Maraboutic Resistance and Popular Culture in the Arab Spring of Morocco

This article examines the hybridity of maraboutic and popular cultural forms in the recent social uprising in Morocco. Adapting a famous Weberian metaphor of the “railroad switch gear,” we display how new revolutionary social potentials are lived out and experienced in old cultural patterns. We argue that for most Moroccan subaltern social groups, meaning and action take place in and through traditional cultural structures, the role of which in the Moroccan social context requires careful cultural and political analysis. The February 20 movement in Morocco and the participants’ use of new social media have demonstrated how both traditional maraboutic and popular culture have merged to form new hybridities in the construction of believable counter-hegemonic political struggles that can lay the groundwork for fundamental social change.