Morocco is rich in complexity, and anthropologists have long researched, theorized, and written about the people who traverse, work, claim, contest, negotiate, barter, marry, worship, migrate from, and return to this place. This ethnographic field school will be in Fez, Morocco, a 1200-year-old city that has experienced intense urban change, with a visual anthropology project in nearby Sefrou. Students will receive intensive training in visual anthropology research methods and collaborate with Moroccan university students to identify and ethnographically research a social, political, cultural or environmental issue. Potential topics include gender, social customs, and rituals; Sufism and spirituality; medicine and magic; multispecies relations; and youth and social movements. Students will spend two weeks contextualizing Fez by traveling around Morocco (a week in the south and a week in the north), two weeks training in visual anthropology methods to create an ethnographic film about women’s labor in Sefrou, and eight weeks embedding themselves into a social context and collecting ethnographic data collaboratively in Fez. Students will also be introduced to historical and ethnographic studies of Morocco and attend guest lectures from scholars who do fieldwork in Morocco, focusing on anthropological representations of peoples, places, and phenomena. We will discuss how scholars have captured life in Moroccan communities and how the process of describing “Moroccans” and “Maghariba” (North Africans) contributes to anthropological theories of personhood, identity, gender, religion, illness, politics, and economics.
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