Encountering Morocco

Description

Everyday life through the prism of fieldwork

Like the Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa series page on Facebook

Encountering Morocco introduces readers to life in this North African country through vivid accounts of fieldwork as personal experience and intellectual journey. We meet the contributors at diverse stages of their careers–from the unmarried researcher arriving for her first stint in the field to the seasoned fieldworker returning with spouse and children. They offer frank descriptions of what it means to take up residence in a place where one is regarded as an outsider, learn the language and local customs, and struggle to develop rapport. Moving reflections on friendship, kinship, and belief within the cross-cultural encounter reveal why study of Moroccan society has played such a seminal role in the development of cultural anthropology.

Acknowledgments
Introduction \ David Crawford and Rachel Newcomb
1. Arabic or French? The Politics of Parole at a Psychiatric Hospital in Morocco \ Charlotte E. van den Hout
2. Time, Children, and Getting Ethnography Done in Southern Morocco \ Karen Rignall
3. Thinking about Class and Status in Morocco \ David A. McMurray
4. Forgive Me, Friend: Mohammed and Ibrahim \ Emilio Spadola
5. Suspicion, Secrecy, and Uncomfortable Negotiations over Knowledge Production in Southwestern Morocco \ Katherine E. Hoffman
6. The Activist and the Anthropologist \ Paul A. Silverstein
7. A Distant Episode: Religion and Belief in Moroccan Ethnography \ Rachel Newcomb
8. Shortcomings of a Reflexive Tool Kit; or, Memoir of an Undutiful Daughter \ Jamila Bargach
9. Reflecting on Moroccan Encounters: Meditations on Home, Genre, and the Performance of Everyday Life \ Deborah Kapchan
10. The Power of Babies \ David Crawford
11. Anthropologists among Moroccans \ Kevin Dwyer
References
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Middle Est
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Marruecos
• History of the Middle East
• General officer
• North Africa
• Middle East
• Anthropology
• Morocco
• General
• Research
• Islam

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 8
• EAN13: 9780253009197
• Langue: English

Extrait

PUBLIC CULTURES OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA Paul Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg, editors
ENCOUNTERING MOROCCO
FIELDWORK AND CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING
Edited by
DAVID CRAWFORD AND RACHEL NEWCOMB
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington & Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East Tenth Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders     800-842-6796
Fax orders     812-855-7931
© 2013 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Encountering Morocco : fieldwork and cultural understanding / edited by David Crawford and Rachel Newcomb.
pages cm. — (Public cultures of the Middle East and North Africa)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00904-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00911-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00919-7 (electronic book) 1. Anthropology—Fieldwork—Morocco. 2. Anthropologists—Morocco. 3. Morocco—Social life and customs. 4. Intercultural communication—Morocco. I. Crawford, David, [date] II. Newcomb, Rachel, [date] III. Series: Public cultures of the Middle East and North Africa.
GN649.M65E54    2013
306.0964—dc23
2012047778
1  2  3  4  5  18  17  16  15  14  13
To Jamila, Noureddine, and Sofia —R.N.
To Hillary, for acumen, inspiration, and the babies —D.C.
CONTENTS
 
Acknowledgments
 
Introduction     David Crawford and Rachel Newcomb
1    Arabic or French? The Politics of Parole at a Psychiatric Hospital in Morocco     Charlotte E. van den Hout
2    Time, Children, and Getting Ethnography Done in Southern Morocco     Karen Rignall
3    Thinking about Class and Status in Morocco     David A. McMurray
4    Forgive Me, Friend: Mohammed and Ibrahim     Emilio Spadola
5    Suspicion, Secrecy, and Uncomfortable Negotiations over Knowledge Production in Southwestern Morocco     Katherine E. Hoffman
6    The Activist and the Anthropologist     Paul A. Silverstein
7    A Distant Episode: Religion and Belief in Moroccan Ethnography     Rachel Newcomb
8    Shortcomings of a Reflexive Tool Kit; or, Memoir of an Undutiful Daughter     Jamila Bargach
9    Reflecting on Moroccan Encounters: Meditations on Home, Genre, and the Performance of Everyday Life     Deborah Kapchan
10  The Power of Babies     David Crawford
11  Afterword: Anthropologists among Moroccans     Kevin Dwyer
 
References
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
A version of chapter 4 previously appeared in Anthropological Quarterly and is being reprinted with permission. The anecdotes in chapter 3 appeared in In and Out of Morocco , by David A. McMurray, and are used by permission of the University of Minnesota Press.
Introduction
DAVID CRAWFORD AND RACHEL NEWCOMB
This book introduces readers to Morocco by showing how anthropologists have come to understand it. Each essay takes us into a specific part of the country through the unique voice of the writer. Each delivers a very local story, a vignette of how a particular individual has done fieldwork in a specific context. And each stands as a personal meditation on cross-cultural understanding, the way that one person came to appreciate an alien social world. Together the chapters build a richly textured portrait of the Kingdom of Morocco—a key site in the development of the discipline of anthropology.
As the essays show, ethnographic knowledge unfolds over time through fieldwork. Fieldwork, as anthropologists generally understand it, is built on intimate and often unstructured encounters with various kinds of interlocutors in one or more local contexts. Many different methods may be employed during the fieldwork experience, but participant observation—living among the people being studied—is cultural anthropology's primary research method. Anthropologists attempt to grasp other cultures by living in them for long periods of time. This type of research reveals the daily struggles that underpin larger social processes, and thus offers a vision of how everyday life is connected to larger social, cultural, and political dynamics. Anthropological fieldwork offers a perspective that is impossible to convey at the pace of a television news program or in the space of a guidebook. In an era of global transformation—with Twitter posts and YouTube videos, Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab Spring—traditional anthropological fieldwork continues to provide uniquely grounded and original insights.
ON FIELDWORK
Anthropologists have not always done what we now call fieldwork. As students learn in their introductory classes, so-called armchair anthropology held sway during the early years of the discipline, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Scholars like E. B. Tylor relied on the accounts of travelers, colonial officials, and missionaries as well as reports from military expeditions to understand the world beyond Europe. This was an era when European society was rapidly expanding, and vast swathes of the planet came to be dominated by Britain, France, and other colonial powers. These powers wanted—indeed, they needed—to understand the places they hoped to control. The curiosity of scholars converged with the interests of powerful states, and the appraisal of subjugated peoples slowly emerged as a legitimate field of study. Scholars like Tylor came to be respected for their knowledge of small-scale, non-European societies, and they worked to establish the intellectual and organizational foundations of anthropology as a formal discipline. These early anthropologists synthesized what was then understood about non-European peoples into a broadly comparative perspective called unilineal cultural evolution—the idea that each culture evolved over time along a singular civilizational trajectory. For Tylor, “progress” depended on human rationality and each society's ability to overcome “the fetters” of its habitual cultural behavior. Arguably this perspective persists in our contemporary era—for instance, in development discourses, in which poor countries are instructed to evolve or progress to be like richer ones.
However, the reliance on secondhand data quickly came to be seen as inadequate, and by the beginning of the twentieth century trips to “the field” for the purpose of conducting research were becoming the norm. These trips were meant to permit increasingly well-trained, professional anthropologists to gather accurate, scientific information about specific cultures. Perhaps the best known of these scholars was Bronislaw Malinowski, who spent much of the period around World War I virtually exiled in the Trobriand Islands, near Papua New Guinea. Though Malinowski had been teaching in London, he was Polish by birth and therefore a subject of one of England's wartime enemies, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Malinowski did not want to return to Poland, so he arranged to banish himself to the south Pacific. He set up a tent on a beach among the Trobriand Island natives he hoped to study and spent much of his time doing what he called participant observation, by which he meant living and participating in the society that he hoped to understand. Subsequent work, and Malinowski's own diaries, showed that his idealized account of anthropological fieldwork was somewhat different from his own practice, but nonetheless basic standards had been set.
Observations by themselves were not good enough, according to Malinowski; one needed to take an active part in the everyday lives of those one hoped to comprehend. The years that Malinowski spent in the Trobriand Islands had the effect of setting the bar very high for time spent in the field. Even today when anthropologists “do fieldwork,” they typically stay many months—if not years—learning the local language, eating local food, and living as much like the study population as possible. As we will see in this volume, some anthropologists become part of the society they set out to study. This is a key difference between anthropological fieldwork and other sorts of knowledge production.
This long-term engagement was important for deep cultural