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Bryn Mawr College

Publication Date

Fall 2014

Program Name

Morocco: Migration and Transnational Identity

Abstract

Conceptions of success for people in any capitalist context are tangled with social hierarchies of work. The rural women of Morocco have been specifically singled out as the objects discourses about their domestic and agricultural work, agency, gender identity and role, and their use of private and public space ownership. This project will examine the justifications, conceptions, and satisfaction with rural-agricultural work in a small-scale family farm in Morocco’s Al Hoceima province. Using the case study approach, I will live with a family in Sidi Bouafif and work alongside the family for an eight-day fieldwork period. Through participant observation and informal interviews, this project will analyze men’s, women’s, and children’s conceptions of working the land. I will ultimately situate the family members’ narratives within the nexus of discourses surrounding women’s work in rural-agricultural regions of Morocco. I conclude that the affinity for Europe and the United States and the work the countries represent affects the intimate domain of the family. This gravity toward Europe is reinforced at all generational levels and creates a situation in which the labor required on a small-scale farm is simultaneously stigmatized and contextualized within family honor and respect. Research Questions: How do women and children who live in small rural-agricultural areas contextualize and justify their daily labor? Are they also subject to the recent trends of stigmatization of manual labor?

Disciplines

African Studies | Agricultural and Resource Economics | Agricultural Economics | Agricultural Education | Agriculture | Family, Life Course, and Society | Inequality and Stratification | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Women's Studies

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