Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco

The book begins with a picture of Rabinow’s life just before his departure for Morocco. He is bored and frustrated with American society, life at University of Chicago, and traditional academia. Although he is nervous about moving to an unknown country for so long, the assassination of Robert Kennedy is the final straw. He is ready to leave the United States and “become an anthropologist” (1).

On the way to Morocco, he has a long layover in Paris. It is 1968, the year of major political protests among French students. Rabinow arrives just as the uprising begins to settle. The crowds in Paris have thinned. He attempts to get involved with the movement, attending meetings in the Sorbonne courtyard, but he had clearly arrived too late. Rabinow describes wandering the empty streets past damaged buildings covered in political graffiti, feeling a sense of dread for the future. He is eager to get to Morocco and begin his fieldwork but is beginning to question what that means and how it fits within a global revolutionary atmosphere.

At the end of his introduction, Rabinow describes the book, explaining that it presents events and encounters as he remembers them, or as he recorded them in his field notes at the time. The main storyline is a shortened narrative account of his fieldwork experience, with some important figures left out entirely and others collapsed into one. He urges the reader to view the work as a whole and reminds them that his interpretations of situations may not be accurate.

Rabinow’s main objective with this book is to analyze the fieldwork experience, the central core of anthropology. In his words, “the [anthropology] world was divided into two categories of people: those who had done fieldwork, and those who had not” (3). Despite the importance of fieldwork, Rabinow notes, there has been little discussion of why fieldwork is actually important, and as soon as an anthropologist returns from their field location, they are to treat whatever information they collected as objective data—the work itself is not important. Rabinow believes in the importance of fieldwork but uses this book to show why he does not believe context can be removed from anthropological data.