Disclosing Elite Ecologies by Bas van Heur Bassens David

Author:Bas van Heur, Bassens David [Bas van Heur, Bassens David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000406177
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Analyzing affective practices

Empirically attending to formulations of emergence requires taking into account material and social becomings and the paths they depend upon; the modes through which agents interact with one another; and, most importantly, how all of these feed back into regeneration and differentiation (De Landa, 2002). By focusing in this example of how diasporic visitors become contextually elite in Moroccan urban spaces, this paper, as part of a larger project investigating diasporic belonging in Morocco (Wagner, 2011), reflects how eliteness might unexpectedly emerge in such an ecology in the dynamics of many social and material agents in interaction. In fact, eliteness was not a primary thematic concern of the original project, which was an attempt to ethnographically and ethnomethodologically comprehend the communicative and leisure practices of diasporic visitors during their summer holidays. That is, this analysis is built primarily upon ethnographic observation following mobile participants from three families, over several years as well as dozens of others encountered during fieldwork over two summers, with ethnomethodological attention to the practical accomplishment of visiting Morocco in concert with diasporic networks.

Effectively, eliteness only became relevant during analysis as more and more of the observed practices and reported discourses pulled me in to a social organization of economic, material and spatial boundaries differentiating DVs from local residents. As an ethnographer developing relationships with research participants, I also participated in an “education by attention” (Ingold, 2014, p. 388), learning instinctively how to follow practices and respond to rules that interlace to make up a collectivity. I learned to recognize what characteristics of distinction separate those who make (and can exceed) rules from those who do not. Close participant observation brought attention to how such rules operate to keep some members in and others out, and how they can repeat and differentiate with feedback. In that sense, this ethnography is ethnomethodological by focusing on the interactional affiliations and boundaries emerging in the micro-activity of everyday life (Goffman, 1971), and in this paper particularly on micro-activity and materiality of mobility and encounter in urban public space (Jensen, 2006; Wilson, 2016). The data presented below, as well as my analysis, is therefore based not only on practices observed, but also on how I oriented to them as an “educated” ethnographer along the rules and mobilities I learned to follow with DVs and in Moroccan public space more generally.

Discursively, the premise of contingent eliteness as outlined at the beginning of this paper is built on a perception of a perception as recounted in an interview context. Conversations about visitation practices were also collected in this project, and the metaphors and frameworks participants used to describe their orientations towards those activities are taken literally and seriously in relation to ethnographic observations (Katz, 1999). These meta-discussions often indicated attitudes that might be difficult to observe as “practiced” – such as Soumia’s possible choice not to visit Morocco, which she may attribute (at least in part) to feeling annoyed at being perceived as arrogant. Such reports also indicate some idea of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.