Moroccan academic life is mourning Abderrahmane Lakhsassi, a scholar whose work helped connect anthropology, Amazigh literature, oral memory and the study of Moroccan society.
Hespress reported that Lakhsassi died after decades of research into Morocco’s material and immaterial cultures, with particular attention to Amazigh literature and memory. His career crossed several fields, from Islamic thought and Ibn Khaldun to social and cultural anthropology, giving his work a wide range within Moroccan humanities scholarship.
One of his best-known books was From Tea to Atay: Custom and History, written with historian Abdelahad Sebti. The study used tea as an entry point into Morocco’s social transformations, everyday practices, exchanges, tastes and relationships shaped by both local life and colonial-era encounters.
Lakhsassi also worked with Mohamed Tozy on Moroccan tribes and with the late anthropologist Kenneth Brown on poetry, history and society in the Souss. These projects placed Amazigh oral and written heritage inside larger debates about power, community, memory and the relationship between learned and popular cultures.
Tributes cited by Moroccan media stressed that his interest in Amazigh culture was not a side concern but part of a broader intellectual project. His research touched on Amazigh poetry, cinema, theater, popular belief, religious practice, songs and the image of women in Amazigh juridical writings. Colleagues also noted that he had been working on an unpublished study of the Souss poet and musician Lhaj Belaid.
For Amazigh studies, Lakhsassi’s death marks the loss of a researcher who treated language and culture as living archives of social history. His bibliography and teaching remain part of the foundations on which future work on Moroccan Amazigh memory will continue to build.