In this paper, I reflect on the ways in which waiting for migration requires, nurtures and ultimately produces specific kinds of subjects in a part of the world marked by decades of transnational movement towards Europe. Drawing on my ethnographic research in emigrant areas of Morocco, I trace how waiting is a constitutive element not only of migration, but also of the subjects involved in its encompassing and multidirectional processes. To do this, I trace the ways in which waiting is spoken of, embodied and reckoned with in the areas by not (yet) migrants. Focusing in particular on the experience of women married to absent migrant husbands, the paper shows how waiting in Morocco engenders specific types of people with specific kinds of social relations, interceding into the very ways in which selves in proximity of transnational mobility emerge.

As young women in a Moroccan emigrant town search for suitable husbands, they frame seemingly irreverent practices such as using makeup and premarital romances as ways to precipitate their unknown conjugal destinies. This complex “labor of hope” flows from the Islamic precept of predestination, which, far from being a fatalistic backdrop to social life, compels people to act in the human world in view of a future that has already been divinely determined. Here, destiny effectively “folds” Islam into the very texture of mundane practices that, on the surface, may seem not just distant from Islam but even antithetical to it. This phenomenon obliges us to recast Max Weber's argument on predestination and action, as well as to reconsider current anthropological debates on “everyday Islam.” [destiny, migration, hope, courtship, future, Islam, Morocco]

This preface develops an argument for a comparative anthropology that takes the concept of destiny as a fertile laboratory for anthropological thought. The articles in this collection show how destiny's distinguishing heuristic feature may be what we call "malleable fixity": a paradoxical juxtaposition of images of temporal and historical fixity with a practical reckoning and openended self-reorientation. Exploring the radically different ways in which destiny is evoked, enacted, and (re)theorized locally, we argue that an anthropology of destiny is, at its heart, the comparative study of diverse temporal orderings of human-as well as divine and cosmic-action.

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Presses de Sciences Po. © Presses de Sciences Po. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

No abstract