Channeling Moroccanness. Becky L. Schulthies
the effort to learn through study and interaction.25 He echoed a wider critique that Moroccan national television spent far more programming hours on music, movie, and dramatic serial programming than religious programs—even though the call to prayer was broadcast five times a day on al-ūla. Yet television was not the only failed medium—the public educational system was regularly implicated in failing to teach Moroccans about Islam, leading to complacency and immorality or radicalization, according to several of my Fassi interlocutors. In May 2003, just a few months before my Sunday lunch with Selma’s family, Morocco had experienced a major religiously motivated attack in which thirty-seven Moroccans were killed. Extremist Islam, learned through foreign media, was blamed. In particular, people claimed satellite television and small portable media (like audio cassette and VCR tapes, as well as VCD and DVD disks and more recently internet videos) had corrupted and confused Moroccans about proper Islam. One of the Moroccan state responses was to recultivate what they called the Moroccan model or pattern of Islam, نموذج المغربي (namūdhaj almaghribī), a historically “moderate” Islam, which they would spread via modern radio and television stations, training institutes, and global dissemination of training materials. The Moroccan pattern of Islam included a bundle of semiotic forms promoted as uniquely Moroccan: clothing, Qur’anic recitation styles, writing scripts, textual reasoning patterns, and communicative channels for connecting to appropriate Islam. I examine Fassi responses to the state media efforts at shaping Islam in Morocco in Chapter 5. The uncle’s comment about learning Islam was set within this context. What was being learned through specific kinds of interactional mediums shaped the kinds of relationality emerging from education about Islam.
Set adjacent to his lament about the forms of contemporary Islamic education, the television as mobility metaphor served both as a longing for other ways of knowing and a critique of passivity that television as a knowledge medium generated. In other words, there was an implicit media ideology embedded in the uncle’s critique: electronic media opened some kinds of social relations and foreclosed others. When I first began fieldwork a decade ago, one Fassi taxi driver told me that television had replaced the tea serving tray, السنية (ssinnîya), as the symbol of Moroccan family gatherings. He explained that prior to the spread of television, families used to gather around the ssinnîya in the evenings, visiting each other, sharing tea and conversation as related in Episode 1. This was the time set apart for collaboratively discussing daily happenings and issues of familial and community interest, as well as local, national, and international events. Now, he continued, people gathered around the television and limited their conversation to commentary on programs and commercials. In this anecdote, the taxi driver framed television and tea serving trays as the same medium, something that would draw Moroccan families together. Yet he also understood this as a frame for sociality across Morocco: Morocco was connected as iterations of families gathering to discuss matters of interest in their lives. The television had replaced the tea tray medium in creating a purpose for relationality and social interaction reduced to programming comments rather than strengthening their interpersonal ties.
What mattered for the taxi driver and Selma’s uncle were the kinds of relationality that emerged from those mediations. All these interactions were shaped by my presence, as the American researcher, and what they thought I knew and should know about Moroccan media and social connection. None of these Fassis knew each other and yet echoed each other’s longing for other kinds of relationality. In making these iconic (sameness) links between sociality and media, they foregrounded some things: televisions replacing teatime connections; passive reception replacing embodied mentoring. In order to do so, they had to background other things: tea sociality was part of television sociality, as in Episode 1, and media reception was rarely a passive, solitary event—illustrated by Episodes 1 and 3. I find these likeness-linking and erasure processes key to the undirected, everyday phatic making of Moroccanness explored throughout this book.
The Linguistic Labor of Relationality in Fez
Phaticity, or ideologies about mediums of social connection, have relied on infrastructural conduits (channels and communicative modalities such as speech and writing), psychological attachments (relationality), and sociality conventions (see Kockelman 2010, 408). The concept has a long genealogy in anthropology but has been arguably undertheorized until recently (Nozawa 2015; Lemon 2017). Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski labeled the purpose of talk designed to foster social relations as phatic communion. It was his critique of referentialism, a European Enlightenment ideology in which the primary purpose of language was to refer to or reflect things as they are in the world (Malinowski 1936 [1923], 315; see also Bauman and Briggs 2003). For Malinowski, the main function of everyday talk in small-scale societies, like the Trobriand Islands where he lived for several years, was to create and maintain social relationships in a ritualized fashion (hence the communion metaphor). Since their primary purpose was connectedness, everyday talk was really the medium for building relationships. Jakobson also thought sociality was a key function of communication in all societies. Interaction did more than refer to things or convey information (referential function). It also expressed aspects of a sender’s identity or affective state (emotive function); recognized and invited addressees or interlocutors (conative function); called attention to the form of the message (poetic function); reflexively evaluated the grammar and social meanings of the code itself (metalingual function); and included the maintenance of relationality through spoken, whistled, signed, drummed, sung, and written channels (phatic function). Jakobson expanded Malinowski’s idea that phatic communication served a psychosocial bond. He included the signaling of interactional openings and closings, as well as the materiality of visual/aural perception and attention in his “Hello, can you hear me?” and “Are you listening?” examples (Jakobson 1960, 355). Phaticity was about channels, perception, and sociality.
Both Malinowski and Jakobson saw phatic function as routinized, repetitive, and socially significant yet unremarkable for participants. Small talk, greetings, leave-takings, chatting, rapport talk were important for relational work. For analytical purposes, the scholars separated phaticity, connection mechanisms, from referential meaning, the information bearing part of communication. Subsequent linguistic anthropologists demonstrated the ways that interactions can layer sign modes and functions (Hymes 1962, 32; Silverstein 1976, 24; Briggs 1986, 53): a bit of talk could be metalinguistic (talk about talk) and expressive (indexing something about the speaker’s identity) or phatic (doing relational work) and referential (stating how media conveys messages). Importantly, the phatic function involved work, the labor of connecting signers and interpreters (Elyachar 2010, 455). As Elyachar noted, phatic connectivity in urban and transregional Arab contexts did not rely on direct proximity or one-to-one psychological models of contact, but rather “a generalized disposition to create, maintain, and extend communicative channels” through exchange of affect, money, information, and faith (2010, 458). Like Elyachar, I trace the relationality labor of Fassi channel ideologies, but do so through their responses to laments of communicative failure that precipitated reform work.
Channels in Fez were diverse but significant infrastructures. They could be electronic media, named languages, written or spoken language modalities, ways of practicing Islam. They could also be neighbors couriering news; colleagues posting a religious video on Facebook and precipitating on- and offline comments; a friend triangulating a loan for a relative living in another country through a Moroccan friend of a friend they knew living there. People served as channel nodes who sent, received, interpreted, and reshaped messages, belief, currency, and sentiment. Throughout this book, I analytically track the moments when Fassis served as channels themselves by foregrounding or erasing classic phatic media such as language code modalities (written, spoken, aural, visual, Moroccan Arabic, formal Arabic) and ideologies about mediation devices and their failures. For example, in Fez television was cast as an interlocutor or background noise, when in practice it could be both. I tend to highlight phatic labor specialists, individuals who inserted nodes into the connectivity webs of these communities by making legible channel infrastructures and translating their meaning for others. In the following episode, I describe one such example of phatic labor.
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