Channeling Moroccanness: Language and the Media of Sociality - Paperback
by Becky L. Schulthies (Author)
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."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.Becky Schulthies is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University.
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