Conclusion 128
4.3.Furnishing and decorating a house 130
4.3.1. Styles 130
4.3.2. Principles of furnishing and decoration 137
4.3.3. Judgements and taste 143
4.3.3.1.Criteria of taste 143
4.3.3.2.Taste and distinction 145
4.4.Intimacy, hospitality and tradition in tourist accommodations 152
4.4.1. Why open a tourist accommodation? 152
4.4.2. Intimacy and privacy 154
4.4.3. Hospitality 157
4.4.4. Tradition 159
4.5. Living with the house 167
4.6. Living in heritage 172
4.7. Conclusion 182
5. How to be attached to houses? 185
5.1.Introduction 185
5.2.Sensual relations with houses 186
5.2.1. Physical senses in Fez 186
5.2.2. Sensual perception, skills and reflexivity 191
5.3.Affective relation with houses 193
5.3.1. Affects in Fez 194
5.3.2. Heritage, affects and distinction 200
5.4.Experts and non-experts’ relations to houses 202 5.4.1. Experts, autodidact experts and non-experts in Fez 202
5.4.1.1. Experts 202
5.4.1.2. Autodidact experts 206
5.4.1.3.Non-experts 210
5.4.2. Expertise 211
5.5.Contentious relations with houses 217
5.5.1. Conflicts in Fez 217
5.5.2 Justifications 221
5.6.Qualification 227
5.6.1. Qualities of houses 228
5.6.2 . The heritage quality 237
5.6.3 Qualities and heritage 239
5.7. Attachment to heritage 241
6. Heritage as a fiction 247
6.1. Introduction 247
6.2. Various forms of heritage 249
6.2.1. Heritage as an object to preserve 249
6.2.2. Heritage as a daily object 251
6.2.3. Heritage as an object of research 251
6.2.4. Heritage as a definition and a category 252
6.2.5. Legal heritage 254
6.2.6. Heritage as development tool 256
6.2.7. Heritage as a label 261
6.3. Heritage as a fiction 265
6.3.1. Relation to the past 266
6.3.2. Culture as a specific entity 267
6.3.3. Experts 269
6.3.4. Moral principles 269
6.4. Circulation and anchorage of the heritage fiction 271 6.4.1. Anchorage and localisation of heritage fiction 271
6.4.2 Circulation of the heritage fiction 273
6.4.3. Local and global 280
7. Conclusion 285
Bibliography 295
Glossary 311
Informants 316
Appendix 319
Abstract in French 396
Table of pictures
Picture 1. The heart of Fez medina with the Quaraouiyine mosque and the Moulay Idriss shrine
Picture 2. Bab Jdid, a new gate built in 2012.
Picture 3. Restoration of the city walls.
Picture 4. Billboard of the CIPA.
Picture 5. Buildings of the Banque du Maroc and the Central Post Office in the New City.
Picture 6. Abdelhay’s living room.
Picture 7. Swimming pool and inside garden in Fettah’s house.
Picture. 8. Gigi’s patio.
Picture 9. Ground-floor of David’s private house and wall he had redone in his street.
Picture 10. Mural fountain and Iraqi glass.
Picture 11. Furniture in the visitor's room, early 20th century
Picture 12. Geometrical pattern in mosaic, floral pattern in wood and carved plaster, calligraphy in mosaic and carved plaster.
Picture. 13. Plastic sheet separating two parts of a floor.
Picture 14. Jawad's patio.
Picture 15. Jawad's kitchen.
Picture 16. Jawad's bedroom.
Picture 17. Jawad's rooftop terrace.
Picture 18. Ruth's rooftop terrace.
Picture 19. Ruth's patio.
Picture 20. Ruth's bedroom (first-floor).
Picture 21. Ruth's kitchen (ground-floor).
Picture 22. Deteriorated column in Amina’s house.
Picture. 23. Works in a house.
Picture 24. Savage construction works.
Picture 25. Styles of furnishing and decoration.
Picture 26. Kitsch display cabinet in a Moroccan house.
Picture 27. Table in mosaic in a tourist accommodation.
Picture 28. Piece of clothe framed and hang on the wall in a tourist accommodation.
Picture 29. Furniture on the rooftop terrace in a guest house.
Picture 30. Two decorated metal or wood doors.
Picture 31. Ziyarates leaftlet
Picture 32. Logo "Smile you are in Fez" on a wall in Boujloud square.
22
39 40 42 61
72 73 74 75
83 85 86
87 91 92 92 93 95 96 96 97 98 101 117 131 136 145 146 163 219 257 261
Table of figures
Figure 1. Map of Fez medina (Fez el-Bali).
Figure 2. Architectural plan or a "typical" North African house (Gallotti, 1926: 72) Figure 3. Secret Fès
Figure 4. Fez PDRT cover
Figure 5. Relations between UNESCO World Heritage bodies
22 81 262 263 284
Abstract
In the present dissertation, I aim to render explicit the actualisation (realization) of heritage, following this guiding question: how do human beings come to qualify a thing, be it tangible or intangible, as heritage? I argue that heritage is at the same time a quality allocated by human beings in their relation with things, and a fiction that circulates between, and anchors them in situation(s). To support this assertion, I focus on one element of official heritage, namely houses in the medina of Fez in Morocco, listed as part of the World Heritage since 1981.
Firstly, I study medina houses in terms of networks, that is to say the various ways people engage with their materiality in everyday life. In this ethnographic report, I ask the question of how to inhabit houses located in a World Heritage site. This ethnography allows to question notions such as legality, taste, privacy, hospitality tradition or agency, and it brings to the fore the debate concerning the skills and ability of Moroccan inhabitants to take care of their house, as well as their obliviousness to the concept of heritage. I argue that houses have another story than the official heritage one, because they offer holds, affordances, to which human actors qualify. Heritage is one of these qualities.
I then focus on heritage as a trajectory, in order to shed light on how houses cross the heritage border. I first introduce the category of self-taught experts, and then propose a wider definition of expertise, as an ability "to speak in the name of" someone or something else. I then underline the importance of senses and affects in the relation with houses and suggest that they are one possible component in heritage qualification, together with actions and justification. Finally, I argue that a notion preferable to that of heritage border, is that of attachment, which allows us to grasp the qualification of houses as heritage, in how it stresses both the similarities and the differences between houses and elements of heritage. Heritage as a quality results from a "surplus of attention" and relates to nostalgia or a feeling of threat, loss and disappearing; values related to purity, materiality and time; and actions of preservation and transmission.
Finally, houses may be considered heritage through their qualification, but heritage also stands for something else than houses in Fez, such as a label or a justification for members of institutions in charge of tourism development or heritage preservation, a tool for sustainable development in the context of international projects, a definition assorted with specific criteria, an object to preserve for experts, an object of research in the field of social sciences, or a legal object. These are forms of heritage circulating between situations in which
they are anchored and are actualised. Each form has its own characteristics, its own criteria of valuation, while all the forms share similarities that I define as the heritage fiction, namely a specific relation to the past, the idea of culture as a specific entity, the importance of experts, and moral principles. Finally, I take the circulation and the anchorage of the heritage fiction and its forms to think of the local and the global as qualities, instead of scales or levels.
" ‘Bad poets borrow,’ T.S. Eliot has said, ‘good poets steal.’. I have tried in what follows to be, in this respect anyway, a good poet, and to take what I have needed from certain others and make it shamelessly my own. But such thievery is in great part general and undefined, an
almost unconscious process of selection, absorption, and reworking, so that after awhile one no longer quite knows where one’s argument comes from, how much of it is his and how
much is others’. One only knows, and that incompletely, what the major intellectual influences upon his work have been, but to attach specific names to specific passages is
arbitrary or libelous."
Geertz (1971: v)
"Why do we acknowledge only our textual sources but not the ground we talk, the ever-changing skies, mountains, rocks and trees, the houses we inhabit and the tools
we use not to mention the innumerable companions, both non-human animals and fellow humans, with which and with whom we share our lives? "
Ingold (2011: xii)
1. Introduction
"[T]he convention according to which anthropology is committed to observing and describing life as we find it, but not to changing it, whereas art and architecture are at liberty to propose forms never before encountered, without having first to observe and describe what is already there, is unsustainable. The truth is that the proposition of art and architecture, to the extent that they carry force, must be grounded in a profound understanding of the lived world, and conversely that anthropological accounts of the manifold ways in which life is lived would be of no avail if they were no brought to bear on speculative inquiries into what the possibilities for human life might be. Thus art, architecture and anthropology have in common that they observe, describe and propose."
Ingold (2011: xi)
1.1.Theoretical appetizer
In this dissertation, I describe and I make explicit how inhabitants of a specific World Heritage site live in their house, how they qualify or not their house as heritage, and what are the various forms of heritage in this World Heritage site. Houses and heritage then constitute the two flag topic. Both have kept scholars busy for long in anthropology and in human sciences more generally. It would then be nonsense not to start with the theoretical background of my argument.
After a general overview of each topic, I present more specific approaches I took basis on for my research, such as the materiality of houses or the daily life of heritage. I nonetheless take distance from that theoretical background to set my own one when I introduce my investigation in the second part of this introduction.
1.1.1. Anthropology, architecture and houses
1.1.1.1. General approaches
Architecture and buildings have long been assumed to receive little interest in anthropology (Humphrey, 1988). After the pioneer works of the Chicago School about urbanism and urban ecology in the early 20th century, scholars developed an interest in architecture and space in the 1960s. Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995) explain this late development by the interest of architects in
material aspects of houses rather than in social ones, and by the interest anthropologists in households – they investigate kinship systems, economy and political organisation – more than in houses. For instance, anthropologists included the physical description of houses as a part – and not a main topic – of their monographs, with for instance Boas’ study of Kwakiult houses, or Malinowski’s description of the yam house in the Trobriand. Lévi-Strauss went further and studied kinship in cognatic societies through the notion of "sociétés à maison" (house societies) as a transitional form of social organisation between kin-based societies and class-based societies. In this view, a house is a social group, a subdivision of a tribe characterised by continuity in time.
Since the 1960s, vernacular architecture is a key topic for anthropologists concerned with culture and cultural change (Rapoport, 1969). Paul-Lévy and Segaud (1983) show interest in the few architectural invariants – to inhabit, to base, to distribute, to transform – which configure space while they produce diversity according to the cultural context they take shape in. Schefold, Nas and Domenig (2003) investigate the diachronic changes in the physical and aesthetic appearance, in the functions and in the uses of houses in Southeast Asian societies. Tonna (1990) differentiates Muslim and classical European architectures. For instance, the latter favors column and entablature and tends to the promotion of identities, while Muslim architecture gives emphasis to the arch and the wall and promotes similarity.
Aside from this cultural study of houses and architecture, many other approaches flourished, such as the structuralist or symbolic one. Bourdieu (1970: 89) connects the house with the conception of the world in Berber societies, for the house is "the principle locus for the objectification of generative schemes." In a similar vein, Baduel (1986: 4) argues that, in North Africa, a "house is the projection on the ground of the values of the group." In Morocco, Eickelman (1980) shows how the perceptions and uses of urban and domestic spaces reflect the cultural values and the implicit conceptions of social order. In his view, the symbolic aspect of urban and domestic forms links to culturally shared conceptions of individual and social identity and expresses the cultural and symbolic characteristics of a social group.
More interested in the operative aspect of houses, scholars within the functionalist approach stress the relationships between buildings and socio-economic practices. They argue that practical considerations, such as politics or economy, determine the shape, the sitting and the signification of buildings. Following the utilitarian philosopher Bentham, Foucault (1995) makes of the panopticon an abstract model of a disciplinary society. The Familistère de Guise, a phalanstery built by Godin in 1880, follows the idea of architecture as a remedy for social problems. Stierlin (2003) for his part points out the articulation between Islamic architecture, politics and faith. In the 1960s, Hassan Fathy, an Egyptian architect, proposed a radically new architecture built for and with the people. He
narrates the experiment of Gourna village in his book, Gourna, A Tale of Two Villages (Fathy, 1969), and how he initiated a rupture with past traditional techniques while still using them.
More recently, the post-structuralist trend focuses on the relation between politics and architecture (Buchli, 2000). For instance, Fehérvàry (2002) relates changes in the political context of the post-communist Hungary with changes in the furnishing of houses. After 1989, American kitchen and luxury bathrooms became normal standards of a new way of life imitating the West and materialised the values of an anti-socialist society. This desire to possess things from the West testifies an identity adjustment in the context of a political change. Feminist scholars on their hand underline the oppressive structure of patriarchy in the order of the house (Ardener, 1993).
In the philological field, language constitutes a way to investigate houses and dwelling.
Berque (2010) approaches dwelling in China and Japan thought the etymology of words and the study of poems related to dwelling. Several other scholars also focus on the meaning of the word
"dwelling" and the verb "to inhabit". Heidegger (1958) starts from the verb "bauen" (to build) to think of the verb "wohnen" (to inhabit). According to him, dwelling is the essential characteristic of the human condition for the habitation oversteps the accommodation to signify the stay of mortals on earth, their movement along a way of life. When they inhabit, human beings accomplish themselves as mortals and realise themselves as part of the original Unity – or Quadriparti – gathering mortals, the earth, the sky and the divine. To reach this state, human beings have to build, to put themselves in security, to preserve the original Unity by giving it a space where to gather the four components, that is to say a dwelling. However, following Ingold (2011), I chose the term
"inhabiting" – and not "dwelling" – to refer to the engagement of human beings with their environment throughout their life – for practical reasons I nonetheless reduce this environment to the Fez medina and its houses.
Bachelard (1964 [1957]) further develops the idea of ontological security through the dwelling. In a phenomenological approach, he proposes a topo-analysis of the intimate being on the base of images of the house. In his view, houses constitute a space defended against adverse forces, a beloved space, a protective space to which inhabitants link images. Doing so, Bachelard (id.) aims to investigate human creativeness and imagination in the context of a phenomenology of poetic imagination, to link "poetic images to an archetype lying dormant in the depths of the unconscious"
(Bachelard, id.: xvi). Serfaty-Garzon (2003) extends this psychological perspective and focuses on the feeling of being at home and on the notion of appropriation.
Studies of appropriation are also inscribed in a semiotic approach that takes the house as a model of expression of the self and of ideologies, and furniture as social or mythological emblems.
Following Vleben’s path, Kenneth (1999) analyses hall furnishing to uncover social, cultural and
psychological meanings beyond their utilitarian function. He makes of the form of Victorian halls and of their furnishing a guide in the moves of inhabitants in the house and a mark of social distinction and social standing. De Certeau (1984) explicitly turns the house into a text – idea that Keane (1995) criticises by putting stress on the practices and on the authority of the speaker as shaping the representations of the cultural meaning of houses. De Certeau (id.) particularly focuses on the tricks, strategies and ruses of inhabitants in their life in and with the house. In Fez, Newcomb (2006, 2010) investigates the everyday practices of women in the New City. In cafés and cyber clubs, women develop tactics to make their presence in public social spaces acceptable by extending traditional principles of behaviour, such as shame – concept socially significant enough for Fassi to be invoked and understood. By their occupation and use of particular spaces, women appropriate, resist, or manipulate their identity, role and social status.
In addition to their importance in the semiotic approach, appropriation and resistance are core notions of the constructivist or interactionist theory. Scholars then investigate the domestic space, the ways inhabitants construct space in order to organise their life and to build their identity (Collignon, 2001; Collignon and Staszak, 2003). Others study the limits and definition of the private space (Zeneidi-Henry, 2003). In Morocco, Navez-Bouchanine (1991, 1994, 1997) focuses on the appropriation of space and houses by Moroccan inhabitants and sheds light on the "dwellers' competence," that is to say the practices, strategies and appropriations by which inhabitants reach a certain degree of satisfaction in their accommodation.
These approaches compose the general framework though which houses have mostly been investigated. To some extend, they set the stage and some of them are found in the following of this dissertation as a support for reflexion. I however chose another lens to start the study of houses in a World Heritage site, namely the materiality of houses, because inhabitants obviously, daily and sometimes blindingly, relate to it.
1.1.1.2. Houses as material elements
After art historians and archaeologists, social science scholars have developed a particular interest in material culture studies,1 and some of them focus on homes, houses and furnishing.
1 Techniques, their efficacy and their listing constitute a first trend in the study of materiality, with Mauss (1973) studying the techniques of the body, Leroi-Gourhan (1943, 1945) focusing on the efficacy of technical gestures and Lemonnier (2004) investigating operational sequences. Aside from this school of cultural technology, anchored around the journal Techniques et Culture, other French scholars of the team "Matière à penser" lay stress on incorporation and embodiment. After Shilder, Warnier (1999) defines the notion of bodily synthesis as a malleable pattern through which the body incorporates and embodies objects into its image. Human beings integrate objects to their bodily space and extend their bodily space to objects. As such, objects become a prosthesis and an extension of the body.
The English school of the University College London (UCL) developed an approach in terms of materiality and
According to Miller (2001: 3), houses are "the single most important site for material culture studies," for they provide an insight into societies. In Miller’s view, houses constitute a central place in the development and the reproduction of social relations. For instance, the investigation of inhabitants who live in council estate and change their kitchen furniture is a way to study the gendered or (inter)generational relations (Miller and Clarke, 1999). Other scholars argue that living somewhere does not mean feeling at home. Inhabitants then have to appropriate their dwelling through a physical engagement. Julien (1999) and Rosselin (1999) particularly focus on embodiment. Based on a case study on single-room accommodations, Rosselin (id.) defines embodiment as an essential modality of everyday life, as a game between the structuring aspect of materials and the imposition of a bodily will, as the definition of a good distance between the self and objects.
Though this appropriation, objects become evident in their use and their presence, and human actors can even find difficulties to talk about them. Miller (2005) names this latter characteristic the "humility of things," which means that "objects are important not because they are evident and physically constrain or enable, but often precisely because we don’t ‘see’ them. The less we are aware of them, the more powerfully they can determinate our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behaviours without being open to challenge" (Miller, id.: 5). In that context, Meskell (2005) investigates the power of materiality thought the monumental remnants of Egypt. In the past, this monumentality – pyramids, statues – served to control nature and society through their massive and affective presence. Rowlands (2005) for his part focuses on the relativity of materiality, stressing some things are more material than others according to the process of materialisation they are engaged in. Verkaak (2012) studies this process of materialisation – or objectification (Miller, 2005) – with the design and the construction of mosques in European countries. He argues that their construction goes beyond a simple political or religious process of claiming one’s identity or respecting religious principles. Each mosque follows its own trajectory, of which Verkaak (id.) stresses the power and affects.
objectification and promoted the mutual self-construction of things and persons. In their view, material culture tells more about the relation between individuals and groups than their direct observation and investigation, about the fantasised image of the other that acts like mirrors. Objectification, a main concept in the British approach, means that what human beings create has the potential to appear and to become alien, to have its own interest and trajectory (Miller, 2005).
Ingold (2007b) however insists on materials over materiality. Rather than the materiality of objects, which human beings cannot touch, Ingold suggests investigating the properties of materials. Rather than material culture or material world, Ingold proposes to investigate the environment and the engagement with materials. According to him, studies in material culture, busy with semiotics, cognition or praxeology, forget tangible stuff. They propose abstract analysis of already made things. Based on Gibson’s definition of the environment as a mix of media – which afford movement and perception, substances – materials, and surfaces – interface between the two latter, he distinguished the properties of materials from the qualities allocated by human beings.
This focus on materiality, and more particularly the notion of objectification, connects with the agency of things. Scholars dealing with agency assert that both objects and humans have abilities, competences, and skills. On the object-side of agency, Appadurai (1986) addresses the interactions between human actors and the material world with the notion of "social life of things."
The existence of people is responsible for the creation of objects and objects are responsible for the creation of the particularities of human existence. Miller (2001) goes a step further by asserting that the materiality of houses has consequences, such as a feeling of alienation. These consequences result from the precise materiality of houses and are not an expression of human agency. He (id.:
20) defines the house agency as "how far people are thwarted by the prior presence of their house and the orders of their material culture." This agency comes from their history and the former presence of material culture that the inhabitants have to appropriate or to resist to. Keane (1997;
2005) rather investigates the historical and social power of objects on the basis of Pierce’s pragmatist notions of iconicity2 and indexicality.3 He invites to treat objects in their own right, to look at the habits, competences and constraints objects make possible. His model gives importance to contingency, causality and openness to possible futures.
Scholars inscribed in the ANT (Actor-Network Theory) on their hand extend the role of objects and artefacts out of the simple technical field to give them a major role in innovations and science-making (Latour, 1987). Fighting against the divide between Nature and Culture, they claim objects are not passive tools, or extensions of the body, or general explanations situated in the Material or the Natural field, or symbols conveying a meaning. On the contrary, objects act, play a role in a situation for, at least, their materiality allows the situation to last in time and to extend in space. These scholars, such as, Venkatesan (2009), investigate objects and technical devices to which human beings delegate functions, which they call "mediators."
However, rather than objects in themselves, these scholars focus on the networks of actors in which objects are involved. Ingold (2007b, 2011) on his hand follows a processual approach of materials.4 He argues that the capacity of an object to act comes from its inclusion in flows and fluxes of the life world. The flux of materials permanently generates and dissolves the form and shape of things. In that view, the properties of materials are not fixed attributes but are processual and relational. Ingold (id.) then criticises the conceptions of agency as a capacity to act back and to
2 Iconicity is a matter of potential. The realisation of a thing as an icon does not lay in the thing but in the social processes such as values or authority relations.
3 Indexicality is a matter of inference. The realisation of a thing as an index relies in cognitive processes and historical conceptions.
4 In his view, scholars have to switch their attention from materiality to the flux and transformations of materials, to the relations between substances (all kind of more or less solid stuff), media (what affords movement and perception such as air) and surfaces (interface between a medium and a surface). He also asserts that it is impossible to define the material world because it a priori separates the mind and the body. This distinction involves the introduction – that Ingold refuses – of hybrids (between the mind and the body, between Nature and Culture).
induce actions human beings otherwise might not do, as an additional ingredient that must be attributed to things for them to act back. According to him, materials are hives of activity for the active engagement they necessarily involve.
On the subject-side of agency, Gell (1994) defines agency as "the capacity to initiate causal events in his/her vicinity, which cannot be ascribed to the current state of the physical cosmos, but only to a special category of mental states; that is, intentions" (Gell, id.: 19). Human agents make causal inference about the intentions, capabilities and social agency of other agents. In this view, things are secondary agents, endowed with agency by the articulation of fragments of primary intentional agents. Gell (id.) then looks after agency behind the world of artefacts. Jansen (2013) also stresses the primacy of human beings over things in the investigation of agency. However, rather than on intentionality, he focuses on the accountability of things and persons in their capacity to act and argues things cannot act without human practices. Rather than choosing between de- reification – a person centred approach – and de-purification – a thing centred approach – in the study of agency, Jansen (id.) proposes to study the ways objects materialise borders and the human practices giving birth to the objects’ agency.
The objectification of houses, their appropriation by inhabitants, their materiality and their agency are at the core of the fourth section of this dissertation. On the one hand, I describe how these characteristics take shape in my specific case study and, on the other, I briefly discuss the theoretical issues related to the agency of objects in their relations with human actors.
1.1.2. Anthropology and heritage
Since the late 1980s, heritage has become a subject of research and an academic discipline within social and human sciences. It has also been the subject of many academic courses, the topic of numerous books and articles, the thematic of several journals – such as the International Journal of Heritage Studies – and even the core of research groups – the Association of Critical Heritage Studies in one of them. In the following, I review the various interests scholars have shown in studying heritage, and more particularly the constructivist approach, and its daily life. I also make clear which approaches I base my argument on and which I take distance from.
1.1.2.1. Constructivist approach of heritage
The constructivist approach is based on discursive and political statements about the making and the use of heritage. It dates back to the 1980s when British scholars asserted that heritage is a
secular religion in modern societies characterised by time-space compression and experiences of rootlessness and rupture (Lowenthal, 1998). In a more post-modernist stance, heritage becomes an empty-signifier characterised by inauthenticity, fake, simulacra, and disneyfication, that is to say the postmodern face of musealisation. The contemporary scholars of the critical heritage studies movement even argue that "there is really no such thing as heritage" (Smith, 2006: 11). In this view, heritage is an interpretation of past events open to appropriation. Rather than in the materiality of heritage or its intrinsic values, scholars are interested in uncovering the experts’ process of value giving and in taken-for-granted processes around heritage-making. Taken in its political aspect, heritage constitutes a powerful resource for creating a present and a future. It also relates to claims about identity, ancestry, transmission and moral issues. Finally, scholars in postcolonial studies insist on heritage as a political site of contestation because it is open to multiple appropriations.
Some scholars speak of its multivocality (Owens, 2002) or of heritage as a hybrid or a creolised production (Long, 2000). Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996) particularly focus on the dissonance of heritage, that is to say the multiple values of heritage. This dissonance is inherent to heritage because this latter consists in an open interpretation.
In this constructivist approach, scholars firstly investigate the local initiatives and the system of heritage-making by the State or experts (Dubost, 1994), the expert and the non-expert relation to heritage (Heinich, 2009), the social uses of heritage (Babadzan, 2001), heritagisation in a top/down or in a bottom/up process5 (Chevallier, 2003; Rautenberg, 2003; Morisset, 2009), the processes of negotiation around the various interpretations of heritage (Fontein, 2006) and the promotion or resistance to the dominant ideologies (Collins, 2008). In North Africa, Boumaza (2003) defends the idea that heritage is a way for countries to overtake the failures of decolonisation. In his view, heritage is a tool to reorder the State ideology and to spread Islam, Arabity and Berberity. In France, Amiotte-Suchet and Floux (2002) investigate how eco-museums erect regional typical houses. In that context, the typical is an a priori category imposed by the museum institution and heritagisation consists in changing the status of the material element through a range of translations and procedures which results in the convergence of discourses about the museified house.
The construction of the past is another topic in many constructivist researches about heritage. An historical approach narrates the rise of heritage – such as Babelon and Chastel (1995) did for France and Harvey (2008) for Great-Britain. In this view, the past is dead and the development of heritage is inscribed in a myth of return and redemption motivated by nostalgia for
5 Tornatore (2001) proposes the distinction between politicisation and crystallisation to make account of these two kinds of heritage. The former, carried by institutions, have visibility and power in the public sphere, while the latter results from civil initiatives. Official heritage is then a set of memories gathered in a unique repertoire that erases the lived experience and establishes it in knowledge.
a Golden Age and imagined homelands. In a more memorial approach, scholars investigate alternative and parallel heritages to the dominant heritage, the various ways to present the past – recollection, commemoration, "authentic" reconstruction – and non-Western expressions of memory, transmission and heritage. Their interests gravitate around politics of return (Rowlands, 2002) and memory work (Ricoeur, 2004).
Constructivist scholars are also concerned with values of heritage. Heinich (2009) draws an axiology of heritage in her study of expert heritage-making at the General Inventory of Cultural Heritage in France. She looks at the construction of a collective look amidst members of this institution, at the criteria and procedures of selection. She concludes that authenticity is the authoritative value in heritage-making. Authenticity is also of prime importance in Morisset's (2009) investigation of heritage in Quebec. According to her, authenticity characterises the real, the truth, and establishes a balance between time (history), space (places) and Others (distinction). She claims that in Quebec, there has been a passage between two regimes of authenticity, between heritage as a monument and heritage as a relic, between a present and a past time, between a
"Quebec friendly space" and a hostile other. Dubost (1994) for her part argues that the value of scarcity turned garden plants in a new kind of heritage. She stresses the prime role of amateurs, collectors and associations in the promotion of "scarce plants," which are their objects of passion, collection, and transmission. Dubost (id.) opposes the values of scarcity in the making of heritage, and the economic value in its promotion.
More than a value, Smith (2006) defines heritage as a cultural practice "involved in the construction and regulation of a range of values and understandings" (Smith, id.: 11). As such, heritage needs a material reality to appear and to be experienced as it involves performances of remembering. Heritage is vital and alive, is a moment of action and creates emotions. But heritage is first and foremost a discourse, that is to say a kind of social practice composed by human practices and performances of heritage. Smith (id.) particularly focuses on the materialisation of the
"authorized heritage discourse," that is to say the Western dominant discourse about heritage. This dominant discourse is based on beliefs about the nature and the meaning of heritage – material buildings reflecting the nation – and on expert knowledge and values. Also, this discourse refers to the past as singular and concrete, to the innate values of heritage and to its passivity.
Smith (id.) also asserts that UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) and ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) are the authorising institutions of heritage and spread the dominant discourse. Several scholars focus on UNESCO politics and values of heritage. Bortolotto (2009) concludes that there is a gap between the legal property defined in the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
and the symbolic property of the listed heritage on the field. In a more political approach, Turtinen (2000) defines UNESCO as a global grammar ordering the world. Lyons (1978), Maswood (2000) and Maurel (2009) investigate its efficiency and politicisation. Smeets (2004) and Rössler (2006) scrutinise the definitions of heritage within this institution while others focus on the values such as authenticity (Cameron, 2008), the outstanding universal value (Pocock, 1997) or culture (Nielsen, 2011). Finally, some scholars are interested in the inside functioning of UNESCO (Brumann, 2009a; 2011; Nielsen, id.).
In this dissertation, I adopt a constructivist approach, but, contrary to Smith (2006), I argue, that there is such thing as heritage and this dissertation offers examples to support my argument.
Also, similarly to constructivist scholars, I'm interested in heritage-making. However, I take distance from them in two ways. Firstly, rather than studying the construction of the past through heritage, I define heritage as one kind of the presence of the past in the present, as memory6 and history are. As a consequence, rather than studying the various ways to be in relation with the past, I focus on the various ways to actualise heritage, the relation with the past being one component of this actualisation. Secondly, rather than values of heritage – which I find too abstract to some extend –, I scrutinise the qualities that inhabitants allocated their houses and the daily practices and experiences of houses-as-heritage.
1.1.2.2. Daily life of heritage
The first investigations about the daily life of heritage focused on the democratisation of and through heritage, with for instance visitor surveys (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1989). Glevarec and Saez (2002) study associations involved in actions around heritage to understand the taste for heritage in France. Wallace (2006) investigates volunteers working for the preservation of heritage while Holmes (2006) inquires volunteers working as museum guides. Aside from this democratic access and the democratic opportunities offered by heritage, scholars focus on its daily life and its appropriation.
Veschambre (2008) is interested in the symbolic – rather than in the material – appropriation of space, that is to say the production and uses of symbols that have a social and political efficiency.
6 Berliner (2005) warns against the "abuses of memory" and the dangers of its overextension as a concept. In his view, the memory blossoming in the humanities may lead to the entanglement of memory and identity or culture. I assert that identity is one instrumentalisation of memory (identity issues refer to memory as one tool in their claims) and culture one of its component. "Memory" is one way for "the past" to be present in "the present" and I explain the difference between heritage, memory and history as presences of the past in the present (cf. p. 266).
This process of appropriation links to the heritagisation and the demolition of marks and traces.7 Rather than marks, traces are involved in the production of heritage, which results from the recognition of signs by specific social groups. Heritage-making consists in turning a trace into an identity mark and to appropriate it as a resource. Once appropriated, heritage allows identification – and then consists in a social capital – promotion – and then consists in an economic capital – and legitimisation – and then consists in a symbolic capital.
Aside from appropriation, scholars investigate the daily relation with heritage – which is also of my interest in this dissertation – and more particularly the ways to inhabit heritage, to live in and with heritage (Gavari-Barbas, 2005; Fabre and Iuso, 2009). To inhabit has to be understood in a wide meaning, as it involves a relation with time – a long-term relation – and space – an affective relation. Gravari-Barbas (id.) asserts that humans have always adapted buildings and monuments to their changing uses. However, the recent heritage inflation extended heritage to daily and ordinary practices and buildings. Some of them prove to be difficult to inhabit and their new function, essential to their survival, raise several questions. Gravari-Barbas (id.) underlines four of them.
The first concerns the meaning of inhabiting a heritage neighbourhood. Scholars then overview the constraints – be they administrative or economic – of inhabiting such a place, the memories of that place, the dialectic of possession and deprivation experienced by inhabitants.
Ortar (2005) points out two main constraints of living in heritage in the French countryside: legal rules and the choice of a balance between authenticity and modernity during the restoration works – or in other words the adaptation of the house to the contemporary life. Building permits restrict the desires of owners and these latter have to play with legality to preserve their freedom. Owners also have to choose which elements of the past to keep and which degree of comfort and modernity to bring. Living in heritage involves the choice of a way of life and of a relation with history, the renunciation of some elements of comfort to respect the structure and the materials – as this work will show either in the fourth part.
Gravari-Barbas (id.) presents a second question, that of the relations between members of heritage institutions and inhabitants and of the relations between heritage, social and housing policies. Gravari-Barbas (id.) also proposes an investigation of otherness, cohabitation and tourism through the third question dedicated to the relations between residents and transit populations. In this view, Bock-Digne (2005) studies the relation between welcoming and inhabiting in old Oman Houses in Zanzibar. Cinotti (2009) even proposes a tool to measure the perceived hospitality in guest-houses and Di Domenico and Lynch (2007) focus on identity and on the economic aspect of
7 Marks and traces are two modes of marking, of producing signs, of materialising a presence and an identity in time and space. While marks relate to the present, are signatures and result from an intentional act, traces come from the past and an intentional act. Traces mainly consist in ruins, remnants and heritage.
"homes enterprises." Finally, Gravari-Barbas (id.) investigates the ways to inhabit strange heritage such as former places of industrial production. Coquery (1998) reports on the transformation of aristocratic private hotels in public places of the State administration after the French Revolution in 1789. She stresses the changes in occupants and in functions and sheds light on the inscription of these changes in the furniture and the symbolic associated to the building.
Fabre (2009: 21, my translation) on his hand focuses on non-intentional monuments and the
"diverse, changing and unpredictable reality of 'people,' of contemporary human beings who live in the monument or in its closest proximity." He concludes that contrary to monuments that serve to narrate History, heritage provides a physical experience of the past. In that view, he defines three ways of inhabiting in and with heritage. "Assimilation" (familiarisation) consists in using the monument as the frame of a ritual, as a familiar cockpit welcoming exceptional experiences.
Inhabitants then wander across the element of heritage, climb on it to dominate it, represent and figure it, and write on it. "Occupation" (takeover) is a second way of being in relation with inhabited heritage. It is the physical or symbolic occupation of an element of heritage, characteristic of the conflicts around restitutions and the claims of the first settler. Finally, "résidence" (staying) includes the presence and the words of inhabitants – which I mainly consider throughout this dissertation while I question the familiarisation with elements of heritage as an explanation to the blindness of inhabitants to their heritage. Interested in the daily life of houses-as-heritage, Brumann (2009b) shows that instead of freezing houses, inhabitants try to do something original with them, such as using them in a commercial purpose. More generally, Brumann (id.) invites for a comparison of historic town centres in their conversion to modern tastes and functions and in the balance between state involvement and private initiatives.
Finally, emotions and affects related to heritage constitute a relatively new field in the study of heritage. Instead of heritage-making institutions, scholars focus on the local and banal relations with heritage. Involvement is the master word of these researches. Human actors are involved in associations and institutions and construct exemplary object through processes of symbolic recognition, social appropriation, and collective promotion of this object. On the one hand, emotions may distinguish experts and non-experts in the way they engage with heritage. Experts engage in a regime of critique – they mix distance and engagement through the professionalisation of their practice – non-experts rather engage in an emotional regime (Heinich, 2009). On the other hand, Fabre (2002) tries to gather experts and non-experts around emotions. In his view, patrimonial emotions are the contemporary expression of a new popular sensibility to the past, and expertise is one spring to understand them. Emotions relate on the one hand with an expert appropriation of heritage leading to its political instrumentation, and on the other hand with a popular consumption
of heritage weaving the local memory. Finally, scholars such as Dassié (2006) or Barbe and Tornatore (2006) investigate the heritage emotions linked to a disaster – storm, fire – that threatens or destroys an element of heritage. Dassié (id.) particularly stresses the integration of the emotions linked to the disaster to the personal emotions of individuals as a necessary step for these latter to act in favour of heritage. She coins this process "intimisation" ("intimisation").
1.2.Dissertation starter
After these patchy clues about my theoretical stance and my empirical work, it is time and place to introduce them clearly.
1.2.1. What is this dissertation about?
With some conceit, which I reduce in the following, I aim to make explicit and to grasp the actualisation – realisation – of heritage, following this orienting question: how do human beings come to qualify a thing, be it tangible or intangible, as heritage? I argue that heritage is a quality allocated by humans in their relation with things. According to the economist theory, a thing is allocated a value or a quality after it entered into the market, an economy, or at least a system of exchange in which criteria define its values and qualities. Such an approach often results in the listing of several markets. In the case of heritage, one could list a symbolic market in which heritage is an identity tool, a political market in which heritage is instrumentalised, an economic market in which tourism and development are based on heritage, and a social market in which heritage is at the basis of claims for social justice. This multiplicity of markets shows that heritage is a boundary object8 (Tornatore, 2000).
Rather than listing these markets and their characteristics, I focus on one element of official heritage, namely houses in the medina of Fez in Morocco, a World Heritage site listed in 1981. The matter of their qualification as heritage raises two related questions, that is to say their daily life and materiality, and the other forms of heritage they are in relation with. As a consequence, on the one hand, I follow medina houses in terms of networks, that is to say the various ways to engage with their materiality in the everyday life. On the other hand, I focus on heritage as a trajectory to shed light on how house cross the "heritage boundary", on how human beings draw it, and on the various forms of heritage.
In a first time, I describe the main place where the field investigation took place, namely the medina of Fez in Morocco. I present the history of the medina and I particularly focus on three major transformations that have taken place since the mid-1950s. First of all, the population of the medina changed. The elites left the medina after the Independence of Morocco in 1957 and moved to the New City, Casablanca – the economic centre – or Rabat – the political centre. Rural migrants have replaced them and have rented or occupied for free their houses. This population change resulted in what some authorities and scholars name the "ruralisation" of the medina, which they
8 Boundary objects are "objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites" (Star and Griesemer, 1989: 393).
consider as the main reason of its material degradation. Also, since the late 1990s, foreigners have bought houses in the medina. They have settled in their secondary residence or have opened a tourist accommodation. The heritagisation of the medina constitutes the second change. I overview the various politics of heritage that took place before the arrival of UNESCO in the late 1970s and I present the actions and programmes related to the World Heritage listing. I also describe how UNESCO looks like in Fez and the various definitions of heritage I met in Fez. I then focus on the third transformation, tourism development in Fez, and in Morocco more generally.
In a second time, following Miller's (2001) idea of physical engagement with houses, I focus on the various ways to engage with this material element, on the networks crossing in houses. I describe what circulates, meets and passes by houses, all the relations, components and flux composing the networks. In this ethnographic report, I address how to inhabit houses located in a World Heritage site and what is their daily life. To answer this question, I start with the presentation of North Africa houses in the academic literature and in Fez. Following Raymond (1994), I support the idea that these written reports tend to freeze houses in a specific and unique model, that of the North Africa house with patio, and to associate them with particular features such as a game between openness and closeness, privacy or hospitality. Doing so, scholars do not take into account the diversity in architectural forms, which I sketch on the basis of two medina houses.
I then depict the construction works that inhabitants undertake and the furnishing and decorative trends they follow once they have acquired a house, a room or a floor in a house. I question the notions of legality, tricks and taste. I also focus on houses dedicated to tourism, that is to say guest-houses and home-stays in Moroccan families. Rather than an industry characterised by fake, heritage tourism first and foremost brings daily problems and issues such as privacy, hospitality and tradition, which owners and tourists have to face and negotiate. I then turn to the daily life of and with houses and on the consequences of their materiality. I examine what the house makes do to inhabitants and how houses and inhabitants act together. Writing books and blogs, expressing one’s creativity and imagination, starting a new life or having a specific way of life are among the actions inhabitant attribute to their house. Finally, I take as basis an oft-heard assertion in the mouth of Moroccan and foreign elites denying any heritage skills to Moroccan inhabitants – they are accused of not being educated to heritage, of having no taste, of leaving houses falling down – to think of the blindness and the lack on interest in houses-as-heritage.
By investigating how people live in and with houses, I faced a surprise. Inhabitants do not especially consider houses, and even the medina, as heritage. Houses have another story that one of official heritage. They are first and foremost a place to live and are at best a familial legacy or an economic heritage when the house is a tourist accommodation. Some foreign residents see their
house and the medina as a personal heritage (that is to say a "plus" in their life), an economic heritage that worth and/or brings money, or a cultural heritage for its location in a World Heritage site or for its architectural or historical uniqueness. The qualification of houses as heritage is however obvious for experts, that is to say members of institutions in charge of the medina.
I then investigate the qualification of houses as heritage in order to grasp the heritage border, that is to say how and according to what houses enter the territory of heritage. I focus on several ways to be in relation with the house, none of them being exclusive but all of them combining and mixing – their split is a descriptive trick for a better clarity. Houses are first and foremost a place of sensual relations – inhabitants touch them, see them, smell them – and some inhabitants even consider these senses as skills. Affects constitute a second kind of relation with houses as Gravari-Barbas (2005) suggests. Inhabitants are in love with their house, feel good in their house or, on the contrary, feel sadness and disappointment. They also remember souvenirs and evoke nostalgic moments. Scholars and inhabitants distinguish between expert and non-expert relations with houses. I challenge the expert approach of heritage by adding the category of autodidact experts – after Dubost (1994) underlined the importance of amateurs in heritage-making.
I also propose a wider definition of expertise as an ability "to speak in the name of" (Tornatore, 2010). Inhabitants also relate to houses in terms of conflicts, from the choice of a decorative pattern or a furnishing element to the debates between members of institutions. These conflicts highlight the justifications inhabitants refer to in their actions and discourses. Finally, inhabitants allocate qualities to their house, among which is the heritage quality.
Arising from the descriptions of the relations with houses, I argue that better than the notion of heritage border, the notion of attachment (Hennion, 2007) allows grasping how inhabitants come to qualify their house as heritage. This notion better sheds light on the actualisation of heritage for it gives room to both human and non-human actors and to the mutual attention they give and take – human being give attention to an object and an attention is taken by the object. Secondly, this notion shows the importance of senses and affects in the relation with houses. Contrary to researches focused on the expert heritage-making (Heinich, 2009), I suggest that senses and affects are one possible component in the qualification of a thing as heritage (Barbe and Tornatore, 2006; Dassié, 2006) together with actions and justification. Finally, the notion of attachment stresses both the similarities between houses and elements of heritage – they share affects, senses, conflicts, qualities – and shows that the house-as-home does not exclude the house-as-heritage. The qualities of home and heritage are however different as heritage results from a "plus of attention" and relates to nostalgia or a feeling of threat, loss and disappearing; values related to purity, materiality and time;
and actions of preservation and transmission.
