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11. Afterword: Anthropologists among Moroccans
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213 11| Afterword: Anthropologists among Moroccans Kevin Dwyer The essays in this volume address topics that, for a long time, were present only at the margins of academic anthropological discourse, if they appeared at all. Issues like the anthropologist’s “identity”— the implications of the anthropologist’s origins and how anthropologists construct themselves in the field; the attractions and perils of friendship; the impact of the anthropologist’s family on fieldwork; suspicion of and hostility toward the anthropologist and competition between the anthropologist and others in the field; the tensions among the many aspects of an anthropologist’s humanity, and between the roles of researcher and judge, between “scientific” observation and judgmental evaluation; the temptations of religious conversion ; the fieldworker’s deep, often extreme emotions in certain situations; the researcher’s uncertain “control” over the fieldwork situation and the importance of unintended consequences, accidents, and mistakes— these are just some of the many topics these essays treat that were rarely explored in the anthropological literature up through the 1960s. These topics were seen as largely irrelevant to the knowledge-gathering aims of the discipline, and writing about them, reflecting on the anthropologist’s own feelings and actions while in the field (what has come to be called anthropological “reflexivity”), 214 | Kevin Dwyer exposed authors then, and sometimes still does, to accusations of self- centeredness; of emphasizing their own presence, personality, and role at the expense of conveying knowledge about the other; of using language betraying too much emotion at the expense of cool, objective discourse. Today it is widely accepted that such accusations are fundamentally misguided and based on the illusion that knowledge of the other exists in a timeless and context-free domain, independent of the particular anthropologist who—situated culturally , geographically, and historically and with his or her personal and behavioral dispositions— tries to construct it. As the essays in this volume demonstrate convincingly, when anthropologists show and question themselves in their encounter with the other, our knowledge of the interaction gains in depth and complexity, as does our understanding of both the other and ourselves. Ifthetopicsmentionedaboveweresorarelydealtwithpriortothe 1970s but pervade the essays on Morocco in this volume and appear frequently in anthropological writing today, we might wonder how this shift came about. To consider this we need to look back at U.S. anthropological writings on Morocco over the past four decades and characterize the general context within which they were produced. Some Thirty Ethnographies, Three Periods, Three Themes1 Ethnographies, Periods There are perhaps some thirty ethnographies on Morocco written by U.S. anthropologists during the past four decades, testifying to a particularlyrichperiodforU.S.researchonMoroccoandforU.S.anthropology as a discipline.2 Not only did U.S. anthropological study of Morocco come to rival and outdo French research on France’s former colony, but in the first decade or so of this period— roughly from the early 1970s through the early 1980s—U.S. an thro po logi cal practice and writing were being critically re-examined and a number of fertile new approaches were emerging, partly in response to world events and the U.S. role in them. These approaches were at times in- [54.173.214.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:23 GMT) Anthropologists among Moroccans | 215 debted to, at times reacting to, the predominantly empiricist Anglo- Saxon traditions of ethnographic study. It is not surprising that there was some overlap in these two areas, with the new developments in U.S. anthropology being in part reflected in innovative an thro po logi cal research on Morocco. These anthropological studies of Morocco were written in a geopo liti cal context where, over a long period— at least from the 1940s up to the present— Morocco played an important strategic role in U.S. foreign policy. While this does not directly account for the attention the country received from U.S. anthropologists— there were other reasons, such as the significant attention already paid to Lebanon and Tunisia through the 1960s and the difficult po liti cal relations between the United States on the one hand and Algeria, Libya, and Egypt on the other— it does provide some of the structuring conditions within which this work was carried out. With Morocco occupying an important strategic position, funding for research in and on the country faced no insuperable obstacles and, as Brian Edwards makes clear in his stimulating 2005 study, starting in the 1970s the an thro po logi cal writing on Morocco was...