Girls of the Factory

Cover

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Title Page

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Front Matter

Contents

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pp. v-

Preface

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pp. vii-xii

A Note on Transliteration

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pp. xiii-

Introduction

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pp. 1-15

I was motivated to write this book by the discrepancy between doing ethnographic fieldwork and writing about it. Anthropology demands objectivity; theorizing and data collection eclipse any need for sensory descriptions. And yet it is a visceral experience...

Part 1. In the Streets

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pp. 17-

1. Finding the Workers

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pp. 19-42

My husband and I arrived in Rabat. He would be teaching at the university, and I was to begin my research into the lives of factory workers. Everything was terribly familiar, for...

Part 2. Inside the Factory

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pp. 43-

2. Gaining Entrée

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pp. 45-65

The factory where I spent the next few months working and learning about the lives of the factory girls is a large gray cement building sitting on a paved road in one of Fes’s industrial districts. It sits near a leather tanning plant and across the street from an...

3. The Girls in the Packing Department

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pp. 66-123

On Monday morning Sylvie sent me to work in the packing area. Here the finished products are inspected, tagged with tickets from foreign department stores, packaged according to the clients’ specifications, and loaded onto the trucks that will carry...

4. Final Days

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pp. 124-146

On Monday, I woke up feeling ill. I was too sick to stand up and did not go to the factory. On Tuesday, I took myself to a doctor in the center of Fes. When he heard that I had been working in a factory, he told me that the factory was what had made me...

Part 3. Inside the Home

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pp. 147-

5. Introductions

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pp. 149-161

Nadia never worked in the factory where I worked. I met Nadia in the factory named Couture, during a rainy spell in late November, when the factory owner (who, incidentally, believed I was a CIA agent) allowed me to survey his workers. Some days after...

6. The Women in the Sitting Room

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pp. 162-218

One afternoon I went to visit Nadia and found her ill. It was cold outside, and she was lying on the banquette in the chill of the sitting room, covered in a blanket, in pain. “There is something wrong with my uterus,” she told me, and almost immediately Jamila...

7. Taking Leave

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pp. 219-229

It is now the end of July, and my departure is near. Fes is enclosed by mountains, and these mountains trap the heat inside the city. I feel like I am baking, and I want to go home. For months I have been visiting Nadia and her family. I have been engrossed with Jamila’s and Aisha’s...

Conclusion

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pp. 230-238

All over the world, local communities experience the impact of globalization. Neo-liberal economic reforms in 1980s Morocco opened the economy to new investments and fueled the development of the garment manufacturing industry. Young Moroccan...

Appendix 1. Inside the Factory: Sewing Factory Personnel

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pp. 239-240

Appendix 2. Inside the House

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pp. 241-242

Acknowledgments

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pp. 243-244

Notes

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pp. 245-254

Works Cited

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pp. 255-260

Index

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pp. 260-264

About the Author

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