Encountering Morocco Fieldwork and Cultural Understanding [Paperback]

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 careersfrom 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.

There are two groups of readers who will particularly welcome this book:
rst, students of anthropology, who contemplate doing
eldwork in Morocco; second, scholars interested in reections on the production of anthropological knowledge in Morocco and beyond. The book is lucidly written and, as it dispenses with jargon, it is also accessible for a broad audience.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 anthropologists 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.[T]he book offers much food for thought, crossing disciplinary and professional boundaries. It also has the added value of de-exoticizing a country which is too often exoticized and romanticized by policy-makers, tourism operators and various other interest groups, both foreign and Moroccan.[T]he chapters of this eminently rel3Y