“The kitchen of the slave and fame for her mistress”. Ritual exchanges and paradoxes of slavery in Tetouan

Abstract

In some situations of inequality, the dominant groups establish exchanges and clientelist obligations with the subaltern groups and they attribute them many powers and threats to the social order. In this article I will develop this hypothesis through a study of the domestic slaves in Tetouan (Morocco), from the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century, and their relationship with the families of middle- and high- rank for which they worked, based on oral and archive sources. Subject to a situation of domination, those women became representatives of the prestige of the owner group through their gastronomic work, as a sign of distinction. And many of them exercised functions of healing and protection, as mediators with sanctuaries and non-human entities or linked to brotherhoods such as the gnawa. In fact, all these exchange processes were generated and transformed through ritual mechanisms and arenas. And in these symbolic processes, the bodies of slaves and freedmen became agents of those clientelistic relations, representing paradoxical powers both to provoke and to evict evil.