DETAILS

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Director: Dr. Becky Schulthies    |      884 KMBL     |     becky_schulthies@byu.edu

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Morocco is rich in complexity and anthropologists have long researched, theorized, and written about the people who traverse, work, claim, contest, negotiate, barter, marry, worship, migrate from and return to this place. This ethnographic field school will be in Fez Morocco, a 1200-year-old city that has experienced intense urban change, with a visual anthropology project in nearby Sefrou (Dr. Jacob Hickman in the BYU Dept. of Anthropology will offer a Visual Anthropology course in the field school in connection with this ethnographic film project). Students will receive intensive training in visual anthropology research methods and collaborate with Moroccan university students to identify and ethnographically research a social, political, cultural or environmental issue. Potential topics include gender, social customs and rituals; sufism and spirituality; medicine and magic; multispecies relations; as well as youth and social movements. Students will spend two weeks contextualizing Fez by traveling around Morocco (a week in the south, and a week in the north), two weeks training in visual anthropology methods to create an ethnographic film about women’s labor in Sefrou, and 8 weeks embedding themselves into a social context and collecting ethnographic data collaboratively in Fez. Students will also be introduced to historical and ethnographic studies of Morocco and attend guest lectures from scholars who do fieldwork in Morocco, focusing on anthropological representations of peoples, places, phenomena. We will discuss how scholars have captured life in Moroccan communities and how the process of describing “Moroccans” and “Maghariba” (North Africans) contributes to anthropological theories of personhood, identity, gender, religion, illness, politics and economics.

 

DATES

May 9-August 1, 2024

 

HOUSING

Students will live with local host families. Home stays are recommended, as it will facilitate the experience of cultural immersion and also provide students with a way to situate data conducted in their fieldwork. 

 

COURSES

Students must register for 12 credit hours during the spring-summer semester from the following courses:

Anthropology 340 Peoples of the Middle East (3 credit hours)

Anthropology 495R Ethnographic Field Project (6 credit hours)

Anthropology 420 Visual Anthropology (3 credit hours)