Sociology in Morocco and General Sociology

One of the challenges facing post-colonial Morocco was the decolonization of sociology and how to rid it of ethnocentric ideology. The aim of this article is to retrace the identity of sociology in Morocco in relation to the colonial period and general sociology, and to question the challenge of the de-Westernization of sociology in Morocco.

Taking stock of the decisive turning points in the history of sociology in Morocco leading towards the construction of the sociological self enables us to analyze the dynamics of conjunction and disjunction between the evolution of sociology in Morocco and sociology in general.

Sociology in Morocco rethought and decolonized

The rise of sociology and anthropology in the Western world was key to colonialist movements, providing them with a political strategy through which to control Indigenous resistance. Scientific knowledge is a non-military force; it is less costly and ensures greater control over the colonized. So, while sociology aims to change the world, it is also guided by underlying ideological tensions.

Historically and politically, Morocco is closely linked to colonialism, along three differentiated periods: pre-colonial Morocco, colonized Morocco after 1912, and Morocco since independence in 1956. For this reason, the characterization of pre-independence sociology in Morocco as ideological and colonial requires great epistemological caution, and enables us to account for the emergence of the sociological identity of Moroccan society as a decolonized entity.

The colonial sociological literature on Morocco is extensive. Officials made an invaluable contribution with monographs and in-depth field surveys. That research was institutionalized by the “Mission scientifique”, the “Section sociologique des Affaires indigènes” and then the “Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines”, producing a corpus of “reference” for later generations of sociologists, who did indeed return to it in an epistemologically critical way, with the aim of creating a national sociology emancipated from colonial ideology.

Haunted by the desire to free itself from its colonial past, sociology has turned towards empirical and methodological refinement. The emblematic sociological figure of Paul Pascon is proof of this. To understand and transform society, he opted for action research, demonstrating a conceptual creativity that put the sociology of Moroccan society in disjunction with Marxism that had far-reaching echoes during the 1970s. Through the notion of “composite society”, Pascon demonstrated how several modes of production (tribalism, capitalism, etc.) can coexist without the demarcation lines between them being necessarily definitive.

The emerging sociology was defined by public action and funding from international organizations. As a result, it was generally dominated by rural and women’s studies. While the founding fathers opted for a holistic perspective embodied in Marxism, the later generation of researchers tended towards more sector-based research.

Decolonized sociology emerged with pioneers who built a line of escape from colonial knowledge and its ideologies. In its search for its identity, the challenge was to rethink the “social we” (nous social) and rebuild niches of knowledge about Moroccan society.

The scientific appropriation of the “social we”

The mission of the pioneers of sociology in independent Morocco was to catalyze the transformation of the world for the benefit of the working classes. They campaigned for a sociology that distanced itself from colonialism and was politically operative on behalf of the exploited.

While national sociology was concerned with social demand, anthropology remained faithful to its quest to understand society. Post-independence anthropological literature has been devoted to revising its colonial counterpart. It set out to access new spheres of religious and political research, and did so with a view to scientifically appropriating the “social we”.

Critical examination and decolonization do not mean wiping the slate clean of the legacy of colonial literature. Although Eurocentric, that literature provides invaluable empirical archives on people, social relationships, tribal dynamics, political power and so on.

On another level of the scientific construction of anthropology in Morocco, awareness of the epistemological gap between the Western, but also colonial, anthropologist and the local anthropologist does not mean that the latter is necessarily more familiar with Moroccan culture.

Of course, the sense of strangeness in the two cases is not the same. In the case of the Western or colonial anthropologist, the gap is ontological, due to an obsession with colonial ideology and the imaginary of the colonized as “savage”, “primitive”, “underdeveloped”, etc. In contrast, for the local researcher, the gap is epistemological and emerges from the desire to produce local scientific knowledge that is valid for transforming society.

In order to escape from doxa and immediate evidence, the local anthropologist and sociologist adopt Alfred Schütz’s “strangeness of the familiar”. This reflexivity concerning the relationships of the local and the colonial anthropologist to the community that is the object of their research would produce a positive epistemological otherness vis-à-vis colonial literature. As a result, the boundaries between the two literatures remain porous for as long as the re-construction of a scientific sociology of Moroccan society continues to probe this dialectical relationship between colonial and decolonized.

For a sociology with a de-Westernized perspective

Despite its epistemological break with colonial thought, while maintaining a positive otherness towards it, national sociology is not in disjunction with general sociology. Like the latter, Moroccan sociology has remained a nomothetic science of the social, capable of generalizing concepts and establishing laws about social life. But in what sense can it only be emancipated through the production of de-Westernized knowledge?

The transition from coloniality to decolonization was aided by the mobilization of the sociological paradigm of “transforming the world” in favor of citizens and the anthropological paradigm of “looking from the inside.” The construction of the “social nous conceived by ourselves” and the consequent emancipation of the sociology of Moroccan society were not achieved without methodological and theoretical innovation nor without profound ontological and epistemological reflexivity.

Yet the epistemological discourse of the de-Westernization of knowledge calls into question the relationship between local sociology and general sociology, which, to the extent that it is Western, represents hegemony of the global over the local.

Indeed, the challenge of de-Westernization means that sociology in Morocco, as in other countries of the Global South, must adopt a non-Western, anti-hegemonic perspective. De-Westernizing sociology means ceasing not just to be colonized but to be dominated and inferior.

The multiplicity of the social can only lead to the emergence of new, credible local knowledge as an alternative to the dominant “global” variety. As long as the empirical terrain in Morocco is fertile, the construction of a local sociology that takes account of its historical, political and socio-cultural singularities can help it escape alienation and produce a local cognitive space that places it at odds with Western hegemony. This does not mean isolation, but rather the elaboration of an inter-cognition between “local” and “global”, and the establishment of a sociology capable of energizing a new relationship between the two scales.

In conclusion, the birth of sociology not only dates to its founding fathers and early pioneers; it is constantly regenerated and reinvented to bring it into line with the evolution of societies, but also with relevant epistemological debates, particularly those in the Global South. The sociology of Moroccan society therefore needs to form its own identity, deterritorializing concepts and theories, appropriating paradigms, and establishing a transnational sociological niche capable of contributing to the universal and inter-civilizational creative accumulation of knowledge.

Kawtar Lebdaoui, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Morocco <kawtar.lebdaoui@gmail.com>