Berber Ethnogenesis: The Origin of the First Berber-Speaking Social Formations

Abstract

In order to tackle the question of the Berbers1rigorously from the ethnic point of view, two different, but complementary, areas of analysis must be distinguished. In the first place, there is the field of ethnogenesis, that is, the fundamental dominance of the self-consciousness and self-definition. On the other hand, there is the sphere of “ethnification,” a local and chronologically earlier process, which results in the construction of the ethnic as an object through economic, social, political or ideological mechanisms. If we limit ourselves exclusively to the first of these approaches, it can be said that the suggestion, of a feeling of identification in some of the Berber-speaking areas2 Figure 1) seems to have a parallel, in recent times, where a somewhat vague unitarian aspiration, which in spite of being almost exclusively limited to intellectuals and the Berberistic militancy area, seems to augur the awakening of a non-existent historically collective ethnic consciousness. It is entirely logical that the examination of the ethnogenetic components contributing to integration and ethnic differentiation, and especially, in the foeination of self-esteem and self-consciousness of what is described as Berber ethnos, becomes particularly relevant.