Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco

Rating:
Summary: How much objectivity could you keep while studying a people?
Review: First off, this is not a book about the Moroccan people. It is a book about the ethnographer's experience with a community of Moroccan people. I assume that, somewhere out there, is a university press publication of his actual findings gathering dust on a shelf. Instead, this book is about some of the more uncomfortable aspects of anthropology and the destroying of illusions.

Questions of finding the outsider's insider (someone enough on the fringes to be willing to take you under their wing, but not so much that they don't have a good in-road into their own culture), of the purity of research (did you have to pay these people before they'd bother to talk to you? Were they expecting payment based on relations with other enthnographers?), and how much one can really understand a culture just by sitting a watching it (as opposed to participating, which threatens objectivity) are the issues Rabinow faced, and what he wrote about.

"Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco" is just that, memoirs on the process of the research itself, not Rabinow's findings. There are interesting comments on Rabinow's interactions with his insiders, but rarely the sort that could go into a standard academic tome. This answer to the delima of objectivity, splitting one's experiences into an official report and a journal of sorts, is one I'd like to see more of.

Rating:
Summary: Fieldwork from Male point of view
Review: In the book, Rabinow seeks to reflect on his experience during his period of studying Morocan-islamic-religious sects and family linages related to saints of Muslim belief.

In whole he forgets to describe (providing he saw any) women or children and their role in the whole system of religion in Moroco.

Thus, if read as an ethnography, the book is very faulty.

Rating:
Summary: reflections on anthropological fieldwork; NOT an ethnography
Review: This is a great introduction to some of the intricacies and complications cultural anthropologists face when doing fieldwork, since the world is our field (and not some lab cordoned off in some building). Several reviewers have mistaken this book for an ethnography, which it is not. This book is a self-reflexive look unto the complications an anthropologists subjectivity and experiences brings into one's study.