The Outside

Alice Elliot

Description

What does migration look like from the inside out? In The Outside, Alice Elliot decenters conventional approaches to migration by focusing on places of departure rather than arrival and rethinks migration from the perspective of those who have not (yet) left. Through an intimate ethnography of towns and villages notorious in Morocco for their striking emigration to "the outside," Elliot traces the powerful ways migration permeates life: as brutal bureaucratic machinery administering hope and despair, as intimate force crisscrossing kinship relations and bonds of love and care, as imaginative horizon of the self and of the future. Challenging dominant understandings of migration and their deadly consequences by centering non-migrants' sharp theorizations and intimate experiences of "the outside," Elliot recasts migration as a deeply relational entity, and attends to the ethnographic, conceptual, and political imagination required by the constitutive relationship between migration and life.

Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
Tempos of Life
The Outside Inside
Wives of Elsewhere
Beautiful Futures
The Gender of the Crossing
The Outside
Conclusion: Migration as Life

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Rural
• Sociology
• Rural area
• Types of rural communities
• Anthropology
• Social
• Campagne
• Migration
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 06 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253054760
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa
Paul A. Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg, editors

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2021 by Alice Elliot
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Elliot, Alice (Social anthropologist), author.
Title: The outside : migration as life in Morocco / Alice Elliot.
Other titles: Public cultures of the Middle East and North Africa.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2021. | Series: Public cultures of the Middle East and North Africa | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020048946 (print) | LCCN 2020048947 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253054739 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253054746 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253054753 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Immigrant families-Morocco-Social conditions. | Emigrant remittances-Morocco. | Morocco-Emigration and immigration-Social aspects.
Classification: LCC JV8978 .E54 2021 (print) | LCC JV8978 (ebook) | DDC 304.809664-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048946
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048947
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1. Tempos of Life
2. The Outside Inside
3. Wives of Elsewhere
4. Beautiful Futures
5. The Gender of the Crossing
6. The Outside
Conclusion: Migration as Life
Bibliography
Index
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not exist without the kindness, trust, and intellectual generosity of Moroccan friends, neighbors, acquaintances, chance grand taxi travel companions on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea. Most are, following discussion and mutual agreement, anonymized in the book-but you know who you are. I am especially grateful to all the people I have met over the years in the Tadla, for the shared thinking and shared life at the heart of this book, for the unquestioning hospitality and teasing warmth, and for the lasting friendships. I want to thank, in particular, the families who opened their doors and lives to me during my doctoral fieldwork as well as my Tadla roommates for taking care of me when I first arrived and for being there ever since. I remain indebted to my language teacher Hassan Eddahabi, who taught me Moroccan Arabic with incomparable expertise, patience, and wit.
It has taken a long time to write this book, and it would have been impossible without the support of many people. Sara Randall has been there from the very beginning, supervising my undergraduate, master s, and PhD work, supporting me professionally and personally, opening her Shropshire home to me, and above all trusting me. I am deeply grateful to my anthropology companions for their vital friendship, thinking, and solidarity over the years and across countries: Karin Ahlberg, Ana Carolina Balthazar, Igor Cherstich, Alexandra D Onofrio, Tobia Farnetti, Martin Fotta, Paolo Gaibazzi, Ashraf Hoque, Dimitra Kofti, Hege H yer Leivestad, Laura Menin, Camilla Morelli, Carl Rommel, Julia Sauma, Nico Tassi, Ca ta lina Tesa r, Francesco Vacchiano, Antonia Walford, and the PrecAnthro collective. Alison Macdonald has been a colleague and a sister from the start, and I cannot thank her enough.
The UCL Department of Anthropology, the University of Bristol Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, and the Goldsmiths Department of Anthropology have provided me with safe harbors for writing, teaching, and thinking over the years. Students and colleagues at Goldsmiths Anthropology, my anthropology home, have been a real strength and inspiration in good times and bad, as have Goldsmiths Justice for Cleaners/Justice for Workers comrades. Thank you to the KU Leuven Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre, and especially to Noel B. Salazar for his continued support; Michael Stasik and the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies for a visiting fellowship at a crucial time in the writing; and All Souls College Oxford for an Evans-Pritchard Lectureship that provided me with feedback and confidence to finish the book-special thanks to David Gellner for the perfect hosting and to Marthe Achtnich and Ina Zharkevich for the instant solidarity.
Loubna Akhrif, Morgan Clarke, David Crawford, Robert Elliot, Lucia Enia, Michael Herzfeld, Martin Holbraad, Hasna Khatibi, Samuli Schielke, and Paul Silverstein have read the book at different stages of its evolution and have provided priceless feedback that has made it simply better. Michael Herzfeld has supported me over the years well beyond the call of duty of a PhD examiner-he believed in my work from the start and it has made all the difference. Samuli Schielke has become a precious mentor and a precious friend.
Research for the book was made possible by a UK Economic and Social Research Council studentship, a Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) Pegasus Marie Sk odowska-Curie Fellowship, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Sections of chapter 3 first appeared in Time Society (2016) 25(1), and a version of chapter 4 was first published in American Ethnologist (2016) 43(3). Thank you to everyone at Indiana University Press for transforming my writing into a book, and to Jennifer Crane for shepherding its production; to Paul Silverstein, Susan Slymovics, and Ted Swedenburg for welcoming my work to the PCMENA series and supporting the project from the start; and to Omar Oualili for helping me standardize my unruly Darija.
Finally, this book would not have been possible without family. My deepest thanks to my lifelong friends who have been there through thick and thin: Aziza Bouchnaoui, Alessandra Checchinato, Jihane Choukri, Diletta Diazzi, Hayat Eddine, Rose Hackman, Giacomo Lo Giusto, Alison Macdonald, Serena Matarese, Ania Obolewicz, Caterina Palli, Diego Rinaldi, Yeni Rizzuti, Eugenio Sorrentino, David tefan, Joshua Surtees. Thank you to my Peverati, Elliot, Carli, and Ma family for their love. Thank you to my brother, Colin, and my parents, Carola and Rob, for being my safety and my inspiration. And thank you to Martin and Lila for everything.
N OTE ON T RANSLITERATION
Moroccan Arabic, or Moroccan dialectal Arabic (Darija), does not have a standardized written form and varies significantly across regions as well as along gender, generational, and many other lines. In my rendering of the language, I have standardized the transliteration, which unavoidably compromises some of Darija s vibrant variations and regional specificity but hopefully helps with consistency and clarity across the book. I have mostly followed the transliteration method of the Georgetown Classics in Arabic Language and Linguistics volumes on Moroccan Arabic (Harrell and Sobelman 2015; Harrell 2004). I have, however, simplified diacritics to make the text more widely accessible-for example, the letter s is used to transcribe both and (respectively, s and in standard transliteration) and the letter h for both and (respectively, h and in standard transliteration)-and consonants not found in English are rendered as follows:
gh (pronounced as a French r )
kh (as the last consonant in Bach )
(a voiced pharyngeal fricative)
(a glottal stop)
Hyphens are used to indicate a definite article, which is generally determined by the first sound of the word to which it is prefixed: l-brra (the outside), d-dar (the house), le-bnat (the girls). When quoting other authors and sources, I maintain the original transliteration-for example, el ghorba (state of feeling out of place, loneliness, homesickness) instead of l-ghorba when quoting Abdelmalek Sayad. I have left names of known figures and places as they are commonly recognized in English (hammam, souk, Casablanca).

I NTRODUCTION
The outside is everywhere, Saliha murmurs as she looks down at her village from a hill of the Moroccan Middle Atlas. She extends her arms, gesturing to what stands below us, taking in the clustered village houses of varied shapes and heights, the paved and unpaved streets, the shops, the hammam, the mosques, the three buses rattling toward the village, the bustling market. From afar, with striking precision, she recites the transnational ties of each building, providing me with a visual census of her village s migratory trajectories: Italy, Italy, Spain, Italy, America, Italy, France then Italy. . . . Two of the mosques, she tells me, were built with l-flus dyal brra (the money of [the] outside). The bright sign advertising the hammam was shipped from France. We look down at the miniature people walking through the narrow alleyways, sitting at the caf s, shuffling through the market lanes. Kollhom f l-brra (they are all in the outside), Saliha says. You see them here now, but they are also somewhere else: Italy, Spain, America, Saudi Arabia. There s even someone in Russia, I ve heard. . . . She pauses and then adds, Anyway, if they are not in the outside, the outside is inside them ( l-brra kayn fihom ).
The Mediterranean Atlas
This book is about the striking place migration has come to occupy in people s lives in contemporary