Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, with a New Preface by the Author

By Paul Rabinow

In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new preface Rabinow considers the thirty-year life of this remarkable book and his own distinguished career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Aug 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9780520933897

Paul Rabinow

Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles, with Talia Dan-Cohen (2004).

Book preview

Front Cover

ABOUT

QUANTUM BOOKS

QUANTUM. THE UNIT OF EMITTED ENERGY. A QUANTUM BOOK IS A SHORT STUDY DISTINCTIVE FOR THE AUTHOR’S ABILITY TO OFFER A RICHNESS OF DETAIL AND INSIGHT WITHIN ABOUT ONE HUNDRED PAGES OF PRINT. SHORT ENOUGH TO BE READ IN AN EVENING AND SIGNIFICANT ENOUGH TO BE A BOOK.

Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco

Paul Rabinow

Reflections on

Fieldwork in Morocco

THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

WITH A FOREWORD BY ROBERT N. BELLAH

AND AN AFTERWORD BY PIERRE BOURDIEU

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,—hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable, mon frère

BAUDELAIRE

University of California Press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 1977, 2007 by The Regents of the University of California

Paperback-ISBN: 9780520251779

e-ISBN: 9780520933897

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rabinow, Paul.

Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco / Paul Rabinow; with a foreword by Robert N. Bellah and an afterword by Pierre Bourdieu. — 30th anniversary ed. / with a new preface by the author.

p. cm.

Originally published in 1977.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-520-25177-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

e-ISBN: 978-0-520-93389-7

1. Ethnology—Morocco—Field work. I. Title.

This book is dedicated to my Moroccan companions, whose names have been changed here to protect their anonymity.

The following people have been particularly generous and helpful: Robert Bellah, Jean-Paul Dumont, Kevin Dwyer, Clifford Geertz, Eugene Gendlin, Sherry Ortner, Robert Paul, Gwen Wright. Most of all I wish to thank Paul Hyman, for his stunning and perceptive pictures, his acute and unique insights, and his friendship.

Contents

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

Foreword by Robert N. Bellah

Introduction

1   Remnants of a Dying Colonialism

2   Packaged Goods

3   Ali: An Insider’s Outsider

4   Entering

5   Respectable Information

6   Transgression

7   Self-Consciousness

8   Friendship

Conclusion

Afterword by Pierre Bourdieu

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Preface to the

Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

REFLECTIONS ON FIELDWORK IN PHILOSOPHY

Fieldwork has been, and remains, the defining mark of the discipline of anthropology.¹ Or, more accurately, doing fieldwork has been, and remains, the defining requirement for becoming an anthropologist in the twentieth-first century. Originally, the linkage between fieldwork, ethnography, and anthropology had been an important innovation, when knowledge production about the rest of the world was being produced by armchair theorists, social evolutionists, and travelers in search of the exotic, or those forced to rely on their accounts.² While this original coupling of being-there and a nascent body of conceptualization and theorizing was critical and salutary, gradually there developed a slippage between the conceptual advances of the discipline and the methods of research that were held to be the source of those advances. As the slippage deepened between the original motives for fieldwork and its increasingly taken-for-granted status, it became both a mandatory rite de passage and like such rites, not subject to public scrutiny. Sooner or later the question was going to be posed: If the discipline of anthropology depended on participant-observation or ethnographic fieldwork, then why was it that so little attention had ever been explicitly paid to the nature and experience of fieldwork? And what exactly was fieldwork supposed to contribute to a practice of critical thinking?

As a graduate student in the mid-1960s at the University of Chicago, these blind spots struck me as curious. This curiosity stemmed in part from the fact that as an undergraduate at Chicago in the early 1960s, I had reveled in the history of philosophy (Western, Indian, Chinese, Islamic) and in the comparative study of civilizations (every undergraduate was required to take a comparative civilization course co-taught by multiple specialists—in my case, Indian Civ, taught by Sanskritists, historians, anthropologists, literary critics, poets, comparative religion specialists, geographers, and likely others). Although it was mentioned from time to time in this curriculum, participant-observation, or ethnographic fieldwork, did not seem to have any absolutely privileged status in the production of knowledge about culture, society, and civilization. And the relevant scholarship on these topics did not seem to begin with the rise of the fieldwork method in the twentieth century. What, then, was the special role of fieldwork?

Furthermore, my philosophic mentor, Richard McKeon, while insisting on the most extreme conceptual rigor, taught philosophy from a pragmatic point of view: philosophy was embedded in practice and in the world.³ What else could thinking be? Although the topic of experience had been taken up by pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Pierce and John Dewey, it has also been central, albeit in quite a different style, to a French tradition of twentieth-century thought which had intrigued me since high school. Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Claude Lévi-Strauss provided agonistic reflections on experience, understood as consciousness, action, and politics.⁴ Debates had raged, after all, in high French circles about the universality of reason (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl), religious experience (Maurice Leenhardt), eroticism, exoticism, and subjectivity (Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris), and related topics.⁵

Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) remains the great masterpiece of what Susan Sontag called the anthropologist as hero setting out to witness the supposed world on the wane, the Rousseau-ist paradise where sensual and passionate natives lived in a throbbing and intricate cosmos, where there was no separation of nature and culture, individual and community, immediate experience and meaning.⁶ The world of the Other was an imaginary site—hence Rousseau—in which the alienation of modern man was unknown. Lévi-Strauss knew he was writing a vast philosophic fiction—which does not mean it was false—the central theme of which was ultimately his own condition and his own experience.⁷ The topics of enrichment through philosophic voyages versus the soul-deadening falsity of tourism and travel in search of exoticism, of the pathos of moderns seeking an adequate compensatory form through art, of the tragic and destructive blindness of hot, progress-driven civilizations, have never been more powerfully written. The book is a masterpiece of French literature, a turn within the great tradition of fictional realism stretching from Balzac through Flaubert and Zola into the twentieth century.

Given this background, what could a [philosophically] poor boy do (to quote Mick Jagger, then a student at the London School of Economics)? One thing was to go off to the Middle Atlas mountains of Morocco imbued with the mystique of fieldwork but with no training in how to do it or why it was so crucially important.⁸ And so I did. And as I struggled to figure out how to observe and to participate, the perplexity grew. Reflecting on that perplexity became a source of solace during the cold and lonely nights and the hot and lonely days. What was I doing? Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco was an attempt to answer that question, or perhaps more accurately, to pose it in a different fashion from what now seemed to me in Morocco to be Lévi-Strauss’s far too Romantic attempt at a Wagnerian anthropology, a total work of art. The Moroccans, it became clear immediately and abruptly, were not living in any paradise, nor were they mired in nostalgia. Other forms of analysis and other forms of writing were called for: more twentieth-century ones.

When Reflections was first written (1974), the reception was one of shock and annoyance. It was considered too personal; it was held to be inappropriate for a young anthropologist to reflect on his experiences, as that was the prerogative of elders (English-speaking ones at least) who had basically finished doing research; it embarrassed some readers who preferred accounts of encounters to remain verbal and after hours; it was not written in a scientific style; et cetera. In sum, I had not earned the right to write such a book, or at least to publish it. And the considered opinions of my elders were accepted by the six university presses who rejected it. My advisor, Clifford Geertz, told me in the sternest and curtest of tones (as close as he could get to conveying concern) that publishing the book would ruin my career. As that was a different era, in which young academics were not nearly so concerned with their careers, partly because employment opportunities were greater then and partly because we had other things on our minds, the rejections and the admonition fell on deaf ears. They only reinforced a sense that the field needed change: it needed to reflect on fieldwork, it needed to reflect on its historical context; it needed to reflect on its genre constraints; it needed to reflect on its existence and worth, given its relations with its colonial and imperial past; it needed to reflect on its future. Reflections was conceived as a modest attempt to put these topics on the proverbial table for discussion. It was also conceived as an attempt to make sense of a disjointed and troubling experience.

Eventually, the manuscript was rescued through the good offices of Robert Bellah at Berkeley, a sociologist and leader of the interpretive social sciences, with whom I had the privilege of participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar for College Teachers in 1975–76. Bellah generously intervened on my behalf with the University of California Press, explaining to the appropriate editor what in his view the book was about—fieldwork as an ethical experience and quest—and what it contributed to the human sciences (see his foreword). When the book was later translated into French, Pierre Bourdieu wrote a counter-preface (here an afterword) challenging Bellah and outlining how I should have written the book. His intervention was perhaps one of the unique moments in publishing history, when a preface was refuted by a counter-preface. The stakes of the exchange were significant: how to do what Bourdieu elegantly called fieldwork in philosophy. Bourdieu’s claim was that the traditional problems of philosophy could only be approached in the modern world through sociologically mediated understanding of how knowledge was produced. Otherwise, the naïve illusion that thinking was unsituated, removed from power relations and structured social relations of domination, would only continue to produce illusion and ideology. Bourdieu’s label for the experiential dimension of research was participant objectivation. Geertz, Lévi-Strauss, Bellah, and Bourdieu, each in his own distinct way, provided a trailblazing response to how traditional philosophic work should be combined with empirical inquiry. Although, broadly speaking, they agreed on the problem, they disagreed vehemently on the solution. The latter, of course, had to depend on the former if conceptual advance was to take place. Unfortunately, not much came out of their exchanges, as they turned into polemics rather than scientific advance.

The problem and the challenge were ones I shared. Thus, it can now be confessed that there was a concealed conceptual background framing Reflections. First, I was inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s argument in La Pensée sauvage that percepts and concepts had, for most of the history of the human species, been joined.⁹ The savage mind was not alienated, did not separate lived experience from incisive analytic work. But second, I also knew that this view was not as foreign to modernity as Lévi-Strauss believed. Within Western philosophy, the most stunning example of this combining of sensual experience and philosophic analysis into a temporally unfolding narrative was, for me at least, to be found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.¹⁰ There, the powerful dialectic of thought unfolding through contradiction and struggle could hardly be gainsaid, given its narrative force if not its ultimate veracity. In fact, Reflections takes the order of its chapters from that of Hegel’s Phenomenology, albeit without any end point of the dialectic. At the time of the book’s publication, to have said any of this explicitly would for me have been an admission of defeat, because the challenge I had set for myself was to find a form that would allow the conceptual work, especially its motion, to be embodied in a narrative of lived experience. To have been more explicit about its conceptual underpinnings would have dramatically altered the way that readers approached the modest tale of experience, insight, and limitation that the book recounts. If readers were shocked or annoyed by the sex scene, just imagine if they had been told it was really an attempt to retell Hegel’s chapter on sensory experience. Today, it all seems rather tame, although it is true that one reviewer did blame Morocco’s gender problems on me. This claim is so outlandish that it would require an anthropologist of the West to unravel it.

I continued to be concerned with philosophic issues as well as the limits of traditional philosophy as a method and as a way of life. Among the other great gifts of the Bellah seminar were encounters with William Sullivan, with whom I edited two volumes on interpretive social science, and most importantly of all, with Hubert Dreyfus, a very singular philosopher at Berkeley.¹¹ Dreyfus taught me about Heidegger, and through him, a great deal about a part of the tradition and present of European philosophy with which I had been insufficiently acquainted. It was during the course of intense discussions with Dreyfus, and due to the fact that I was appointed to a position in the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley in 1978, that I met Michel Foucault. Foucault was visiting Stanford in 1979, and Dreyfus and I engaged him in sustained and passionate debate and dialogue which, to our pleasure, Foucault seemed to relish. One thing led to the next: Dreyfus and I wrote a book about Foucault; Foucault began visiting Berkeley each year to teach; he helped compile a reader of his works; and then, the tragedy, he died of AIDS in 1984.¹²

The 1986 publication of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography was a watershed event in American anthropology.¹³ The book opened a hearty, if at times windy, debate about the nature of the taken-for-granted narrative forms of traditional ethnographic writing and about the (relatively) unexamined power relations internal to the discipline of anthropology, as well as those relations connecting and separating the anthropologist from the people he or she studies.¹⁴ Although I participated in Writing Culture, as well as in some of the antecedent and subsequent discussions, I always felt a little out of phase with the debates