Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco

In addition, it was immensely “ethnographic” and fulfilled all of my images of myself as anthropologist sitting in the heart of a thousand-year-old walled city with my turbaned friends, notebook on my lap, drinking tea and being the participant observer.

During the fieldwork villagers became acutely aware that they did not know their saint’s legend and they now felt that they should.

How to limit and control the tendency of informants toward possessiveness was a central problem throughout my fieldwork.

Fieldwork is a dialectic between reflection and immediacy. Both are cultural constructs. Our scientific categories help us to recognize, describe, and develop areas of inquiry. But one cannot engage in questioning and redefining twenty-four hours a day. The scientific perspective on the world is hard to sustain. In the field there is less to fall back on; the world of everyday life changes more rapidly and dramatically than it would at home. There is an accelerated dialectic between the recognition of new experiences and their normalization.