Ṣedq in Morocco: On Communicability, Partonage, and Partial Truth

As I have said, it is not possible to describe here the general tone of inter- personal relations in Morocco with any concreteness; one can only claim, and hope to be believed, that it is before anything else combative, a constant testing of wills as individuals struggle to seize what they covet, defend what they have, and recover what they have lost.

—Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge

In Morocco . . . the play ofsedq: immediate and bargained dependency relations . . . is sovereign.

—Clifford Geertz, After the Fact

That partial truths are the best we can expect and most often accept from ethnographic work has become commonplace, it seems, even though serious distortions arise when such "truths" sediment in discourse and come to typify a group of people rather than being taken for what they are—partial (in both senses of the term). Clifford Geertz states that the "general tone of interpersonal relations in Morocco" is "combative," which is, indeed, a partial truth—any person who spends time in Morocco's suqs and streets or becomes involved in discussions of social or economic concern certainly experiences intense verbal interactions. But to state that interpersonal relations are combative "before anything else" and entail "a constant testing of wills as individuals struggle to seize . . . defend . .. and recover" (1983, 114) is to be less descriptive or figurative than political. To go further and render the meaning of the Arabic term for personal sincerity and truthfulness (sedq) as "immediate and bargained dependency relations" (33) is to conflate distinctive fields of communicative practice and confuse private and public spheres of everyday life.

Partiality is, of course, a controversial subject in interpretive ethnography and other forms of human science research. Ethnographic writing has become, in James Clifford's terms, an "oxymoronic" exercise of creating "true fictions" that "cannot tell all" and cannot avoid "expressive tropes, figures, and allegories that select and impose meaning as they translate it." Clifford goes further and argues that the poetic constitution of cultural texts is made possible by "powerful 'lies' of exclusion and rhetoric," and that "power and history work through" such "systems, or economies, of truth" in inscrutable ways beyond the ethnographer's control—a recognition of political import affirmed by many cultural theorists over the last three decades (1986a, 6-7). ¹ These theorists and many others, representing diverse fields of research, concur that the deconstruction of ethnographic texts (questioning their authority, taking findings back to those studied for argument and refinement, explicating that which has been excluded, and discussing political implications) is a critical and potentially juridical undertaking.

Perhaps no other ethnographer in the modern era has detailed the workings of power and history in Morocco as extensively as Geertz, or influenced as many researchers who enter Moroccan fields. At several points in his writing Geertz does make attempts to account for the partiality of his texts. He acknowledges in Works and Lives, for example, that problems of representation, privilege, accuracy, and responsibility for the effects of "fictionalization" do exist (in ways they never did for the "great ethnographers of the past"; see 1988, 129), and that the problem of imposing meaning is, indeed, imposing and potentially imperialistic, something any prudent researcher in the field should be mindful of. Ultimately, in After the Fact he states that "all this doubt and meta-doubt" about the ethnographic enterprise means "only" that "the game has changed," that "we" now work in "intensely contested [settings] among all sorts of constrictions, demands, suspicions, and competitors," and, in the end, the best an ethnographer can do is to write sentences that he or she can live with and believe in, settling in at a "crossroads of controversy" that "makes contentment difficult" (1995, 129-33).

In this essay, then, I take issue with Geertzian and other ethnographic economies of truth concerning Moroccan communicative practices. What are Moroccan conceptions of sedq and what are the links, if any, with the Geertzian interpretation? In what ways do...