Encountering Morocco: Fieldwork and Cultural Understanding

Introduction

1 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 in­ di­ vidual 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 vari­ ous 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 po­ liti­ cal 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 2 | David Crawford and Rachel Newcomb Spring—­traditional anthropological fieldwork continues to provide uniquely grounded and origi­ nal 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 pow­ ers wanted—­ indeed, they needed—­ to understand the places they hoped to control. The curiosity of scholars converged with the interests of power­ ful 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 organizationalfoundationsofanthropologyasaformaldiscipline .Theseearly 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 perspectivepersists inourcontemporaryera—­forinstance,indevelopment discourses, in which poor countries are instructed to evolve or progress to be like richer ones. However, the reliance on sec­ ondhand 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, scien- Introduction | 3 tific 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 En­ gland’swartimeenemies,theAustro-­HungarianEmpire. 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...