In watching Moroccans watch television, Becky L. Schulthies challenges traditional understandings of language modes, literacy, and linguistic categorization. After a decade of fieldwork in Fez, Morocco, Schulthies found that Fassis lament television, radio, print, and online media (often crafted by the state to exemplify a certain type of citizen) as failed channels of communication and decry their inability to produce a desired Moroccanness. In channeling these laments in a multilingual, multigraphic space, Fassis produce relationalities that create and maintain nationality projects. In other words, media in Morocco make and unmake political communities, but not in the way one might think.
Schulthies’ work alternates between ethnographic tidbits, or ‘episodes’, and long moments of deep, informed analyses of lament, literacy, register usage, ‘orthographic heterogeneity’, and mediation, to address political community-building projects. At the center of her study sits Roman Jakobson's phatic function—the language function that maintains relationality—as discursive labor that Fassis do to maintain and harness Moroccanness. She first explores these channels of relationality in questioning notions of state-sanctioned illiteracy. In Fez, it is uncommon to have books in one's home and talking over and to television programs is routine and expected. When a news program comes on, those Fassis who are not able to interpret printed texts are key actors in critical reasoning, or ‘literate listening’. Full awareness and understanding can only be gained from conversation distributed among family members (69).
Television programs that Fassis watch include public service television, a genre the Moroccan state has created to modernize Moroccanness by employing a traditional storytelling register of talk that promotes institutionally desired moral ideologies. However, representation of the quintessential Moroccan female trickster, as deployed by the state in its modernity project, creates chronotopic dissonance and nostalgia for an old way of speaking among citizens. Thus the medium did produce Moroccanness as Moroccans lamented the channeling failures of the storytelling register together, and it was that channeling of lament that produced notions of unity.
Another lamented channeling failure resulted from the state's desired orthographic usage and deployment of fuṣḥā, formal Arabic, in a space with colonially tinged French and ‘everyday language’, darīja. Critically, Schulthies argues that scripts were not just seen, but heard and allowed for ‘graphic-sonic orthographic heterogeneity’ (104), where script choice was a political act, ‘to align oneself with a Moroccanness relationality project’ (136). In this sensory-bending analysis, a written script could and did represent spoken channels—much like the phatic labor of religious discourse in Fez relied on the interpretation of multimodal signs.
Those who are not linguistic anthropologists might find Schulthies’ text daunting, and it is most appropriate for graduate students. However, in its technicality, this work offers a revised conceptualization of what listening, speaking, reading, and writing are, and what they do. It also offers a rich analysis of media channels as they structure sociality and makes one wonder if anyone can read a text without hearing it. Ultimately, Schulthies’ work productively blurs linguistic categorization and considers the full spectrum of multimodal communicative practice.
