Channeling Moroccanness - by Becky L Schulthies

About the Book

This book explores how Moroccans engage communicative failure as they seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez.

Book Synopsis

Honorable Mention, 2022 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies

What does it mean to connect as a people through mass media? This book approaches that question by exploring how Moroccans engage communicative failure as they seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused not just on social relations that used to be and have been lost but also on what ought to be and had yet to be realized. Such laments have transpired in a range of communication channels, from objects such as devotional prayer beads and remote controls; to interactional forms such as storytelling, dress styles, and orthography; to media platforms like television news, religious stations, or WhatsApp group chats.

Channeling Moroccanness examines these laments as ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing formations of Moroccan relationality. Rather than furthering the discourse about Morocco's conflict between liberal secularists and religious conservatives, this ethnography shows the subtle range of ideologies and practices evoked in Fassi homes to calibrate Moroccan sociality and political consciousness.

From the Back Cover

"In Channeling Moroccanness, Becky Schulthies challenges anthropological linguistics by pushing beyond the speech event to different contexts of speaking, listening, and viewing to come up with what she calls a 'calibration' of Moroccan sociality. The book is an important and distinctive contribution to the ethnography of Morocco."--Steven Caton, Harvard University

"Channeling Moroccanness is highly readable and brisk. Schulthies's intimate descriptions of timely media practices and Moroccans' discussions of their effects contribute important ethnographic detail on the weaving of technological media into everyday communications, and evidence her extensive ethnographic labor. This is a vital and compelling book"--Emilio Spadola, Colgate University

What does it mean to connect as a people through mass media? This book approaches the question by exploring how Moroccans engage communicative failure as they seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused not just on social relations that used to be and have been lost, but also on what ought to be and had yet to be realized. Such laments have transpired in a range of communication channels, from objects such as devotional prayer beads and remote controls; to interactional forms such as storytelling, dress styles, and orthography; to media platforms like television news, religious stations, or WhatsApp group chats.

Channeling Moroccanness examines these laments as ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing formations of Moroccan relationality. Rather than furthering the discourse about Morocco's conflict between liberal secularists and religious conservatives, this ethnography shows the subtle range of ideologies and practices evoked in Fassi homes to calibrate Moroccan sociality and political consciousness.

Becky Schulthies is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University.

Review Quotes

Channeling Moroccanness is highly readable and brisk. Schulthies's intimate descriptions of timely media practices and Moroccans' discussions of their effects contribute important ethnographic detail on the weaving of technological media into everyday communications and evince her extensive ethnographic labor. This is a vital and compelling book.---Emilio Spadola, Colgate University

In Channeling Moroccanness, Becky Schulthies challenges anthropological linguistics by pushing beyond the speech event to different contexts of speaking, listening, and viewing to come up with what she calls a 'calibration' of Moroccan sociality. The book is an important and distinctive contribution to the ethnography of Morocco.---Steven Caton, Harvard University

...this work offers a revised conceptualization of what listening, speaking, reading, and writing are, and what they do. It also offers a rich analysis of media channels as they structure sociality and makes one wonder if anyone can read a text without hearing it. Ultimately, Schulthies' work productively blurs linguistic categorization and considers the full spectrum of multimodal communicative practice.-- "Language in Society"

...Channeling Moroccanness offers a welcome intervention into what can often be stale and binary debates about language, religion, identity, and politics in the contemporary Maghrib. It also offers an innovative way of conceptualizing and studying national identities and national publics through the lens of lament and communicative failure. Perhaps most importantly, it offers a subtle sense of hope for the possibility of social connection to exist despite, or perhaps even because of fractures.-- "The Middle East Journal"

[An] analytically sophisticated attemptby a sociolinguist to reveal how a group of urban Moroccans critically use different linguistic channels to confirm their identity and reestablish their connectedness as fellow Moroccans. Recommended.-- "Choice"

About the Author

Becky Schulthies is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University.