Channeling Moroccanness. Becky L. Schulthies

worked had ideas about what social relations should be, based on a nostalgic view of what had been lost, but also what ought to be and had yet to be realized. You may think the opening episode was just language play and improvisation, a moment when a Fassi family marked similarities of troublesome practices to pass the time. After a decade of doing fieldwork in Morocco, I look back at this interaction as part of a larger pattern, one in which laments about loss of, or longing for, more effective communicative channels actually generated multiple projects of making Moroccanness, a sense of how they should relate as Moroccans. They also evoked ideologies about how communicative channels should work. These channels, or mediums, that they expected to connect people could range from objects such as devotional beads and remote controls to interactional forms such as languages and dress styles, media platforms like television news or WhatsApp group chats, and institutions such as public or Qur’anic schools. Although they viewed the mediums as forms of connection, they did not see them as unencumbered channels. They focused on the problematic aspects of the ways television or prayerbeads operated as channels in order to reform relationality. I argue that communicative laments about the failure of mediums to connect people properly have become key to Moroccanness.

      In this introduction, I introduce why Fassis linked language mediums and mass media channels to social relationality, national identity, interactional work, and political projects. To do so, I explain how Fassis understood ideas such as Moroccanness, media, language, sociality, and politics and how that differs or overlaps with the ways scholars of language and media have been writing about these concepts. In the process I briefly introduce the Fassi perspectives of communicative channel failures I examine in the chapters of this book: both their ideas about the already realized breakdown of Fassi sociality and the anxiety-producing specter of future consequences. These perceptions of failure seem to have motivated multiple uncoordinated practices of communicative renewal, reform, and rejection. Chapter 1 introduces the Fassi linguistic soundscape, giving a sense of the context in which laments about communicative failure arose. Chapter 2 explores competing Fassi perspectives on what it meant to engage in public life through “literate listening” to news in Morocco and introduces the practice of distributed literacy. The language of news and literacy in Morocco is standard Arabic (fuṣḥā), which is different from everyday forms of Arabic. Despite modernist claims that literacy is reading and writing that leads to a secularized reasoning through individually acquired set of skills, some Fassis critiqued this visual path to reasoning and pooled the oral literacy skills of multiple family members in making sense of broadcast news. In Chapter 3 I continue to analyze how Fassis understood moral literacy through an oral storytelling register of rhymed prose revamped for civic education via television. Instead of relying on fuṣḥā, standard Arabic, to convey moral civic values such as gender equity, Moroccan television producers valorized a darīja (Moroccan Arabic) way of speaking, storytelling rhymed prose, to educate viewers. I demonstrate a channel and relationality ideology that shaped why viewers embraced the rhymed prose medium, but not the gender equity message. Chapter 4 examines the moral loading of connecting through written darīja (Moroccan Arabic) speech in media platforms such as billboards, books, social media, and newsprint. Until 2011, standard Arabic was the official language of Morocco according to the constitution and ideologically the variety to be used in written genres.⁵ In practice, Fassis wrote Arabic using a variety of linguistic forms and heard the relationality effects and politics of darīja writing differently depending on the media platform/channel in which they encountered it. In Chapter 5 I bring morality, literate listening, and sonic reading together to explore Fassi responses to the relationality of “Moroccan Islam,” a state-sponsored effort to reshape religious discourse and practices via language and media channels in the wake of “extremism.” Each of these chapters show that Fassis had different ideologies about how to relate, the role of channels in connecting Moroccans, and what practices they understood as the right kind of Moroccanness relationality.

      I use the term “Moroccanness” instead of Moroccan identity to highlight the interactional process of negotiating and debating what it meant for Fassis to connect as Moroccans. Why do I analyze Moroccanness, a sense of appropriate relationality, instead of individual identity work? Because the Fassis among whom I lived viewed Moroccanness as the contested labor of defining what kinds of social connection mattered. Rather than foregrounding their individual subjectivity, sense of self, or socialization into structures of feeling, I explore the ways communicative laments focused on their concerns about how failures were affecting their relationality—how they should relate as Moroccans. Fassis have long encountered other kinds of social connection through pilgrimage, migration, trade, colonialism, and tourism and have debated what kinds of connectedness to adopt or reject to be Moroccan (see Messier and Miller 2015 for a description of thirteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta; Zhiri 2001 and Davis 2006 on the sixteenth-century writer al-Hasan al-Wazzan; Burke 2014 on nineteenth-century French colonial ethnographic writing; Bazzaz 2010 on early twentieth-century religiopolitical conflicts emerging from Fez; and Newcomb 2009 on Fassi women). Scholars have argued that social movements seeking to define Moroccanness, or renewal campaigns, have been central to the history of Morocco (Pennell 2013). There was nothing new in this concern, even if Fassis evoked a “tradition vs. modern” dichotomy to situate it. What I explore in this book is the focus, in the last decade, on appropriate use of communicative channels to influence Moroccan relationality in media, education, and religion contexts (see also Schulthies 2014a).

      Perhaps this has emerged because Morocco’s past two kings have repeatedly emphasized Morocco’s social relatedness to multiple worlds: Morocco is a tree with African roots, its trunk in the Arab-Muslim world and its branches in Europe. This framing of Moroccanness as tied to African peoples, the Muslim ummah (community), Arabness (see Schulthies 2015), and European influences was often evoked in my fieldwork, but often as a point of debate rather than a consensus (see Episode 2 of this chapter). Fassis I encountered were also anxious about the failures of appropriate social connectedness and violence tied to North African migration to Europe, Syria, and the Arab Gulf. They keenly lamented the troubling transnational outcomes of communicative channel failure, even if they didn’t agree about them: terrorism, hooliganism, immorality, extremism, intolerance, endemic corruption, apathy, depression. And those laments generated political projects of Moroccanness, not just how to be a certain kind of person, but how to relate to each other within a nation-state sociality as lived in the specific urban context of Fez.

      My training is in linguistic anthropology, which assumes that communication is always about something other than referring to things as they are in the world. Communication, like language, is multifunctional, doing many things at the same time: transferring information, creating a social relation, calling attention to itself, marking identities. Hence when I use the term “connection,” I don’t mean neat and tidy information transfer in an equal exchange sense. Instead, I explore kinds of contested socialization and intersubjectivity linked to a widespread ideology of nationwide communicative failure. Moroccanness, as I am using it, is not subjectivity as in the senses of self (perception, affect, thought, desire, fear) animating action (Ortner 2005, 31), but rather the ideologies and practices of social relatedness emerging from anxieties about the failure of communicative channels. In other words, I’m interested in how they practiced relatedness via communicative channels, or thought it should be practiced, not just what identity work was being done.

      Communication, as understood by my Fassi friends, was not just social connection facilitated by linguistic and media technologies. The Fassis among whom I worked viewed communicative media and language as central elements of social relations on multiple scales: familial, interpersonal, intraurban, national, coreligionist, and transnational. Communication was tied to moral ways of knowing and being through social interaction (see Chapters 2, 3, and 5).