The Moroccan Riffi World through Ursula's Lens: Land, Gender, and Childhood in Behind the Courtyard Door: The Daily Life of Tribeswomen in Northern Morocco (1994)

This article explores the portrayal of land, gender, and childhood in Ursula's Behind the Courtyard Door (1994), an anthropological book of the Riffi people in Northern Morocco. The book sheds light on the daily life of the tribeswomen of the Moroccan Riffi region after Spanish colonialism in the Rif land, which witnessed one of the most remarkable wars in history (the Rif War, 1921–1926). This paper seeks to approach Ursula's book from three different aspects: gender, childhood, and land. Men are portrayed as oppressors and old-fashioned husbands, whose dream is to immigrate to Europe to improve their economic situation, while women are depicted as illiterate, naive, and oppressed housewives. Children are represented by highlighting their involvement in practicing daily rural harsh activities in nature. The land is portrayed as an orientalist landscape, where desert and camels exist. Indeed, anthropology has widely been known to exoticize "the other," making it ahistorical by treating each culture as isolated and unconnected to others, and Ursula's textual production serves as an example. Ursula uses orientalist assumptions, and this contributes to a distorted understanding of culture and the history of this region.