Encountering Morocco: Fieldwork and Cultural Understanding

2. Time, Children, and Getting Ethnography Done in Southern Morocco

40 2| Time, Children, and Getting Ethnography Done in South­ern Morocco Karen Rignall When ethnographies assume polished form, the process of selecting a field site usually appears to have been a serendipitous alignment of intellectual commitments and affective attachments. The “arrival narrative” begins to take shape in those first days at the field site. As the narrative becomes fixed in the published ethnography, the anthropologist ’sculturalconnection—­thatcommitmenttopeopleand place—­ becomes naturalized. In retrospect, the relationship can appear inevitable, even foreordained. My choice of field sites had more to do with day care than serendipity. Perhaps I can admit my pragmatic concerns because my affective attachments had already been established. I had previously lived in the south of Morocco, managing a community-­development organization and traveling as much as I could through­ out the arid steppe and the green river valleys that wended their way down the jagged topography of the south­ ern High Atlas Mountains. Years later, I designed my dissertation project with the knowledge that I wanted to return to the region. I had seen how migration remittances and livelihood diversification had transformed it in sometimes surprising ways. Rather than withdrawing from agriculture and settling their families in Lyon or Casablanca, many people were reasserting Time, Children, and Getting Ethnography Done | 41 their commitment to the tamazirt, the homeland. I wanted to understand how they expressed this commitment, and I developed a research agenda around the reasons people were expanding agriculture into the steppe. This meant that my choice of field sites was to a certain extent decided for me. I needed to go where people were, in fact, converting rangeland for cultivation. But my pre-­dissertation researchvisit,shortenedtothebareminimumbecauseIdidnotwant to leave my two toddlers for any longer than necessary, focused less on surveying the extent of rangeland conversion than on finding a site that could satisfy the basic needs of a young family, at least a young, middle-­ class, Ameri­ can family. We needed day care, a reasonably accessible hospital, and an Internet connection so that my spouse could work—­and so that our children could have video calls with their grandparents. We settled on Kelaa Mgouna, a regional market town nestled at the bottom of the Mgoun Valley. People come here from the mountains and surrounding plateaus to sell produce at the weekly market , buy supplies, take care of official business, visit doctors and relatives , and commute to their jobs in the businesses that have grown up around the one main intersection in town. An old friend directed me to a good preschool, and we would have the medical care and other amenities to secure the well-­ being of our family—­ a vibrant weekly market, a comfortable apartment, even a hammam (pub­lic bath)—­ on our block. And I would be right next to the rural communities where people were expanding agriculture into the steppe, the communities that form the heart of my research. I began writing this essay only four months into my fieldwork. The immediacy, at times traumatic, of settling in has compelled me to reflect on how rupture, discomfort, and even failure not only inform my experience of fieldwork, but also challenge my intellectual understanding of anthropology as a discipline. When I arrived, I thought back to Paul Rabinow and his reflections on the same experience that was proving so disconcerting to me. He frankly admitted thathe“hadgoneintoanthropologyinsearchofOtherness,”butthat the shock of actually encountering it forced him to reevaluate cul- 42 | Karen Rignall turalcategoriesinwayshehadnotanticipated(Rabinow2007[1977], 29). He also acknowledged that this was emotionally difficult, but I resented him nonetheless for what I perceived as his privilege. As a single man, he had the free­dom to wait for his fieldwork to take shape as he adjusted to these experiential shocks. I, on the other hand, felt rushed from the day I arrived. Because I had brought my family with me to the field and we were on a strict one-­ year schedule, I felt the pressure of having a limited window in which to settle us in and gather all the material necessary for a dissertation. By organizing my field research in terms of a work plan—­formally structuring my days as a job—­I thought I could make my project manageable. I fashioned myself as a commuter, leaving the house in the morning to work in my field sites and returning in the evening to share a meal and help put...