44 pages • 1 hour read
Paul RabinowReflections on Fieldwork in Morocco
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Self-Consciousness”
In Chapter 7, Rabinow describes a ceremony at the shrine of Sidi Lahcen. The shrine is the site of two yearly museums, religious harvest festivals attended by local Berber tribes. These tribes and other groups also visit the shrine throughout the year, offering sacrifices in return for blessings. Rabinow looks forward to attending these events; he sees them as a view into how Islam is actually practiced by rural Moroccans.
Most Moroccans are happy to share what he calls “standard Islam” with the anthropologist. He has fruitful conversations and observations surrounding major Muslim holidays, such as how and why specific people celebrate Ramadan. Men are happy to discuss the Koran, eagerly debating its meaning regardless of their familiarity with its actual text. Even some of the mainstream mystical versions of Islam, like the Aissawa, are relatively easy for Rabinow to access. The topic of Sidi Lahcen is regularly avoided, though. At first he thinks the topic is another mysterious taboo, but he eventually realizes that most Sidi Lahcen Lyussi residents are simply embarrassed that they don’t know much about the legends or actual life of their founder and most important historical figure.
The anthropologist also notes a distinct indifference toward the activities at the shrine. He is surprised, having thought that Sidi Lahcen Lyussi’s proudest cultural events would be elaborately planned in a town where residents have little to do outside of olive harvest season. One of the first ceremonies he observes at the shrine is the annual visit of the Beni Yargha tribe, a group of Berbers who reside nearby.
The Berber leaders offer a small cow for sacrifice, apologizing that it isn’t bigger. The crowd watches in horror as the sacrifice is botched, leaving the cow writhing in pain and spreading blood across the town square for several minutes. The cow’s meat is divvied up among the important families, a task usually done in celebration but that, after the disturbing slaughter, this time happens in silence.
After the ceremony Rabinow is invited to Malik’s house for dinner with a group of saint-descended Arabic teachers, some of the best-educated and most powerful members of the community. They discuss the decline of the cult of Sidi Lahcen, calling the current descendants, including themselves, “withered grapes on the great vine of Sidi Lahcen” (141). To them, it doesn’t matter that the specifics of the saint’s life have been forgotten; they know he had a great baraka, a divine power that would pass down to his descendants. That embarrassing sacrifice has clearly shown that the baraka is gone. Even the genealogy is likely a fiction; the descendant’s ancestors are only partially recorded before the turn of the 20th century.
The teachers are clearly worried about the future of Sidi Lahcen Lyussi. Immediately after liberation, several nearby villages flourished, having been chosen as the sites for new Moroccan infrastructure. Meanwhile, Sidi Lahcen Lyussi was still in societal upheaval after the events of the sultan’s exile and missed out on the boom. By the time of Rabinow’s field work, there is very little hope for the village to prosper economically, and its longstanding tradition as a spiritual center is dying. Rabinow writes that men seem weary as they talk about the saint; their relationship to Sidi Lahcen is what defines them as people. The decline of his shrine and his baraka are the decline of their culture and their identities as individuals within that culture.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Friendship”
In the last chapter, Rabinow introduces Driss ben Muhammed. Ben Muhammed resisted working as an informant from the beginning of Rabinow’s stay in Sidi Lahcen Lyussi, but the pair gradually form what Rabinow reports is his closest true friendship in Morocco. Near the end of Rabinow’s fieldwork, ben Muhammed returns to Sidi Lahcen Lyussi from school in Fez, and the two spend hours walking in the fields discussing the work that Rabinow has done.
Ben Muhammed is described as an intellectual, and on this front Rabinow relates to him. In contrast to Rabinow, he is a traditional Moroccan academic, thoroughly ensconced in Islamic tradition; he “looked to Fez rather than Paris for his inspiration” (143). Ben Muhammed believes that Islam is poorly understood by almost all of its followers and that many of the key tenants of the Prophet Muhammed’s writing, like generosity and modesty, have been obscured or skewed by vanity, jealousy, and other negative motivations. He explains that Allah sees all believers as equal. He sees many Sidi Lahcen descendants as vain; they believe in their cultural superiority because of genetic ties to an important saint but do not care about preserving that saint’s legacy in their lives. Rabinow finds ben Muhammed easy to talk to, and he brings up several questions that he has resisted asking anyone else. First, they discuss whether Islam actually does promote the superiority of Muslims over non-Muslims. Ben Muhammed says yes. No matter how a Moroccan relates to their religion, being Muslim is part of their core identity. Even a very self-reflective Moroccan like ben Muhammed believes in the inherent Otherness of non-Muslims, but he is one of the few Moroccans who is able to bridge this divide lucidly.
Ben Muhammed and Rabinow also address the topic of race in Morocco, particularly anti-Black sentiment. Rabinow writes that throughout his stay in Morocco, a disdain for Blackness and sense of superiority of whiteness is obvious; Malik brags about the whiteness of his newborn daughter, and jokes about inferior Black people are common. However, ben Muhammed insists that racism in Morocco is not the same as racism in Western countries. Even if Blackness, or non-Muslimness, is inherently inferior, the Koran states that all people should be considered equal; Allah is the only superior being.
His conversations with ben Muhammed make Rabinow realize he is ready to leave Morocco. He has discovered many things about the culture of Sidi Lahcen Lyussi and will be able to produce a meaningful ethnography, but there are some divides that can never be bridged, especially in the brief time that an anthropologist occupies their study community. He returns to Chicago in 1969, finding that a cultural transformation has occurred there as well, with all his friends passionately involved in politics, although he questions whether they have a strong vision of what they want. He ends the book with a look forward to his next trip to another former French colony and political hot zone, Vietnam. He has just started to get to know his first contact there, and the process begins again.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
By the time he departs Morocco, Rabinow has a complete data set to compile an ethnography that will later make up his PhD thesis. He has also begun to identify some of the inherent issues that make pinpointing the goals of anthropological fieldwork difficult. Since anthropology is the study of human culture, it is inherently the act of one culture viewing another. In the early days of the discipline, the viewed cultures were always “primitive” to the eyes of the viewer, and the inhabitants of that culture were viewed more like animals than fellow humans, beings that lived by an innate cultural instinct rather than the wealth of freewill available to individuals from “developed” cultures. This view is, of course, not true, a fact that was widely accepted by the time of Rabinow’s work. He takes this a step further, though, and partly blames anthropology’s difficulty on the decline of specific, unified cultures in the Western world, or at least in himself and his cohorts. This lack of a specific “my culture” to compare to the Other “your culture” makes objectivity seem simpler but in fact complicates it.
Near the end of Rabinow’s work with Malik, the men move on from the most straightforward information to topics that are more difficult to define and translate. One of the most revealing things they discuss is family economics throughout the village. In Morocco, being poor does not mean the same things as it does in the United States. Most of the villagers live in poverty, but they do not feel a need to tally up who has what and assign relative poverty to a scale. In Malik’s self-conception, he is poor, even though he owns land and animals. When the men systematically calculate Malik’s economic situation as compared to the rest of the village, they find that he is relatively well-off. This realization causes Malik to question his sense of identity, a trend that Rabinow sees in many of his Moroccan informants.
In Chapters 7 and 8, Rabinow describes scenes that suggest that the death of traditional culture is not just a Western issue. The cult of Sidi Lahcen is going strong according to genealogy, but the cow sacrifice and the conversation with the Arabic teachers show that the true meaning of this cult is almost forgotten. Sidi Lahcen Lyussi residents who are descended from the saint still center their entire identity on that fact, but that identity does not always align with living lives that the saint would approve of. Nor do they feel much reason to uphold traditions while watching their town crumble into ruins; missing the rebuilding period after the end of colonialism has left the town with little reason to celebrate the past—they do not see a future in which this past will matter.
By the time Rabinow gets back to Chicago, it is 1969. The city has gone through a cultural transformation, and all of his friends are now rabidly engaged with politics. Rabinow describes his return somewhat like his layover in Paris while enroute to Morocco. The revolutionary atmosphere is appealing to him, but he does not see it as something that truly matters enough to enough people. Western academia may no longer have a culture, but they do not have a clear vision for a radical new culture either.
