Becky Schulthies
Morocco
May 2004
View Previous Submission by Becky Schulthies
Politics of the Everyday
Though my daily life consists of relatively mundane actions, the conversations that I invariably am drawn into are far from routine. In the process of making appointments, visiting families, following up with other families, interviewing, recording, and writing about television viewing processes, I am not a mere observer. Every setting and interaction involves my American status, and I am called upon to explain American foreign policy, television, culture and society. With most people—taxi drivers, shop owners, fellow train travelers—the discussion is more about having an American listen as they communicate their thoughts and positions about things they feel so passionately. Even with close friends, the day’s events regarding Palestine and Iraq are retold and analyzed from a frame of reference that most Americans would find difficult to understand. While I never feel threatened in any way by being American, I struggle with the constant demand to play the role of political interpreter in the wake of an event that leaves many dead or wounded. Empathizing with both sides does not make the translation process easy.
Moroccans come in contact and, to varying degrees, are familiar with more than one culture of media circulation in the course of their lives. Moroccan television is present in most urban homes and provides news and entertainment next to images, stories, and events accessed from French, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Saudi, German, Italian and British points of view. Given this diversity, many Moroccans still follow national stations. In order to better understand this interplay between the global and the local, dominant media structures and local reformulations, I am exploring Moroccan interpretive practices through multiple lenses. I expanded my research to include interviews with Moroccan TV and radio authorities to understand the indigenous programming ideology (including political-economic constraints). It is clear that national television programming is projected as part of the globalizing process, a means to develop a "society of information and knowledge." At the same time, it is a significant source of entertainment.
I'm also observing and recording the everyday viewing practices of several families to identify their collaborative meaning-making within the framework of choices offered to them. I scaled down the number of families that I am recording at a more in-depth level due to transportation and time limitations. The outlines of an everyday poetic of family interpretations are emerging in the data I have collected and transcribed thus far. As a linguistic anthropologist, I am interested in the particular discourse markers utilized when family members evoke current event information, the gestures and backchannel cues that indicate their positionality or evaluations.
Most Moroccans have at least a passive knowledge of multiple Arabic dialects, primarily Egyptian and Classical Arabic, with Lebanese as a close third. They also garner the linguistic resources of English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German from films and other programs. Bits and pieces of these languages and cultures are media script resources for family interactions and examples of Moroccan appropriations, in the Bakhtinain sense, of social imaginations. Family members transfigure fusha, English, French, Egyptian, and even regional Moroccan dialects to mock and approve of statements, to tease each other, to give added meaning to social interactions, to index their education and or/social standing and to identify with political and social positions.
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