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 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Respectable Information”
Rabinow introduces the informant who will help him produce the most “real anthropology.” Abd al-Malik ben Lahcen is an educated, well-respected Sidi Lahcen descendent is his early thirties and the “brains” of a household that includes his mother and two brothers. His father died several years prior. Malik, as he is known, is described as a somewhat sickly and unhappy man, plagued with frequent nosebleeds and mourning the losses of his father and several children. He avoided manual labor throughout his life by studying at the local Koranic school and mosque before moving to a Berber village to become a fqi, or religious teacher. He romanticized the job greatly but eventually left it due to low pay, boredom, and the early hours required to call morning prayer.
Rabinow first meets Malik in Sefrou while negotiations are being made about whether or not to allow him access to the village. Although Rabinow suspects Malik was originally against him coming, as soon as the decision is made he offers his services as an informant. Unlike some other informants, Malik retains an awkwardness around Rabinow, which Rabinow suspects stems from Malik’s devotion and his own status as a non-Muslim, although they never discuss this. Malik tackles the job of providing Rabinow with contextual facts very seriously, presenting the researcher with a contract for a once-a-week meeting during which they will outline paternal lineages back to saint Sidi Lahcen, discuss land ownership rules, and compile all of the other data that Rabinow will eventually use to write his ethnography. They rank the tasks by level of linguistic simplicity and begin with the genealogy, a repetitive list of names and relationships. This process helps Rabinow learn more Arabic and involves the type of straightforward information that allows Malik to avoid difficult topics.
As a respected and influential Sidi Lahcen Lyussi citizen, Malik helps integrate Rabinow into village society. One of their first interactions outside the weekly meetings is a plan to deal with a problem that is distracting them from their work, Rabinow’s car. Rabinow reports that he “hated” cars prior to moving to Morocco but bought one in Sefrou to explore the larger area and in case of an emergency. He rarely uses it in Sidi Lahcen Lyussi but has Malik announce to the village that the car is available for a weekly trip into Sefrou to run errands and for emergencies. They are immediately bombarded with requests for rides, everyone claiming to have immediate need to get to Sefrou. Although Rabinow denies the most outlandish requests and initially sees this situation as another failure to work within Moroccan cultural norms, he later transports a woman to the hospital in an actual emergency. Although she later dies, his efforts build his level of trust with the community.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Transgression”
During his last few months in Sidi Lahcen Lyussi, Rabinow becomes frustrated with certain aspects of his ethnographic research. His work with Malik has given him a good framework of village history and societal structure. His Arabic has improved significantly, and he has established relationships with people occupying various roles in the village. Still, there are certain topics that remain taboo no matter whom he is talking to. His attempts to find new informants make his current informants uncomfortable, and he is closing is in on his return to Chicago.
During this time, Ali comes to the village to recover from an illness, and Rabinow confides his struggles to him. He is particularly hoping that someone will give him details of the local reaction to the 1953 exile of Sultan Muhammed V, the ultimate catalyst for Morocco’s overthrow of the French Protectorate. Ali offers to explain everything in exchange for a ride to Sefrou to see Mimouna. The story he tells shifts Rabinow’s perspective entirely, giving him context that allows him to more deeply understand the research he has done.
Sultan Muhammed V was originally backed by the French Protectorate but embraced the nationalist movement and gave speeches aligning Morocco with other Arab nations. These actions caused France to dethrone him, replacing him with a hand-picked French supporting sultan. The Protectorate rallied powerful Berber qaids to gather rural support for this new sultan and uphold the power of French forces across Morocco. Sidi Lahcen Lyussi was officially allied with one of these qaids, and there was intense pressure on the village to back the qaid in support of the new sultan. The saint’s descendants, as the traditional rulers of the village, felt especially pressured to follow the qaid. They started giving weekly prayers in the name of the new sultan, a move that announced their support for him and therefore legitimized France’s power over Morocco. At the same time, anti-French sentiment was expanding, and the Middle Atlas was a base for an anti-colonial militia and a number of revolutionary groups. These groups pressured locals to support the fight for independence, and a number of Sidi Lahcen Lyussi residents joined the cause or openly backed the old sultan.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
These chapters cover the meat of Rabinow’s data collection process, the “real” anthropology that he has looked forward to up until this point. He identifies his best Sidi Lahcen Lyussi informant, Malik. Malik is a good informant, particularly for tedious factual work. He is a descendent of Sidi Lahcen, so he is considered an important person in the village. He is also intelligent and quite pious, having studied the Koran extensively and taught as a fqi. Malik’s thoughtfulness reassures Rabinow that the information he has provided is accurate, or at least as accurate as possible under the circumstances. At the same time, his heritage and religiousness ensure that his involvement in the anthropological project will not jeopardize Rabinow’s relationships with other members of the village, especially the influential saint’s descendants.
The structure of the saint’s lineages at the time of Rabinow’s work is such that families identify with one of four groups, who live in different sections of the village and often squabble over control of village politics. This division also applies to working with the anthropologist, so Rabinow is almost immediately limited in whom he can and cannot work with. If a new informant approaches him, even if they mutually agree to work together, often other people will intervene to keep Rabinow focused on their own friend groups. Malik finds people to answer almost all of Rabinow’s questions, but it is clear that some things are being intentionally kept in the dark.
This situation gives Rabinow a choice: either respect his informants’ wishes to avoid certain subjects and return to Chicago without a full picture of Sidi Lahcen Lyussi, or push past their boundaries and find a way to the information he seeks. He chooses the latter when he asks Ali about the Sultan’s exile. Rabinow presents the interaction as almost happenstance, but his reference to “blackmail” suggests that he knew Ali would tell him the story. The context of the recent political circumstances allows Rabinow to understand his ethnography more fully, and the circumstances of getting the information further his claim that fieldwork is impossible without closely considering context. Even then, it is never complete. In this instance, Rabinow identifies one major stumbling block to understanding and is able to get past it. There could be many other blocks that would be impossible to cross and some that may not even be visible.
The sultan’s exile and his replacement by a French supporting sultan caused an immense rift in Sidi Lahcen Lyussi society, residents were essentially forced to choose a sultan to support. Ali shares a complex story of broken friendships, family rifts, and shifted alliances among local residents as a result of their support for one side or the other. As soon as his other informants hear that Ali has broken the ice, they offer him their sides of the story. Although discussing this time period is still taboo among villagers, they do not want Ali’s version to be the anthropologist’s only official account. Rabinow is able to piece together how Sidi Lahcen Lyussi is still in the aftermath of this period and gain a fuller understanding of the data he has gathered. He writes that if he had respected the informants’ initial resistance, he would not have been able paint an accurate picture in his ethnographic writing. He defines his use of Ali to gain information from the other villagers as “blackmail” and “an act of violence” (129), yet he argues that it is essential for understanding Sidi Lahcen Lyussi history beyond the official narrative. Without an informant like Ali, he would be blocked from gaining context that is necessary for understanding his research. He concludes that it is impossible to ensure than the anthropological fieldworker has a full picture of their study subjects and that attaining the fullest picture possible means finding ways to broach taboo subjects, even if doing so means setting aside the unstated anthropological rule that informants are always right.
