Resumen de Morocco 1967-1968: Memories, Reflections and Nostalgia
Here are reflections on my Moroccan fieldwork in 1967-1968 with the Ḥamadsha, a popular Sufi brotherhood, or ṭarīqa. My focus is on memory ‒ images that evoke the surround of my research but never appeared in my ethnographic writings. They mark, as they create. what I have called the scene ‒ roughly, the subjectivation of an “objective” situation that colors our response to it. They reflect the not altogether post-colonial atmosphere in the years immediately followings Moroccoʼs independence and, equally important, prevailing anthropological assumptions. I relate the images to my understanding, then and now, of such theoretical issues as ‒ serendipity in fieldwork; suspense in reciprocal relations; the dynamics of gift exchange which includes the transfer of emotions as elements in the exchange itself; a socially active rhetoric that prioritizes the “freedom” of the potential over encumbering actualization in patron-client relations; the force of the supplicative oath (ʻār) in social relations; insight and the oscillation between idioms of understanding (e.g. the “spiritual” and the “real”) that each have their truth that is, paradoxically, at once the same and radically different. Implicitly, I argue for a skeptical empiricism ‒ a meta-empiricism ‒ that acknowledges the dangers arising from un-understanding and the arrogance of over-understanding.
