Encountering Morocco: Fieldwork and Cultural Understanding

4. Forgive Me, Friend: Mohammed and Ibrahim

77 4| Forgive Me, Friend Mohammed and Ibrahim Emilio Spadola In Morocco I tend—­ like many Ameri­ can anthropologists—­ to seek rapport with a smile. Retailers in Fes refer to Ameri­ can tourists by the code word miska—­ chewing gum—­ meaning they are all teeth and lips. (British tourists, in contrast, are ad-­dam al-­barid, which means cold blood.) Yet a Moroccan acquaintance of mine characterized Ameri­ cans as tragically sad friends. The United States is so enormous, he said, and everyone so mobile, that “you Ameri­ cans are always ready to drop a friend.” He’s right, in my experience. The friendly first steps of rapport are, if not the opposite of friendship, a firm defense against it. Defense against the long-­ term obligations and demands of friendship may be why so many Ameri­ can ethnographers have focused on these themes in Moroccan social life. Perhaps this shadow of contractual obligation is why my dearest friend, Mohammed, assures me in his inimitable English: “Ibrahim, I have no interest in you.” Rapport is anthropology’s most cherished concept, the sine qua non of fieldwork. Without rapport, one merely observes from afar; with it, one participates. “That mysterious necessity of an­ thro­ po­ logi­ cal field work” (C. Geertz 1973, 416), rapport evokes not so much friendship as utility—­an intentional spontaneity, suspended between levity and labor, sheer calculation and mere tolerance. Nevertheless, 78 | Emilio Spadola­Clifford Geertz famously commented that he and Hildred Geertz established rapport in Bali only by mistake. The Geertzes were observing an illegal cockfight when armed police raided it. Instead of “pull[ing] out our papers”—­ that is, instead of acting properly—­ the Geertzes fled (ibid.). Before this they had been intent on establish­ ingrapport,“wander[ing]around,uncertain,wistful,eagertoplease” (ibid., 412). Fleeing the police was, in contrast, spontaneous and unintended , and the hospitality it established was entirely “accidental.” Yet, Geertz notes, “it led to a sudden and unusually complete acceptance into a society extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate” (ibid., 416).1 In the later essay “From the Native’s Point of View,” Geertz debunked rapport as a “preternatural capacity to think, feel, and perceive like a native” and advocated instead a technical and “a bit less magical”emphasison“experience-­near”conceptsofpersonhood(C. Geertz 1983, 56, 58). Yet the Geertzes’ ineptness in Bali suggests the converse: rapport freely emerges when the ethnographer ­fumbles and abandons technique; the magic of rapport is its emergence from accident . And precisely because it is “not a very generalizable recipe”—­ not a formal element of fieldwork—­ the mistake may lead to deeper ethnographic intimacy: their “accidental host,” writes Geertz, “became one of my best informants” (C. Geertz 1973, 416). Experimental or reflexive ethnographies, especially those written on Morocco in the 1970s and 1980s, intentionally (at times, infamously ) stretched the boundaries of rapport, drawing in part on Geertzianthemesofaccidentalorunintendedconnections.Theirmotivations surely differed; reflexive authors emphasized fieldworker-­ informant relations as messy, muddled, and, at best, negotiated—­ chiefly to refute ethnographers’ authoritatively transparent recording of society and culture. But like Geertz, writers such as Paul Rabinow (2007 [1977]), Vincent Crapanzano (1980), and Kevin Dwyer (1982) sought to humanize rapport—­ even, however tentatively, engaging informants as something like friends. They did so with evident difficulty , emphasizing the agonies rather than affections of Moroccan friendships—­the “brinksmanship,” “domination,” and “submission” Forgive Me, Friend | 79 (Rabinow 2007, 47–48), the “scheming, intriguing, and manipulation ”so“cloying—­totheWest­erner”(Crapanzano1980,78).Andthey re­ corded their own mistakes, accidents, and general failures of authoritative fieldwork form. But like the Geertzes’ magical accident, these failures of intention did not so much discredit their work as identify “real rapport”—­ friendship—­ as a formal condition of ethnographic inquiry. In this essay I look at fieldwork and friendship in Morocco and, more specifically, at my dearest friend Mohammed and me and our mutual affection, which has developed over the past twelve years of my periodic fieldwork and social visits in Fes. I explore these themes of friendship and fieldwork, of mistakes and unintended connections, between Mohammed and me, and in Rabinow’s and Crapanzano’s exemplary works of reflexive ethnography. In doing so, I suggest that what links friendship with mistakes in Morocco is what may come after the lapse, in a friend’s forgiveness. Mohammed and Ibrahim I met Mohammed in Fes Medina in 1998. I was living in a Moroccan household near the neighborhood of Ayn Azlitan...