Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco

When Rabinow first arrives in Morocco, he stays in Sefrou, the site of his graduate advisor Clifford Geertz’s work. Sefrou lies in a fertile valley called the Sais Plain, between the Middle Atlas Mountains and Fez, the cultural capital of Morocco. The Sais has been agriculturally important for millennia, and its physical resemblance to European farmland made it particularly attractive to colonial interests. Rabinow describes the landscape along the highway from Fez to Sefrou: fenced, precisely planned, expensively irrigated fields next to huge farmhouses built by former colonists, now owned by the Moroccan government or wealthy people from Fez. These European-style estates lie side by side with the settlements of field laborers who work for them, small compounds of mud and brick dwellings ringed by cactus fences.

Rabinow begins his stay in Sefrou in a room at the Hotel de l’Oliveraie, a “decaying edifice” just outside the medina. The hotel has a robust past as the main residence for European visitors to Sefrou but was slowly abandoned in favor of newer hotels in the Ville Nouvelle. During Rabinow’s stay, the hotel is obviously in serious financial trouble. Rooms are rarely full, and the lobby bar is only frequented by a few local cab drivers. The hotel’s newest owner, Maurice Richard, spends his days manning the bar and checking in fewer and fewer guests. Richard talks to Rabinow at length in the student’s first few days in Sefrou. Both are happy to have another lonely French speaker to converse with. Richard was born to wealthy parents in France and moved to Morocco in the early 1950s to escape family pressure. Rabinow describes him as “a failure historically," noting he “arrived in Morocco a generation too late” (13).

Rabinow writes that Richard would have fit in best with the first large group of French settlers in the 1920s, mostly farmers and soldiers who often learned Arabic, worked alongside locals, and had Moroccan neighbors and friends. Many of these settlers left France to escape French society, and although most held deep paternalistic views about Moroccans, the earliest settlers were seeking a new way of life; few had a desire to actively make Morocco more like France. The second surge of immigration, to which Richard actually belonged, happened during and after the second world war and mostly consisted of government employees. These settlers were wealthier than the first, loyal to France, and committed to preserving their French lifestyle. They primarily immigrated to segregated French communities in the colonial centers of Casablanca and Fez, almost never learned Arabic, and interacted with Moroccans only when buying something from them or hiring them for menial jobs. These settlers rejected people like Richard, who didn’t share their level of patriotism and cultural elitism.

At the time of Rabinow’s fieldwork, Sefrou’s French population is mostly young teachers who signed up to work at schools in the ex-colonies as an alternative to military service. Rabinow criticizes this neo-colonial influx harshly. He describes the group as having an attitude of “domination” toward Moroccans. The teachers live in large villas, socialize only with each other, and employ many servants whom they treat poorly. They see the local students as culturally quaint but unteachable. The anthropologist describes the teachers as living out a fantasy, savoring the taste of an upper-class lifestyle that they will never be able to attain in France. Many of these teachers stay at the Hotel de l’Oliveraie for their first days in Sefrou before moving into their villas. Although Richard attempts to befriend the newcomers, they eventually retreat into the Ville Nouvelle and their own homogenous community, leaving the hotel and its owner as forgotten relics of the past.

Rabinow describes Richard as intensely lonely, shunned by all but the oldest French people but far from integrated into any Moroccan community, largely through faults of his own. He only knows basic Arabic, although he regrets not learning. His wife, who grew up in a wealthy colonial settlement in Algeria, openly believes that Africa is culturally and racially inferior to Europe and refuses to socialize with Moroccans. In his futile attempts to relate to the French teachers, he gives them racist warnings about locals, scaring them with stereotyped stories that he doesn’t even seem to believe himself. Ultimately, this means that Richard is a man trapped in the past, with no real prospect of a viable future in his adopted country.

Rabinow wraps up his first chapter with a bit of regret that he did not write his ethnography about Richard’s relationship with the other French inhabitants of Sefrou. The shared French fluency and similar cultural heritage between Richard, Rabinow, and the French teachers would have made anthropological inquiry relatively straightforward, and the social dynamics at play were potentially meaningful for understanding the changing face of colonial Morocco from the perspective of settler groups. To Rabinow, this approach seems too easy, so he sets off on the task of exploring “real” Moroccan culture.