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In the postcolonial era, Arab societies have been ruled by a
variety of authoritarian regimes. Focusing on his native Morocco,
Abdellah Hammoudi explores the ideological and cultural foundations
of this persistent authoritarianism.
Building on the work of Foucault, Hammoudi argues that at the heart
of Moroccan culture lies a paradigm of authority that juxtaposes
absolute authority against absolute submission. Rooted in Islamic
mysticism, this paradigm can be observed in the drama of mystic
initiation, with its fundamental dialectic between Master and
Disciple; in conflict with other cultural forms, and reelaborated
in colonial and postcolonial circumstances, it informs all major
aspects of Moroccan personal, political, and gender relations. Its
influence is so pervasive and so firmly embedded that it ultimately
legitimizes the authoritarian structure of power. Hammoudi contends
that as long as the Master-Disciple dialectic remains the dominant
paradigm of power relations, male authoritarianism will prevail as
the dominant political form.
"Connecting political domination to gift exchange, ritual
initiation, social loyalty, and gender reversals, "Master and
Disciple" is nothing less than a thoroughgoing revision of our
understanding of authoritarian rule in Morocco and in the Arab
world in general."--Clifford Geertz, Institute for Advanced Study
Each year, in a solemn Sunni Muslim feast, the Ait Mazine of
northern Morocco reenact the story of Abraham as a ritual
sacrifice, a symbolic observance of submission to the divine. After
comes a bacchanalian masquerade which seems to violate every
principle the sacrifice affirmed. Costumed men sing and dance and
torment villagers, their wild activities centering around a mute
figure sewn into the skins of sacrificed animals. This character is
attended by several others who keep up a constant patter that mocks
the social order, especially marriage, women, older men, and the
Qu'ran. Because of the apparent contradiction between sacrifice and
masquerade, observers have described the two as entirely separate
events. Abdellah Hammoudi's study reunites them as a single ritual
process within Islamic tradition. Working with metaphors of stage
and play, Hammoudi details the festival from the rituals of makeup
and costume through the final spectacle. Each part of the ceremony
denies and at the same time conjures up the other. The
contradictions inherent in social and religious life are vividly
enacted; sacrifice and masquerade appear.
Challenges to ethnographic authority and to the ethics of
representation have led many contemporary anthropologists to
abandon fieldwork in favor of strategies of theoretical
puppeteering, textual analysis, and surrogate ethnography. In
"Being There, "John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi argue that
ethnographies based on these strategies elide important insights.
To demonstrate the power and knowledge attained through the
fieldwork experience, they have gathered essays by anthropologists
working in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tanzania, the Canadian
Arctic, India, Germany, and Russia that shift attention back to the
subtle dynamics of the ethnographic encounter. From an Inuit
village to the foothills of Kilimanjaro, each account illustrates
how, despite its challenges, fieldwork yields important insights
outside the reach of textual analysis.
In the postcolonial era, Arab societies have been ruled by a
variety of authoritarian regimes. Focusing on his native Morocco,
Abdellah Hammoudi explores the ideological and cultural foundations
of this persistent authoritarianism.
Building on the work of Foucault, Hammoudi argues that at the heart
of Moroccan culture lies a paradigm of authority that juxtaposes
absolute authority against absolute submission. Rooted in Islamic
mysticism, this paradigm can be observed in the drama of mystic
initiation, with its fundamental dialectic between Master and
Disciple; in conflict with other cultural forms, and reelaborated
in colonial and postcolonial circumstances, it informs all major
aspects of Moroccan personal, political, and gender relations. Its
influence is so pervasive and so firmly embedded that it ultimately
legitimizes the authoritarian structure of power. Hammoudi contends
that as long as the Master-Disciple dialectic remains the dominant
paradigm of power relations, male authoritarianism will prevail as
the dominant political form.
"Connecting political domination to gift exchange, ritual
initiation, social loyalty, and gender reversals, "Master and
Disciple" is nothing less than a thoroughgoing revision of our
understanding of authoritarian rule in Morocco and in the Arab
world in general."2;Clifford Geertz, Institute for Advanced Study
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