Encountering Morocco: Fieldwork and Cultural Understanding (Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253009111 ISBN 13: 9780253009111

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

David Crawford is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Fairfield University, and author of Moroccan Households in the World Economy: Labor and Inequality in a Berber Village.

Rachel Newcomb is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rollins College and author of Women of Fes: Ambiguities of Life in Urban Morocco.

Review

"Mixes personal memoir with sensitive observations about Morocco; searching questions about the nature of the fieldwork experience; and sometimes surprising revelations about aspects of Morocco that have received little attention. From activism to autism, and from fraught conversation to religious conversion, the range of approaches to the American anthropologist's encounter with Morocco and Moroccans is impressive. Indeed Morocco itself, and its anthropologist interlocutors, are seen in this collection as through a prism: refracted and brilliant."

(Brian T. Edwards, author of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express)

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0253009111
• ISBN 13: 9780253009111
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 284
• Editor: Crawford David, Newcomb Rachel