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Islam Observed

Author: Clifford Geertz

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1971-08-15

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9780226285115

"In four brief chapters," writes Clifford Geertz in his preface, "I have attempted both to lay out a general framework for the comparative analysis of religion and to apply it to a study of the development of a supposedly single creed, Islam, in two quite contrasting civilizations, the Indonesian and the Moroccan." Mr. Geertz begins his argument by outlining the problem conceptually and providing an overview of the two countries. He then traces the evolution of their classical religious styles which, with disparate settings and unique histories, produced strikingly different spiritual climates. So in Morocco, the Islamic conception of life came to mean activism, moralism, and intense individuality, while in Indonesia the same concept emphasized aestheticism, inwardness, and the radical dissolution of personality. In order to assess the significance of these interesting developments, Mr. Geertz sets forth a series of theoretical observations concerning the social role of religion.

After the Fact

Author: Clifford Geertz

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 0674254031

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“An unabashedly honest ethnography . . . [from] a founder of ‘symbolic’ anthropology . . . reflections on his fieldwork over a period of . . . forty years. Brilliant.” (Kirkus Reviews) In looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is a personal history as well as a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. An elegant summation of one of the most remarkable careers in anthropology, it is at the same time an eloquent statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers. Through the prism of his fieldwork over forty years in two towns, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a truly original book, one that displays a particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a particular—and particularly efficacious—view of what these sciences are, have been, and should become. “Geertz charts the transformation of cultural anthropology from a study of "primitive" people to a multidisciplinary investigation of a particular culture's symbolic systems, its interactions with the larger forces of history and modernization.” —Publishers Weekly “An elegant, almost meditative volume of reflections.” —The New Yorker “[An] engrossing story of a few key moments in American social science during the second half of the twentieth century as [Geetz] participated in them.” —New York Times Book Review

Morocco Bound

Author: Brian Edwards

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2005-10-28

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0822387123

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Until attention shifted to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Americans turned most often toward the Maghreb—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and the Sahara—for their understanding of “the Arab.” In Morocco Bound, Brian T. Edwards examines American representations of the Maghreb during three pivotal decades—from 1942, when the United States entered the North African campaign of World War II, through 1973. He reveals how American film and literary, historical, journalistic, and anthropological accounts of the region imagined the role of the United States in a world it seemed to dominate at the same time that they displaced domestic social concerns—particularly about race relations—onto an “exotic” North Africa. Edwards reads a broad range of texts to recuperate the disorienting possibilities for rethinking American empire. Examining work by William Burroughs, Jane Bowles, Ernie Pyle, A. J. Liebling, Jane Kramer, Alfred Hitchcock, Clifford Geertz, James Michener, Ornette Coleman, General George S. Patton, and others, he puts American texts in conversation with an archive of Maghrebi responses. Whether considering Warner Brothers’ marketing of the movie Casablanca in 1942, journalistic representations of Tangier as a city of excess and queerness, Paul Bowles’s collaboration with the Moroccan artist Mohammed Mrabet, the hippie communities in and around Marrakech in the 1960s and early 1970s, or the writings of young American anthropologists working nearby at the same time, Edwards illuminates the circulation of American texts, their relationship to Maghrebi history, and the ways they might be read so as to reimagine the role of American culture in the world.

Religion and Power in Morocco

Author: Henry Munson

Publisher:

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780300053760

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In this book a well-known anthropologist traces the evolution of the political role of Islam in Morocco from the seventeenth century to present times. Integrating history and anthropology in a way very different from Clifford Geertz's famous study of 1968, Henry Munson organizes his book around a series of conflicts that have exemplified the myth of the righteous man of God who dares to defy an unjust sultan. Grounding his book in the relevant indigenous texts and on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Munson suggests a more solidly substantiated alternative to the "social history of the imagination" advocated by Geertz, and he illustrates the consequences of neglecting the historical and symbolic contexts of events by examining Geertz's interpretation of the conflict between the seventeenth-century scholar-cum-saint al-Yusi and the sultan Mulay Ismail. Munson argues that the religious facets of power cannot be understood without reference to factors like force and fear, and he suggests that anthropological analyses of "sacred kingship" in Morocco have often been distorted by their neglect of such matters - and by their failure to distinguish between the religious rhetoric of rulers and the religious beliefs of those they rule. Munson examines the social historical roots of the fundamentalist opposition to the regime of King Hassan II, who has reigned since 1961, and the reasons for its relative weakness when compared with its counterparts in Iran and Algeria. He shows to what extent Moroccan fundamentalism is rooted in classical Islamic notions of "just rule" and to what extent it represents an invented tradition similar to recent forms of politicized revivalism in other religions.

Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew

Author: Lawrence Rosen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 022631748X

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"Drawn from Memory" is an important contribution to Moroccan studies, to the field of anthropology, and to academic approaches to biography. Rosen weaves the threads of his narrative together into a tapestry focused on the lives of four men: a raconteur, a teacher, an entrepreneur, and a cloth dealer, a Jew. Ordinary people have intellectual lives, Rosen tells us. They may never have written a book; they may never even have read one. But their lives are rich in ideas, constantly fashioned and revised, elaborated and rearranged. Rosen first encountered the four men he profiles in his book in the course of his academic research, and he then visited and revisited these men, and the towns in which they live, over several decades. He engaged them ina kind of continuous conversation. He spoke to members of their family, their neighbors, and the town people. Out of this wealth of material, he has constructed a narrative that takes the reader not only into four intensely observed individual lives but also, as it were, the history of Morocco s evolution across the span of many decades; he takes the reader not only into the outwardly lived lives of his subjects, but their innermost thoughts, their own perceptions of themselves and the evolving Moroccan world around them. At the same time, he manages to evoke the physical landscape, the towns in which these men live, marvelously well, so that the towns and their inhabitants come alive for the reader. Beautifully illustrated with archival and ethnographic photos, "Drawn from Memory" teaches us that that for Moroccans, and by extension Muslims in general, nothing in everyday social life is hard and fast, and the meaning and outcome of all interactions is the product of negotiation and relatedness."