Channeling Moroccanness. Becky L. Schulthies

but classified them differently (see Chapter 2) and divided political movements on moral grounds as often as policy distinctions (see Episode 2). In fact, I rarely heard notions of working or middle class used to reference themselves or others. This was not because they didn’t know these ideas—they knew the terms when I asked about them—but because they had a different conceptual frame for thinking about sociopolitical formations. The classification of collectivities most often divided along the lines of those who had more resources than they needed (لا باس عليهم [lā bās ‘alayhum, “the ones with no worries”]), normal folks (الناس العاديين [annās al‘adīīn]), and those who needed help (المساكين [lmsākīn, “the poor”]).³⁰ Their alignment within these collectivity frames was situationally evoked—what I’ve been calling a calibration of Moroccanness, everyday phatic processes of connecting and disconnecting central to relating in Fez.

      In linguistic anthropology, knowledge circulation about social issues (the core of public sphere discussions) has not been viewed as a simple matter of production, transmission, reception. Instead, analysts pay attention to how actors frame one “text,” message, bit of talk, kinds of persons, as related to another; a process of entextualization (Briggs and Bauman 1992; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Agha 2007). Circulation, as an explanatory concept for how knowledge and people move, relies on processes that involve framing two or more things as the same in some way (Hankins 2012, 204). As Gal noted, “in ‘circulation,’ texts, messages, utterances, ideas, and practices are not physically or spatially displaced, nor do the semiotically relevant aspects of people and things ‘travel.’ Rather, the effect of movement is a social achievement of interaction; it arises from a perceived repetition and hence a seeming linkage (across encounters) of forms that are framed, reflexively, as being the ‘same thing, again,’ or as yet another instantiation of a recognized type in some cultural framework” (Gal 2018, 2). Framings of similarity, transformation, or rupture are achievements, and it takes work to produce an ideological frame as much as a thing framed (Hankins 2012, 206). I provide a look at these calibrations throughout this book. I explore in Chapter 1 some of the sign systems in Fez (phonological, morpho-syntactical, lexical, discursive, semantic, pragmatic, gestural, orthographic, sartorial) that shaped specific linguistic genres (Chapter 2: news talk), registers (Chapter 3: هدرة الميزان [hadra lmīzan, “rhymed prose”]), sociohistorical named languages (Chapter 4: الداريجة [darīja, “Moroccan Arabic”]), and Moroccan Muslims (Chapter 5: نموذج المغربي الإسلامي [namūdhaj almaghribī alīslāmī, “the Moroccan model of Islam”]) during the last decade.

      Perhaps a metaphor may help us think about these calibrations of Moroccanness. One of the most widely known and consumed dishes of Moroccan cuisine has been the tagine. It was named after the cone-shaped clay pot in which the slow-cooked meat and vegetable stew was prepared, with long connectedness to North Africa (Newcomb 2017, 110; Mardam-Bey 2002, 199; Zaouali 2007, 47). Tagines are served regularly in Moroccan homes and are available at roadside cafes for truck drivers and travelers and on every restaurant menu offering Moroccan fare: chicken with olives and preserved lemon rinds; chunks of lamb shank bedded in layers of caramelized onions, topped with honeyed prunes and toasted seasame seeds; nuggets of fall-off-the-bone beef nestled amid an oregano-enhanced sauce of zucchini and okra. Though easily recognizable as part of a Moroccanness framing, the number and variety of tagines have also been central to marking subtle regional and social distinctions, all calibrated as Moroccan tagines: an everyday tagine might include a quarter of a chicken, melted onions, and loads of sliced carrots or the “classic” lamb with potatoes, carrots, and tomatoes served as a staple throughout the Amazigh regions of the Atlas mountains. In Marrakesh Moroccans would seek out the famous tangia, a primarily meat tagine with spices and aged butter (smen); the southwest Sous was well-known for goat tagines with dried fruits such as apricots or plums; in the north a request for tagine would involve fish, sometimes stacked on slow-cooked potatoes, carrots, and tomatoes; the region of Oujda in the east produced pears and thus was known for its tagine with meat and honeyed pears; and Fez was often linked to the chicken with preserved lemon tagine. An increasingly health-conscious segment of the population might avoid meat in tagines or cook it without salt or garlic. All these variations were prepared throughout Morocco, and despite the different ingredients, spices, and practices of making them, all were recognized as tagines. I suggest that Moroccanness was much like tagines: the laments, ideologies, and practices I explore in this book were varied and debated but were calibrated as significant in the making of Moroccan relationality. Regardless of the locale served, tagines take time to cook, often a couple of hours on very low heat—just as the kinds of equivalences and incommensurabilities I describe involved time to develop as recognizable patterns. And just as decades of preparing tagines can lead a cook to make tagines by muscle memory, so too have some of these Moroccanness calibrations operated without explicit rationales. They have become part of the lived experience of phatic connection.

      This is not an ethnography of the connection ideologies of Moroccan oppositional groups, like those aligned with visibly organized protest and reform groups such as the February 20 movement (emerging from the 2011 Arab Spring protests), hirak (the 2016 economic development mass protest movement in the Northern Rif region), or al-Adl wal-Ihsane (the Justice and Benevolence Muslim opposition group started in the 1970s)—even though these are the kind of Moroccans who garnered the lion’s share of investigative interest in news reports. However, it is still an account of language ideologies and practices shaping relations of citizens intensely critical of state institutions and deeply concerned about Moroccanness and morality. The majority of the Fassis I worked among did not view themselves as a counterpublic, a community (imagined and enacted) as against the state. This was because my interlocutors viewed the state as a variegated entity, including the coterie of the king, his family, and advisors; a contentious multiparty parliament; a cabinet of ministers drawn from the political parties with the largest parliamentary blocks and their coalitions with smaller parties; state media run by non-appointed directors with their own political agendas and media ideologies; entrenched shadow state power movers (الدولة العميقة [addūla al‘amīqa]) with their own economic interests tied to foreign governments and corporations; self-interested local politicians and bureaucrats whose work was to find a way to benefit from their positions; and corrupt police and military personnel who did not enforce the law so much as selectively apply it for their gain. In other words, the state meant different things at different moments, and so their laments of state communicative failures did not always emerge as a sustained movement against the state.

      Fassis I worked with were critical of aspects of government, media, education, and language, yet fiercely nationalistic and often defended the king and their country as much as they criticized him and the state. These Fassis, who did not self-identify as part of any given class formation or political movement, seemed to paradoxically hold deep distrust of the state, consistently call for reform, and yet offered widespread support for the king’s constitutional referendum in 2011; they constantly critiqued the relationality failures of state media, and yet it continued as a regular presence in their everyday domestic lives. On one hand, we might view them as unreflexive subjects, failures of “modern development” projects in their unflinching support of an outdated political project (Tambar 2012); yet on the other hand they relentlessly critiqued the failures of state projects no matter the political orientation of those in power. I don’t offer an objective notion of critique in this book, but rather explore shifting mobilizations of what it meant to engage in laments about the failures to connect appropriately. I hope these chapters will aid us in reimagining critique as a generative tool of both liberal and nonliberal self-identifying Moroccan Muslim collectivities (Asad 2009). My interlocuters challenged assumptions about the role of schooled literacy, presupposed