Reflections on North African Fieldwork and Ethnography
Panel 069, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
This panel returns to the roots of contemporary ethnographic writing in North Africa. North African ethnography has had an impact far beyond the region and the discipline of anthropology, inspiring a range of scholars to better understand not only North Africa, but the process of studying culture. Following Edward Said’s Orientalism a new generation of ethnographers –led by North Africanists-- questioned the politics of representation and offered innovative, experimental ethnographies. Today, however, after decades of reflexive analyses and experiments with textual forms, we still struggle with the practical and ethical dynamics of fieldwork: with whom do we collaborate, how do we engage the various perspectives we find in the field, how do we represent them, and what do we owe our interlocutors?
With attention to the contradictions and ironies of various forms of power, the papers begin with the issue of how fieldwork actually gets done, and on the elisions and silences that seem crucial –or at least endemic-- to the rendering of experience as intellectual production. One paper examines the role of suspicion in the fieldwork encounter, particularly suspicion of the ethnographer's research agenda as potentially part of a neo-colonial endeavor. Another paper asks how fathering children changes the terms of ethnographic engagement in Morocco, and how children both facilitate and constrain the possibilities for fieldwork. A third paper interrogates the complexities of social class in the fieldwork encounter, and the fundamental ambiguity of social class across cultural divides. Finally, the fourth paper examines strategic local uses of ethnography (and ethnographers), and the opportunities, limitations, and tensions that arise as a result. In an era when US politicians employ misinformation, stereotypes, and Orientalist clichés as justification for neo-colonial aggression, the papers show how ethnographers working in the region can contribute to public discourse and the dissemination of more nuanced representations of Muslim social life.
There are two dominant discourses of class: class as a position in a social hierarchy and class as an exploitative economic relation between producers and owners. This paper refers to the first one with its multitude of markers, anxieties and orderings. Fieldworkers in Morocco have trouble fitting into this hierarchy. They obviously come from an affluent background or they wouldn¹t be carrying out fieldwork in the first place. They obviously have the diplomatic and political power of their home country behind them or they would not have gotten permission to carry out their study. Yet they don¹t learn to manipulate the status codes synonymous with affluence; they don¹t manage to master the language of the upper class; they don¹t learn the performative aspects of elite belonging. Their sympathies would seem to be with the exploited and the marginal. This paper will draw on the author¹s experiences doing fieldwork in Morocco to address the circumstances surrounding the confused and confusing subject position and class identification of the foreign field worker. Why is it that both the locals and the foreigner are left scratching their heads over where the grad student/ foreigner/ Firstworlder fits in the local social hierarchy? Why is it that status and prestige codes remain so unstable in the face of this alien being?
For some time now, anthropologists working in rural Morocco have found themselves rubbing ethnographic shoulders with a variety of development professionals and local cultural experts. Amazigh/Berber activists have been particularly committed to pursuing areas of traditional anthropological knowledge production: collecting genealogies, transcribing oral narratives, recording rituals, and preserving material artifacts. Concerned with the survival of their endangered language and culture, these activists have returned to the colonial ethnological and philological archive to establish a baseline for Berber language and culture before Arabization. In this paper, I explore the convergences and divergences between the epistemologies, practices, and politics of activists and anthropologists. Drawing on my own recent fieldwork in the southeastern Ghéris valley, I discuss the dilemmas of having one's research presence and findings appropriated for activist political concerns, the practical opportunities and limitations such appropriation entails, and the potential conflicts that can arise when the ideological commitments of anthropologists and activists prove to be incompatible. Such tensions and negotiations point to the ways that all ethnography is ultimately a collective production and challenge the conceit of the anthropologist as an autonomous researcher.
Children are of obvious importance to rural farmers in the High Atlas, as the main source of farm labor, but also as a preeminent cultural value. Villagers expect to have children, pity those who do not, ask about having them, and consider any equivocation about the desirability of parenting to be either a weird misunderstanding or a kind of mental illness. As a researcher without children I existed in an extended liminal state as someone with the material resources and seeming capabilities of a man, but lacking an essential component of full masculinity. I understood this vaguely at the time of my original fieldwork, but its significance became forcefully apparent much later when I returned after having managed to impregnate my wife. From my very first communal taxi ride south out of Marrakech total strangers included me in bizarre new sorts of conversations. I was queried about the details of my sex life, how many times a day I copulated, how many children my wife and I expected to have, how lucky we (married) men in the taxi were to have children. The simple act of saying I was going to have a baby changed my ontological status, transformed me into a new kind of being with assumed commonalities rural men now felt comfortable interrogating. The centrality of children in Morocco has gone radically underappreciated in anthropology for reasons that point to the some key dilemmas in reflexive fieldwork.
Power relations inherent in the encounter between anthropologist and informant preoccupied advocates of reflexive anthropology and their analysis has refigured the practice and writing of ethnography over the last three decades. Questions of truth, disclosure, and suspicion shape not only anthropologists’ relationships in the field, but also the data that can be collected and the cooperation that can be expected. For American anthropologists of the Muslim world, relations with informants are already charged with American foreign policy and military preoccupations. In Morocco, French colonialism, contemporary tourism, and Peace Corps activities have shaped Moroccans’ perceptions of foreign interests in their lives. Yet as this paper argues, political and historical factors internal to communities also shape the ways that informants accommodate or reject particular researchers and their projects. This paper explores research on Berbers in the charged 1990s, prior to the Gulf wars, given Moroccan governmental hostility towards an interest in Berber speakers and their grievances. Equally important were the community-internal and deeply-entrenched practices of secrecy and evasion that Anti-Atlas mountain Berbers deployed as strategies for controlling the circulation of information to fellow villagers as well as outsiders. I argue that the practices of revelation and secrecy I encountered were patterned after local understandings of the production, dissemination, and circulation of valued knowledge within these primarily oral societies. This complex ethical terrain required constant negotiation over not only the collection of knowledge but also its textual and acoustic documentation through ethnographic fieldnotes, interviewing, and audio recordings.
