1- “Clad in Mourning: Violence, Subjugation and the Struggle of the Soul,”
“My considerations are rooted in my ethnographic work in Morocco, and in the insistent questions raised by my interlocutors to me, as well as in the
predicaments of their lives. I read Fanon side by side with a parallel reflection on destruction, trauma, and the possibility of ethical-political struggle in a contemporary Islamic tradition, in the context of a renewed problematization of the concept of jihad al-nafs, “the struggle of the soul” (but also struggle at such), in relation to the experience of oppression, violence, pain, melancholy, and what Fanon calls the “annihilation of being.” Pp.26
“Spiritual slaughter”, Sheikh Yassine explains, is caused by the injustice of
a tyranny that concentrates all wealth and power in the hands of the few, in a
situation in which it becomes both self-evident and justified that only some have
access to humanity. The slaughter, or tadbih, destroys the possibility of imagining
the future, as well as of relating to the past. It freezes time, and reduces life to a
flat surface without exits. The only “exits”, under the rule of “soul murder”, are
suicide and self-immolation, if one has the strength and courage to pursue them.
But these are flights, says Sheikh Yassine, and constitute a religious transgression,
a ma`siyya.” Pp.31
2- Observing the Other: Reflections on Anthropological Fieldwork:
“In this paper, I shall attempt to develop a psychoanalytic hypothesis concerning the psychological nature of fieldwork for the anthropologist who possesses, in the ethnographer EvansPritchard’s words (1962), the capacity “to abandon himself without reserve,” “to think and feel alternately as a savage and as a European” and for whom the native society is “in the anthropologist himself and not merely in his notebooks.” Pp.614
“Malinowski’s intense feelings for his mother while in the field-one manifestation of the regression induced by his isolation in a totally alien setting-are recorded regularly throughout the first section of the Diary: “Dream of settling permanently in the South Seas; how will all this strike me when I’m back in Poland? I think-of Mother. Self-reproach” (p. 22). Recurrently, Malinowski‘s romantic memories turn to his mother: “I still think about and am in love with T.-It is the magic of her body that fills me, and the poetry of her presence-all my associations lead in her direction. Moreover, I have moments of general dejection. . . At last I begin to feel a deep strong longing for Mother in my innermost being (pp.27-28). “Occasionally strong yearning for Mother-really if I could keep in communication with Mother I would not mind anything and my low spirits would have no foundation” (p. 41). Significantly, there is only one incidental mention of his father in the Diary and it is of more than passing interest that, subsequent to his fieldwork, Malinowski published a series of essays disputing the universality of the Oedipus complex.” Pp.618
