Channeling Moroccanness. Becky L. Schulthies
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The institute catered to both non-native students of Arabic and Arab students of English and boasted a large shaded garden with green metal tables and benches for studying outdoors in the waxing summer heat. Moroccan high school and university English students would spend hours “studying” in the garden, in the hopes of a chance meeting with foreigners trying to learn Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Foreigners eagerly struck up friendships with Moroccans who they imagined would offer intimate views into Moroccan lives. I’m certain the administration saw this as a great opportunity for Moroccans and Americans, Germans, and British students to practice their speaking skills. More was anticipated by students, who sought deeper relationships as a means for privileged access into the world of the other, with language as vehicle and rite of passage.
I was forcefully reminded of this about two months into my stay. At the time I was studying Fassi darīja and trying desperately to connect the years of Modern Standard Arabic instruction in the U.S. with the embodied language styles of Moroccan youth. I forged friendships with several young Moroccan women in their third year of English at the public university, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah. They helped me with darīja, and I explained more arcane nuances of Shakespeare and American poetry. I was trying to locate and define my dissertation research interests and was thus open to everything. I asked and received permission to record the girls’ conversations as a means to enhance my language acquisition through repeated playback. I placed my bulky DAT player on the metal table, adjusted the microphone, and began recording. The microphone picked up the clank of books on the table, the scrape of clothes as bodies moved to make space for newcomers, the wind in the trees, and the ebb and flow of conversation that included hushed social commentary and greeting routines to passersby. At one point another university student came up and addressed herself to the group. I had met her previously, and the young women at the table had informed me that she was a married student in the English program. As I listened to the tape later in repeated playback, I was struck by how telling it was of our positionality. She greeted the group with a standard Fassi greeting, السلام عليكم (ssalāmu ‛alaykum [peace be upon you]), then asked me in English, “How are you, Becky?” I responded in darīja, بخير، لا باس (bikhīr, lā bās, “Fine, how are you?”) At this point she noticed the recorder and microphone on the table and asked in English if I was doing interviews, to which I responded, in darīja, that I was just recording. She seemed confused momentarily, commenting again that it seemed I was doing interviews. When I clarified in English that I was just recording conversations, she finished my sentence by saying, “In order to write another Tuhami.” I laughed nervously and said in Arabic, لا لا لا (lā lā lā, “no, no, no”), and again tried to explain my use of the recording was personal, for learning the dialect.
My personal initiation into anthropology as a suspect discipline was highlighted that summer. When students asked me about my interest in Morocco and Arabic, I tossed off a well-rehearsed mantra about being an anthropologist interested in language and culture. Interestingly enough (and contrary to many university students in the U.S.), anthropology is known to Moroccan university students through their exposure to French colonial history in North Africa and the role of ethnology in the civilizing mission (Malika Khandagui personal communication, September 2004). English students were acquainted with ethnography as a writing genre, since they were required to read sections of Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980) in their Cultural Studies course. Invariably, when students would find out I was an anthropologist, they would tell me how much they disliked and distrusted the one example of American ethnography about their society they had encountered. Some felt it was terrible to write a book about someone clearly marginal within society and pass it off as representative, explicitly citing the subtitle, Portrait of a Moroccan, as misleading. Others resented the idea that an outsider appropriated the experience and voice of a Moroccan in order to advance his own theories, misunderstandings, and projections about the Moroccan Other. In either criticism, the students rejected an anthropological representation and inherently problematized my own project by choosing to alert me of my sketchy associations. Shaykh Abdessalam Yasin, deceased leader of one of the most influential Islamic movements in Moroccan universities and a self-taught reader of English, remarked to another anthropologist after reading Tuhami, “How could anyone publish such a book?” (Munson 1993, 191).
Even though Crapanzano’s experimental book Tuhami was designed to challenge ideas about objective knowledge in ethnography, Moroccan students disagreed with representing Moroccanness in this way.29 That afternoon, as I sat trying to straddle my own positionality as a student of Fassi lives and language, an ethnographer trying to insist on my intersubjective commitments, I was reminded of how easily my actions were linked to misrepresentation based on methodological channels. The recording microphone indexed my unproven credibility and held me accountable for representations of Arabic, Morocco, Fez, and Islam in a mediatized decolonizing world. Unlike other anthropological accounts of entering the field that led literarily to enlightenment (Geertz 1973; Abu-Lughod 1997), my fieldwork experience was a steady stream of subtle and explicit challenges to my authority as a (seemingly independently wealthy) researcher and to my position as an Arabic-speaking American. These challenges were not simply of sentiments against American international actions, but part of larger processes of critique and credibility present in Morocco arising in part because of distrust of political, educational, and economic systems generally (see Chapters 2 and 3).
Thus, I offer this ethnography as a series of discursive snapshots I observed and contributed to make, in which my training and positionality contributed to a slightly different vantage on language and media in Fez Morocco. I recommend throughout this book other ethnographies, analyses, memoirs that will give a sense of other encounters (researchers, tourists, migrants, pilgrims, traders, explorers, politicians, neighbors, laborers) that shaped Moroccanness projects. This book is mine and yet not mine. The Fassi communities I affiliated with shaped (and continue to shape) my interpretations.
Media, Politics, and Publics
Numerous studies of Arab media have analyzed communicative technologies such as newspapers, cassette tapes, television channels, blogs, and Facebook to understand Arab publics, social and political subjectivities, and Muslim movements in the Arabic-speaking world (Abu-Lughod 2005; Armbrust 1996; Bishara 2013; Crawford and Hoffman 2000; Dwyer 2004; Eickelman and Anderson 2003; Hafez 2008; Hirschkind 2006; Khalil and Kraidy 2009; Kraidy 2009; Kraidy 2016; Lerner 1958; Lynch 2006; Miles 2006; Rugh 2004; Salamandra 2008; Spadola 2014). Language scholars have viewed mass media as a tool for exploring language change and perceptions about language and social classification (Al-Batal 2002; Bassiouney 2010; Caubet 2017; Hachimi 2013, 2017; Hoffman 2006; W. F. Miller 2007; C. Miller 2012, 2017). I build on these studies, describing the ways language and multimodal media ideologies influence how reception happens: the social productivity and politics of communicative failure as renewal of sociality ties, as well as the bringing to bear of linguistic anthropology theory on the analysis of media. In addition, I engage current scholarly interest in semiotic multimodality to bring together soundscape literature (Hirschkind 2006) with linguistic landscape scholarship (Blommaert 2013). Writing, reading, and listening are separated analytically in much scholarship, despite the embodied sensorium experience of everyday mediation. To this end, I explore the listening ideologies shaping television news reception in a context where formal reading literacy is assumed for understanding; the moral properties and civic effects of revitalizing an oral storytelling register for public service television; the sonic qualities and ideologies informing public writing of Moroccan Arabic “dialect” on billboards, social media, and newsprint. Last, I bring these channel and multimodality perspectives to bear on “Moroccan Islam,” a state-sponsored effort to moderate religious communicative failures, model appropriate connectedness, and export that connectedness to Europe and West Africa.
Most of the Fassis among whom I worked did not engage the idea of a public sphere as understood in the scholarly literature: arenas where people of a given collectivity identify, discuss, and politically mobilize in relation to social issues. That does not