FRAMES OF REFERENCE: Cloth, Community, and Knowledge Ideology in Morocco

Abstract

This paper explores how one type of traditional Moroccan cloth comes to be known through different epistemological frameworks or “knowledge ideologies.” The case in question involves a rural women’s weaving cooperative and Moroccan state strategies to rationalize cloth production, which here takes the form of technical training and product development workshops. A struggle over the right to determine the present and future of cloth‐making manifests in part as differing perspectives among weavers and government officials about legitimate quality assessment criteria and methods, and the appropriate color of the local cloth. At the center of these competing ways to evaluate or define traditional cloth is the question of authority: who has the right to assess quality and what aspects of their identity should factor into this right? The case of traditional weaving in Morocco underscores how “knowing” and “knowing what’s best” are thoroughly entangled in the domain of cultural heritage and its management.

MAKING KIN: Rawness, Porosity, and the Agencies

“…These perspectives help better attune scholars to the different ontologies and understandings of objects (see Basu 2017; Liboiron 2021). This comes out beautifully in Berk's (2022) discussion of the newly made kelp water carriers and stringybark canoes, Nicholas's (2022) discussions of the threads of textiles, Stuckey's (2022) commentary on the memory‐work around photographic albums and houses, and Cruz's (2022) examination of the different localities through which heritage is enacted in southern Mozambique. Taking meshworks or its analogue, kin‐making, seriously means attending to the lived realities of materiality—and working to keep these connections in view.…”

BEING CALLED TO ACTION: Contemporary Museum Ethnographies

“…Claire Nicholas's article focuses on how a Moroccan wool textile, the jellaba zaouiya , throws into relief the clash of two “knowledge ideologies.” For accomplished weavers, the quality and value of wool and/or a finished garment are assessed by seeing and touching the object in question, whereas a state‐contracted “expert” relies on and enforces quantifiable techno‐scientific standards such as the strength, density, and resistance to shrinkage of a specific cloth. There is no disagreement that the jellaba zaouiya is significant cultural heritage in Morocco; rather, what is at stake, Nicholas (2022) argues, is how its material qualities are measured/judged, and by whom. For the makers who are descendant from the priestly class, their quasi‐sacred status is inextricable from the prestige of the cloth they make; there is an emphatically blurry boundary between persons and things.…”