Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
15
result(s) for
"Anthropology Fieldwork Morocco."
Sort by:
Encountering Morocco
Encountering Morocco introduces readers to life in this North African country through vivid accounts of fieldwork as personal experience and intellectual journey. We meet the contributors at diverse stages of their careers-from the unmarried researcher arriving for her first stint in the field to the seasoned fieldworker returning with spouse and children. They offer frank descriptions of what it means to take up residence in a place where one is regarded as an outsider, learn the language and local customs, and struggle to develop rapport. Moving reflections on friendship, kinship, and belief within the cross-cultural encounter reveal why study of Moroccan society has played such a seminal role in the development of cultural anthropology.
eBook
Being There
Challenges to ethnographic authority and to the ethics of representation have led many contemporary anthropologists to abandon fieldwork in favor of strategies of theoretical puppeteering, textual analysis, and surrogate ethnography. In Being There, John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi argue that ethnographies based on these strategies elide important insights. To demonstrate the power and knowledge attained through the fieldwork experience, they have gathered essays by anthropologists working in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tanzania, the Canadian Arctic, India, Germany, and Russia that shift attention back to the subtle dynamics of the ethnographic encounter. From an Inuit village to the foothills of Kilimanjaro, each account illustrates how, despite its challenges, fieldwork yields important insights outside the reach of textual analysis.
eBook
THE HARD WORK OF SMALL TALK IN ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK
In this article we explore the importance of small talk in the context of ethnographic fieldwork. Our examples derive from more than thirty years of research experience in Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, and The Netherlands. We argue that small talk is a central, yet taken-for-granted, ingredient of ethnographic fieldwork. We claim that this skill should be reflected upon and given a more consistent role in supplementing and correcting data obtained by other techniques. It is our conviction that it can and should be taught in courses on research methods and techniques.
Journal Article
Silence Sits in Places
Having become interested in the uprising of the Hirak movement and its denouncement of a 'cancer epidemic' in the Moroccan Rif, I ended up having what appeared to be a shattered experience, one broken by refusals to speak, miscommunication and bureaucratic barriers. Upon returning home, the very same silence that had surrounded my fieldwork then emerged as a resourceful tool with which to make sense of an opaque history. In this article, I will therefore consider silence as a social object that we encounter during fieldwork, as a positional issue and as an epistemological space. In this sense, engaging with what appears to be at the margin of everyday speech requires consideration of silence as something that is made powerful precisely by its being left unsaid.
Journal Article
Piebald Camels
Animal breeds are the diverse outcome of the thousands-year-long process of livestock domestication. Many of these breeds are piebald, resulting from the artificial selection by pastoralists of animals bearing a genetic condition known as leucism, and selected for their productive, behavioural, or aesthetical traits. Piebald dromedary camels have not been studied or discussed before, and their same existence is often overlooked. Based on fieldwork in Western Sahara, direct observations across Northern and East Africa and the Middle East, and a literature review, we address the morphological and behavioural traits, geographical distribution, taxonomy, and material and cultural importance of piebald (painted) camels. They are a hundreds-year-old camel breed used for caravans, as mounts, and for aesthetical and cultural reasons across Sudan, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Western Sahara, and Morocco. While they are increasingly bred out of a pastoral context for tourism and entertainment in the Canary Islands, mainland Europe, and the USA, in part of their original African range, piebald camels are under threat due to wars, droughts, and demise of pastoral livelihoods. More research is needed about these ‘beautiful and dignified’ animals.
Journal Article
Readings in Methodology
One of the weaknesses of research in Africa is the little consideration that is given to questions of epistemology and methodology. What we see is the trivialization of research protocols which, consequently, are reduced to fantasy prescriptions that detach social studies from universal debates over the validity of science rather than an interrogation of research procedures induced by the complexity of social dynamics. As a result, social sciences have become an imitative discourse and a recital of exotic anecdotes without perspectives. Knowledge production therefore loses any heuristic bearing. It is on the basis of this reality that attempts to correct this tendency have been made in this book by discussing the methodological foundation of social science knowledge. This volume is a collection of papers presented during methodological workshops organized by CODESRIA. Its objective is to revitalize theory and methodology in field work in Africa while contributing to the creation of a critical space hinged upon the mastery of epistemological bases which are indispensable to any scientific imagination. Far from being a collection of technical certainties and certified methods, this book interrogates the uncertain itinerary of the process of social logics discovery. In that sense, it is a decisive step towards a critical systemization of ongoing theories and practices within the African scientific community. The reader can, therefore, identify the philosophical, historical, sociological and anthropological foundations of object construction, field data exploitation and research results delivery. This book explains the importance of the philosophical and social modalities of scientific practice, the influence of local historical contexts, the different usages of new investigative tools, including the audiovisual tools. Finally, the book, backed by classical theories, serves as an invitation toward considering scientific commitment to African field research from a reflective perspective.
eBook
Forgive Me Friend: Mohammed and Ibrahim
This essay examines my accidental conversion to Islam and its discomforting consequences for my fieldwork in Morocco, While my conversion and my subsequent efforts to grasp its significance represents an awkward extreme, I use the episode to challenge similar tropes of friendship and obligation, accident and rapport in the American reflexive ethnographic tradition, especially in Morocco—one of the tradition's classic fieldwork sites. Focusing on my friendship with Mohammed (a Moroccan) and his efforts to negotiate my ambivalence, I argue that what remains underexplored in this ethnographic tradition and its thinking on friendship is the act of forgiving.
Journal Article
Land Use Negotiation in Eastern Morocco
In this article, I analyse a steppe region in contemporary Morocco, outlining the political environment in which land use is currently negotiated. I ask what place different actors such as the state, the tribe, or local individuals occupy in the relevant power structures. Relying on
recent fieldwork, I then discuss land appropriation by tribal households. Con flict-resolution mechanisms are presented in the third section. My contribution shows that access to land is often related to other types of resources (such as livestock, access to institutions and social prestige),
and points out that a detailed, actor-centred analysis is essential to understanding the making of politics in the Moroccan high plateaus.
Journal Article