Anthropologist, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Rabat
Abstract:
In the early 1980s, on the threshold of my path as a scholar, speaking about oneself was considered inappropriate and unscientific, since it contradicted the requirements of objectivity. From the 1990s onward, it has become almost normal for a researcher to include himself in the text; the use of “I” has almost become a mandatory ritual. The dogmatism of objectivism was abandoned in favor of another dogmatism that made commitment, the “disease of the diary,” and narcissistic presentation the dogma of the postmodern scholar. When writing about my path as a scholar, I am subject and object at the same time; yet this does not mean that I am in a process of direct confrontation with myself. To create a distance to myself, I used two types of mediation. The first is empirical. My experience as a researcher left traces and archives: my field notebooks, my recorded interviews with informants, summaries of my theoretical readings, my publications, etc. The second mediation is theoretical; in analyzing my path I applied the same method that I used in my studies of the work of my predecessors and colleagues, which I summarized in the concept of ethnographic positivism.
The “I” that I used to describe my path is not abstract but rather time-bound, variable: the agile novice, the learner, imbued with structural analysis, then with theories of collective action and microscopic ethnography, the agile researcher, counselor, etc. I also tried to locate the “I” in a series of contexts and networks of academic relationships. Where do I start my path story? I will confine myself to the period before acquiring a position as a young researcher, explaining the effects of my Marxist readings, my activity in a movie club, and my university studies on my choice of the research profession, as well as my shift from legal studies to sociology and anthropology. The path of the researcher is mainly filled with theoretical questions and issues. I propose three questions related to the idea of decolonizing anthropology, the totalitarian approaches to Moroccan society, and my status as an anthropologist in his own country. Finally, I will talk about fieldwork, which occupied a central place in my path. I will confine myself to raising two questions relating, respectively, to writing and the spirit of the field. I would very much like to stress that it is not only about recounting my experience, but also about achieving a degree of abstraction that allows comparison with other experiences.
Bio:
Hassan Rachik, anthropologist, Professor at the Mohamed VI Polytechnic University in Rabat, at Hassan II University in Casablanca (1982-2021), Visiting Professor in American, European and Arab universities. He devoted his first field research to the interpretation of sacrificial rituals (1990, 1992) and to the explanation of social changes in rural areas (2000, 2019). He has studied the uses of nationalist, Amazigh and Islamist ideologies, the processes of ideologization of religion and secularization (2003, 2006, 2016). Inspired by the sociology of knowledge, he studied colonial and postcolonial anthropological knowledge (2012, 2021).
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