2021FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11 (1): 281–290

CURRENTS: DECOLONIZING ETHNOGRAPHIES

Decolonizing anthropology at a distance

Some thoughts
Abdellah H A M M O U D I , Princeton University

Through the notions of distance, double critique, and colonial difference, this essay suggests a decolonization through a novel
usage of colonial ethnographies. Analyzing the case of Morocco to reflect on the question of language(s) used in writing eth-
nography, specifically Arabic, French, and others, and unpacking the notion of colonial difference, the essay attempts to break
away from the Western episteme. An “outside” to that episteme is found in the confrontation between knowledge accumulated in
the written and the vernacular Arabic on the one hand, and Western knowledge (here, anthropological knowledge), on the other
hand. This double critique aims at a reappropriation of colonial ethnography, and restructuring of the anthropological field, thus
reframing the question of decolonization. The hope is that this reframing may have some general relevance.
Keywords: decolonizing, language, double critique, distance, ethnographies, colonial difference, reappropriation

Critiques of the Western episteme, and the numerous
attempts at breaking away from the ethnocentric, have
opened many crucial vistas for the renewal of anthro-
pological discourse. However, it seems that this salutary
movement still carries within it some unproblematized
conditions of its production. Decolonizing at a distance
from those conditions can allow for the unproblemat-
ized to come into view: for example, in which part of the
world, in which universities, does the writing and teach-
ing about decolonization happen? Location refers to the
geographic, the political, the position, and the power of
these universities in the world.
For all the indisputable importance of our new and
immediate copresence to each other through dizzying
multimedia circulation, the question of location cannot,
in my view, be neglected. Another question is that of the
language(s) used for the effecting and writing of ethnog-
raphy. To be sure, some of these issues have already caught
the attention of scholars. However, neither the relation
between language and the structure of the anthropolog-
ical field nor how the language(s) adopted may deter-
mine the nature of the produced ethnography has been
explored enough. This essay raises some of these issues
with the aim of reframing the general question regard-
ing the decolonization of ethnographic theory. The plu-
ralizing landscapes for diverse anthropologies have been
well described, together with the necessary “reanthro-
pologizations” in our fragmented, yet globalized world
(Restrepo and Escobar 2005: 113, 118–19). However, the
difficulty remains in finding an “outside” to the Western
epistemic tradition from which pluralizing can proceed.
One way would be to focus on the “colonial difference”
(Mignolo 2002: 85, 88). Unpacking what the “colonial
difference” means for the countries of the “global South,”
we may encounter within its folds epistemic structures,
concepts, and thought that worked before the world of
the colony. By reworking them within a new context, we
may even walk outside Western traditions with their roots
in Enlightenment Europe.
The “outside” I write about here, and its aforemen-
tioned epistemic structures and thought, would take us
beyond the function once assigned to it as a mere limit
to the Western ratio. It would generate knowledge in its
own right. The new locales for knowledge production in
the South (notwithstanding the real changes occurring
within North and South) would produce contemporary
knowledges beside, as well as in critical exchange with,
Western ones.
In this essay, I want to stress the linguistic dimen-
sion alongside the one of the geographic locales in the

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 11, number 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/713740

© 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2021/1101-0021$10.00
 Abdellah HAMMOUDI
production of a new ethnographic knowledge. First, I
will make some remarks on language in the postinde-
pendent nation. In the second section, I evoke my own
experience as a student and researcher insofar as it was
intertwined with the problem of decolonizing anthropol-
ogy; also, I will introduce the notion of “double critique”
as an approach to decolonizing. In the third section, I
try to clarify the relation between positionality and dou-
ble critique. I take up the linguistic dimension again in
the fourth section where I reflect on language, the pro-
duction of ethnography and the structure of the anthro-
pological field.
I am aware that there are efforts that are being made
by other scholars across the world in the same direction
(Alatas 2003, 2014; Alatas and Sinha 2017; Connell, Beigel,
and Ouédraogo 2017; Onwuzuruigbo 2018, to limit my-
self to these examples). Here, I prefer to start with a case
study in Morocco from which I draw a more general con-
clusion while planning to examine these other contribu-
tions in future work.
Independent nations as new locales
of production: The linguistic dimension
Every independent nation became a new locale for knowl-
edge production. The dynamics of this new situation in-
cluded the tension between cooperation with, and auton-
omy from, the former metropole. The range of variations,
the myriad experiences around the world that bore the
imprint of the past, the colonial moment, the size and sig-
nificance of new independent entities, and so on and so
forth, are beyond the scope of this paper.
The centrality of the question of language will appear
as the discussion develops, and it is especially crucial for
the case under study because, upon independence, Mo-
rocco, like all the countries of North Africa and the Mid-
dle East, established Arabic as its “national language.”
Those countries, we may recall, had been part of the French
or British empires. From this perspective, their choice dif-
fered markedly from the ones that were made by many
newly independent nations at the time.
French and English were implanted in that region in
ways similar to the imposition of several European lan-
guages across the globe. To limit myself to the British and
French empires, English and French, to cite only these
two , became the official languages in much of Africa, the
Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere. In most places the
language of the colonizer (English or French) was adopted
as an official language coexisting with a national one (like
282
Hindi in India) or/and other languages, both written or
nonwritten, with their cultural heritages.
In Morocco, as in the rest of the Maghreb, French
was to be relegated to a secondary position and replaced
by Arabic. True, Arabic, too, came from outside the re-
gion. But it had established itself as the administrative
and scholarly medium since the eighth century CE, as-
suming a dominant status and role in countries whose
native language was Amazigh. A nonwritten language at
the time, except for a number of texts which later came
into existence in the Arabic alphabet, and other texts
which were transcribed from the oral tradition in pho-
netic writing during the colonial period, Amazigh be-
came written in the Tifinagh script in the 1980s, and it
is now enshrined as a national language beside Arabic
in the Moroccan constitution (Hammoudi 2015: chap-
ter 5 [in Arabic]; El Guabli 2020). I have insisted else-
where that it would be misleading to equate the intro-
duction of Arabic through a conquest whose motto was
spreading Islam, with the specifically modern settler and
colonization type of language introduction (Hammoudi
2015: 184–85, 223–24).
Be that as it may, the point here is to stress a difference
between Morocco and the Maghreb on the one hand,
and a number of countries, such as India, Nigeria, Uganda,
Senegal, or Ghana, for example, on the other hand. In
Morocco, decolonization, for the nationalists who took
over from the French, meant reestablishing Arabic in the
primary administrative and academic role, and its de-
velopment as the main medium of communication in the
long run, despite the actual widespread practice of the
Amazigh language.
More important for my purpose is the fact that, in my
view, the language dimension is a consequential one for
the practice of ethnography and the structure of the an-
thropological field. As I noted earlier, I will deal with this
issue later, after a description of my own experience re-
garding the problem of decolonizing anthropology.
Decolonizing at a distance: “Double critique”
and the rejection of anthropology
In the aftermath of the national liberation in Morocco,
the legitimacy of the practice of social sciences as such
was posited as contingent on their decolonization. There
was a consensus over the necessity to decolonize as the
nation strove to create a national university system. The
task was a daunting one, especially since the country had
to transform the colonial research institutions it inherited
283
into a new university and establish new curricula. Mo-
rocco accomplished those tasks based on the French model
with the aid of the former colonizing power. Furthermore,
the colonial legacy included an exceptionally large body
of social scientific knowledge in French, both academic
and policy-oriented about the land and its peoples.
At the beginning of this new era, it was all the more
fitting to teach the social sciences in the language of the
former metropole. But the inherently contradictory de-
colonizing discourse couched in the French language was
met by a powerful call for “Arabizing”—that is, replac-
ing French with Arabic—that emanated from nationalist
quarters and constituencies. And, in any case, a process
of a poorly planned Arabization began at the end of the
1960s.
The newly established Institut de Sociologie, created
in Rabat in 1965, taught anthropology in French. We
studied “classics,” such as Émile Durkheim, James Frazer,
Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, and Arnold van Gennep. Young
scholars such as Negib Bouderbala and Gregory Lazarev,
supported by more established ones such as Joseph Gabel
and Georges Balandier, taught the courses. One course,
on the sociology of the Moroccan peasantry and its modes
of production, taught by the well-known Moroccan soci-
ologist Paul Pascon, was an eye-opener for me. Pascon
was a pioneer and aguably the true founder of Moroccan
sociology. Some of us studied Ibn Khaldun in the philos-
ophy department at the Faculty of Humanities. We also
learned a lot about Marxism, as well as the ideas of Ray-
mond Aron on industrial societies. And we were intro-
duced to some texts of Max Weber (the famous piece on
axiological neutrality, and his book on the Protestant ethic
and “the spirit” of capitalism). At some point, Ernest Gell-
ner, who was completing his book on Moroccan tribalism
(published later as Saints of the Atlas), briefly introduced
E.E. Evans-Pritchard and his Oxford school in a talk he
gave at the Faculty of Humanities. Jean-Paul Sartre was
all over the place, you could hardly miss reading or hear-
ing about him . . .
A somewhat ironic situation emerged: between 1965
and 1967, while I was being taught the works of these im-
portant authors, anthropology would soon be denounced
as the colonial science par excellence (see Sinha, this issue).
Indeed, the other social sciences were well-accepted on
the condition of being more or less decolonized, while
anthropology apparently had no redeeming condition.
Critics proposed to ban it purely and simply.
However, since no decree was officially issued in this
regard, the situation of the social sciences remained un-
DECOLONIZING ANTHROPOLOGY AT A DISTANCE
clear. Students, like myself at the time, were instructed
in French and in the French tradition, and part of that
tradition did not make a clean-cut separation between
sociology and anthropology. And, as we entered active
life after college, we took up jobs as “sociologists,” thus
contributing to the survival of anthropology on the side-
lines until the closure of the Institut de Sociologie (1971–
1972), in the context of rising political authoritarianism
in the country.
In the meantime, a possible approach as to how to pro-
ceed for decolonizing the social sciences was proposed.
Couched in different terms, by two leading figures—one
a sociologist who was also a writer, the other a historian,
who also wrote about Arab ideology—their approach
became known as “double critique.” Abdelkebir Khatibi
coined the term in French: “la double critique” in his Ma-
ghreb pluriel in 1970, but the notion was elaborated and
circulated before 1970. It was an important beginning. It
formulated the crucial point of going back and forth crit-
ically between the colonial legacy, on the one hand, and
the Arab-Islamic legacy, on the other hand: a “double cri-
tique” for a double legacy was thus proposed for a proper
decolonizing.
Meanwhile, a historian and critic of Arab ideology
came up with a formulation in more methodologically
precise terms. In a similar move to double critique, Abdal-
lah Laroui proposed “to compare the image produced
about us” by colonial knowledge with “the image we could
work out about ourselves from our own scholarly tradi-
tion.” This cross-examination would indicate zones of
overlap and corroboration and help theorizing about our
past and present. Laroui warned that unless we proceed
to this cross-examination for producing an alternative
knowledge, our decolonizing would lack a method and
remain “pure ideology” (Laroui 1967: 164). Be that as it
may, in the context in which those ideas were proposed,
economics and sociology seemed to require only adjust-
ments rather than a total decolonizing, apparently because
they were deemed universal knowledge. History occupied
center stage as the discipline that would recapture and re-
habilitate a past and traditions that predated the colonial
onslaught. Economics, much of which at the time was
Marxist-derived, was entrusted with the task of develop-
ment and planning for a better future, which is another
way to say “development studies.” In the field of history
specifically, the decolonizing dynamic resulted in a take-
over of history writing in and about North Africa and the
Maghreb by a generation of scholars who hailed from these
societies.
 Abdellah HAMMOUDI
Those debates, together with some skills in sociology,
accompanied me in 1967 when I took a position as a
rural sociologist in a development project of the Draa
Valley, a Pre-Saharan string of oases south of the Atlas
mountains. My work was to help in the conception and
implementation of plans to transform agricultural pro-
duction through modern irrigation. Given the reliance of
the region on a century-old irrigation (Hammoudi 1985)
and agricultural system, my task was to help study that
system in order to advise about its potential transforma-
tion and modernization (in the parlance of that time).
Two things became clear as soon as I started my work:
first, ethnography proved to be key to the kind of data I
had to collect. This did not mean discarding the classic
sociological techniques, such as sampling, questionnaires,
and so forth, but it meant immersion within the commu-
nities, seeking help from persons with whom I needed to
build long-term relationships, relying on the vernacular
language, but also on written Arabic to read books and
local archives extant in that language. That is, beside the
classic methods in sociology, my work had to be in-depth
ethnography in the vernacular and written languages. Sec-
ond, as soon as my fieldwork regarding issues such as re-
sources, population, community structures, stratification,
land and water ownership and management, languages,
and customs developed, I realized the pertinence of colonial
knowledge to my own enterprise because all these matters
and more referred me to a wealth of systematic works
which were completed under colonial rule, some of which
were conducted in the very last years of the colonial ad-
ministration before Morocco’s independence in 1956.
The more my fieldwork developed, the more I real-
ized that I had to do more, not less, reading of the co-
lonial anthropological archive. And the deeper I went into
both tasks, the clearer it became to me that decoloniz-
ing had to be conducted through these most colonial of
knowledges. Interestingly, the Moroccan administration
was drawing on this colonial knowledge to implement its
policies without critically developing it. In my own work,
I recognized in this colonial archive the input and the
knowledge of the people of the Draa Valley, thus I decided
to add critically to it in the hope of defending their views
on the “development” plans that were underway.
To be sure, none of the social scientific disciplines were
immune to the colonial paradigm and its political impli-
cations. And in any case, none of them paid much atten-
tion to microstructures and concrete situations the way
robust ethnography usually does. And some colonial eth-
nography did just that about the communities I had come
284
to live and work with in 1967 in the Draa Valley. The
newly established Civil Service created in the aftermath
of independence did not only occupy the very premises
of the colonial one, but it also inherited its abundant ar-
chived knowledge.
I found a wealth of information, often enough describ-
ing some of the exact practices my fieldwork dealt with,
each time I looked into the colonial archive on some of
the abovementioned matters and many others. Also, the
existence of this colonial archived knowledge made it pos-
sible to register changes in many practices, such as water
distribution, intercommunity pacts, land and pastures
disputes, conflicts, to mention only a few examples. Those
archives had been constituted by trained French civil ser-
vants (“officiers des affaires indigènes”), who were well-
trained in languages (spoken Arabic , sometimes also in
the written form , and Amazigh) as well as in ethnography.
I became firmly convinced that there was something
to be done with the colonial, nonacademic work, as well
as with academic ethnography. I found that there was a
glaring contradiction between the public discourse reject-
ing anthropology and the Moroccan nationalist adminis-
tration quietly using it for its own management purposes.
The postindependence Moroccan administrators consulted
these archives, and quite often my interlocutors referred
to those French officers’ writings, not infrequently citing
them by name. Thus, colonial knowledge was used in prac-
tice, albeit reinterpreted in evolving contexts. Moreover,
when and where that had resulted in material arrange-
ments regarding resources or changes in law and custom,
for example, those arrangements became part of realities
I happened to study with the help of my interlocutors.
The notion of a possible reappropriation of colonial
ethnography was not clear to me at that time. I had an
intuition of it at the end of my college education. But on
that point, my fieldwork activity had to wait several years
before coming into fruition.
In the meantime, deep immersion in fieldwork alerted
me to the importance of what I call “the external eye.” In
the case at hand, I found that French writers described
things that did not seem to have elicited the interest of
their Moroccan counterparts. For example, there were
very few records about water in Arabic, except for some
recording of the sharing of water in traditional canals.
Matters of religious and legal interest were written about,
but nothing of real importance about human forms of
assembling since Ibn Kaldun (Alatas 2014); extensive
genealogies were sometimes kept by family or commu-
nity leaders, but many “customary” legal codes were only
285
recorded under French demand and supervision. By
contrast, the French wrote about everything I mentioned
above, albeit in an objectifying sense. They also wrote
about many other things, such as village, house, family,
rituals, techniques of date and other crop production. In
short, their foreign eye was attracted to all kinds of things
and manners that did not seem to solicit the attention
of Moroccans. Not only their colonial power and con-
trol, but also their mere curiosity triggered by difference
demanded systematic knowledge of things Moroccans,
perhaps, took for granted.
This was often obvious to me when I talked with peo-
ple. Many of my questions did surprise them: “Didn’t you
know all these things as a Moroccan like us?” they often
asked me. Development and ethnography forced me to
position myself ultimately as a kind of “external eye,” if not
a foreign one, although life in the oasis was not new to
me. This problem of belonging and yet positing myself
through my ethnographic practice as a kind of external eye
would often be asked of me throughout my ethnographic
career.
Time and again, I found myself reflecting on this “ex-
ternal eye.” Through my intensive reading of the colo-
nial body of ethnographies, I had trained myself in order
to try and fathom how a sort of externality is compara-
ble to but not the same as what I found at work in the
colonial ethnographies, and the ones written about Mo-
rocco by non-Moroccans. Also, I did another exercise by
trying to be reflexive about the questions I asked my in-
terlocutors and the ones they asked me back, sometimes
quite curtly. My new sort of external eye proved compa-
rable, yet different from what I could identify in reading
non-Moroccan ethnographers. Mine was intimate yet,
as I could glimpse, it may have the sort of externality I
mentioned. Another outcome of these exercises was that
I became able to do an ethnographic reading of the co-
lonial texts: a practice I did more intensively after my
work in the Dra Valley, which was followed by two years
of doctoral coursework in Paris (1971–1972).
Those two years in France were a period of intense
theoretical learning in classes and workshops and, per-
haps more, through the effervescence that followed the
1968 movement. The revolution had failed and gone were
the old Marxist paradigms. New ones had to be invented
to deal with cultural forms, power, and the immediate
acting of freedoms within a broad social movement. One
could still study Lévi-Strauss, as I did, but new seminars,
which were debating the culture-nature articulation, were
attracting more students. New literary criticism and de-
DECOLONIZING ANTHROPOLOGY AT A DISTANCE
bates, under the direction of Roland Barthes and his col-
laborators, were unpacking bourgeois morality. As a matter
of fact, it was debate that mattered. Existentialism, decon-
struction of the subject by psychoanalysis, discourse and
power theory, and feminist theory coexisted and conflicted.
But if those views conflicted, they were often united in ral-
lies and street demonstrations. All forms of domination
(including the ones denounced during the recent liber-
ation war in Algeria and the ongoing one in Vietnam)
weighed on the imagination of the present and the future.
Also, the revolution in China as well as the Latin American
movements were very present in the debates for change.
And this, quite importantly, spurred academic changes.
So, for example, the critique of the relationship between
anthropology and colonial domination was becoming more
audible (Leclerc 1972), and Claude Lévi-Strauss was taken
to task for showing too little engagement with ethnocide,
especially regarding Native Americans, and with the co-
lonial devastations and genocides (Jaulin 1970, Jaulin and
Renaud 1972). The well-known writings of Pierre Bour-
dieu and Abdelmalek Sayad were important for under-
standing colonialism in North Africa and beyond (add-
ing to the earlier theoretical and critical writings of Albert
Memmi and Frantz Fanon).
During these two years in Paris, I attended lectures
and seminars, and became familiar with some of the ideas
of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and, given my in-
vestigations in colonial ethnographies, I could have started
a discursive critique of a Foucauldian sort, or a Derridean
deconstruction. But I was already engaged in the project
I had somehow intuited earlier. Teachings by two prom-
inent “Orientalists,” as they were known then, helped
deepen my understanding of Arab culture and history:
Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson were as interested
in historical and written Arabic knowledge as they were
in the contemporary lives of the “Arab Peoples.”
When I resumed research and teaching in Rabat, in
1973, I kept in touch with these innovative Oriental-
ists without knowing what to think of the lack of cross-
disciplinarity between their work and that of anthro-
pologists. For example, there was indeed very little echo
of their writings in Bourdieu’s anthropology of Algeria.
And the reverse is also true.
Positionality and double critique
Other fieldwork-based writings followed my return to
Morocco, where I took up a teaching position in the
department of the “Human Sciences,” as junior teacher,
 Abdellah HAMMOUDI
alongside with Pascon and Bouderbala, at The School
for Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine (Rabat). This pe-
riod marked a new interest in technology, systems of pro-
duction, change and tradition, which was ushered in by
collaborations with French colleagues. It also opened a new
concentration on culture, especially regarding religion.
At this juncture, similarities and differences with those
European colleagues appeared more clearly. They were
both changing their anthropological traditions and work-
ing within them. I was educated in that tradition, but while
foreign colleagues’ questions were accepted by our inter-
locutors, the same questions from me were still met with
some surprise. I had to find many justifications for this
peculiarity of mine: being Moroccan yet asking questions
about things I was supposed to know. One of my justifi-
cations was that this work could help improve local life
conditions. This was generally accepted, but only politely
by some. Finally, decolonizing did not imply a similar pro-
gram: for me it meant the creation of a new tradition, a
new knowledge that would find a place and use for the
colonial.
I had to deal more systematically with the question of
my identity—a question that appeared all along in my
fieldwork. That crucial aspect of my positionality became
clearer with time. In particular with my research on sacri-
fice, on ritual play, this positionality became paramount as
I, instead of celebrating the feast of sacrifice in my home-
town with my extended family like everyone else, was at-
tending the ceremony and asking questions about it far
from home: why aren’t you celebrating with your own
family? was the question posed to me in substance by Ali,
the head of an extended family who, nevertheless, agreed
to host me. He evidently meant that, instead of coming
to work with him learning about the Feast of Sacrifice, I
should have done what everyone is expected to do: cele-
brate and worship in family and community. I responded
that I pursued knowledge. Ali seemed to accept my (odd)
position, and invited me to stay with the family.
I wrote about this in my book, La victime et ses mas-
ques (1988b, subsequently translated into English as The
victim and its masks). It is enough to say that my position
appeared as distancing myself in order to describe some-
thing to which I felt I belonged. That is my unique po-
sition, as a Moroccan ethnographer working “at home.” I
registered this new awareness at the time in the Moroc-
can magazine Librement (Hammoudi 1988a). From then
on, I continued to reflect on some of its major implica-
tions. Thus, decolonizing came also to entail writing an-
thropology from this position.
286
I will say more about this writing of anthropology
from this position after I mention a methodological-
theoretical move I made in that book. The sacrifice and
the masquerade that followed it were consistently sepa-
rated in the large body of the colonial literature that de-
veloped about them since the late nineteenth century. I
moved to account for them as different parts of one and
the same global religious and cultural event. It was a break
with the colonial past that put me firmly on the way to
developing a decolonizing lens in anthropology.
But first, some remarks on position and positionality
seem in order. We recall that “double critique” called for
a mediation of the social scientist between two series of
images and knowledges. I mentioned some of the im-
portant epistemic steps this approach achieved. However,
from the new realization of the sort of positionality I had
to occupy, the work of mediation had to base itself on a
clarification of the relationship between subject/object.
A measure of reflexivity leads the Moroccan ethnographer
studying at home to realize that s/he occupies an aporetic
position, one of extreme intimacy with what s/he studies,
doubled with indispensable distancing. Having repudi-
ated the colonial, s/he realized that the Moroccan collec-
tive enacted a subjectivity only momentarily obscured
by colonial objectivation. Likewise, in her/his very role of
mediation, the ethnographer assumes her/his problem-
atic subject/object position. Problematic and aporetic,
this position nonetheless gives a distance from which
s/he can describe the collective and its practices in which
s/he has been socialized. A new and decolonized knowl-
edge will have to be produced from that position. Unsta-
ble and aporetic as it is, this positionality must be accepted
with its limitations and yet made productive.
I had to admit several limitations, and three of them
seem most important. Reflexivity cannot make my con-
sciousness totally transparent to myself. Far from it. The
distance I achieve cannot be taken as something to be
achieved in the same manner and degree by everyone.
Each of us may only work out a variable manner and de-
gree of distance. Therefore, my distance is not to be taken
as a yardstick, but an example (not exemplary). What
seems important is what each effort at distancing may
permit to be seen, which hitherto was invisible. There is
no normalized and exactly measured distance everyone
may achieve, in the manner of a tool for car repair. The
basic question for a Moroccan working “at home”is to
defamiliarize the self with things learned and incorpo-
rated through the socializing processes. And it is obvi-
ous that every distance reveals some things and obscures
287
others. A third limitation relates to the double critique:
here also the subjectivity of the anthropologist, in one way
or another, may elude awareness. For all these reasons,
the crucial matter is debate and comparisons among col-
leagues, to enrich knowledge as “work in progress” that
develops by probing limitations.
Assuming this new position, as I came to realize only
recently, the postcolonial ethnographer must begin anew.
S/he finds herself/himself creating a tradition of ethnog-
raphy with differences and similarities with his/her non-
Moroccan colleagues who, unlike him, have to familiarize
with things Moroccan (Borneman and Hammoudi 2009:
271; Silverstein 2020). This should not come as a surprise
since European and American colleagues, and others, work
within their anthropological traditions. The question for
a Moroccan anthropologist working “at home” is what
it is that s/he is supposed to do with the massive colonial
knowledge s/he has inherited.
My answer regarding this problem is that this huge co-
lonial archive may be reappropriated and reassigned. I
gave an example earlier on of a “practical reappropria-
tion.” It later appeared to me that I had been practicing
theoretical appropriation since my critical writing about
colonial anthropology. As an ethnographer, I practiced
“thick description” (Geertz 1973) of very localized mat-
ters, together with the very local connections among them.
However, I do not use the “text metaphor,” nor the notion
of translation for which Geertz has been taken to task.
Language and writing mediate my ethnography, which,
I insist, inscribes propositions, keywords, and long speeches
by my interlocutors explaining to me their practices. And
in those speeches, I also see my interlocutors consider-
ing the futures Moroccans, including myself, aspired for.
In this view, the myriad localized structures, and prac-
tices, described by the colonials, were not so much wrong
as wrongly fitted, that is, seen as pure fragments within
the large context of colonial Empire.
Similarly, sacrifice and masquerades, which I studied
in the 1980s (Hammoudi 1988b), were characteristically
described by a long tradition of colonial ethnography as
two fragments from different religions (paganism and Is-
lam). French ethnography developed, from the 1930s on,
a narrative that separates Arabs from Berbers (today we
say Amazigh). According to that narrative, Islam is a for-
eign religion brought in to North Africa by the Arabs.
This narrative stressed a “native” and more “authentic”
Amazigh religious and cultural stratum, which the colo-
nials insisted was akin to the Greco-Roman, and, at least
by implication, to the modern French who ruled North
DECOLONIZING ANTHROPOLOGY AT A DISTANCE
Africa. This same basic narrative was also at work in ac-
counting for the structures of society and polity.
A Moroccan postcolonial ethnography had to avoid
obscuring the difference between sacrifice and masquer-
ade, yet it was most crucial to redescribe them as parts
of a contemporary composition, celebrating tradition and
looking forward to the future—reading them within the
cultural and political dynamics in Morocco and beyond.
Colonial ethnography depicted them as local fragments
and fitted them into a global French empire. Thus, it dis-
mantled the composition the people put together every
year. To decolonize, in this context, meant to recognize
the fragments as components, and to reconnect them by
overcoming colonial political dismantling.
Decolonizing at a distance:
Language, knowledge production,
and the restructuring of the field
The notion of decolonizing through double critique was
handed to us by Abdelkebir Khatibi and Abdallah Laroui.
Neither of them added a reworking of any sort of colo-
nial ethnography. Both were preoccupied with finding
some epistemic premises that may make possible the pro-
duction of a social science from the region (and not only
on the region). One of them (Laroui) rejected anthropol-
ogy and had no use for discourse and power theory or
deconstruction. Khatibi understood that those theories
relativized and radically destabilized traditional West-
ern epistemes, although, as I personally knew him, at some
point he favored deconstruction and was close to Derrida.
Walter Mignolo (2002) mentions that Khatibi, never-
theless, thought that the works of Foucault and Derrida
were not able to break away from Western traditions.
My contention is that neither of those two philoso-
phers, Derrida and Foucault, nor others, broke away from
Western traditions, with the possible exception of Henry
Corbin, and René Guénon (the latter venturing into mys-
ticism and theosophy). One condition, staying with the
region (and two examples) I am concerned with, was the
knowledge of Arabic and/or Persian. Corbin mastered
Persian, and Guénon, Arabic. Neither Foucault nor Der-
rida knew those two languages and the conceptual res-
onances encapsulated in them. As matter of fact, this
was, and still is in large part, the preserve of “Oriental”
or “Middle Eastern Studies.”
In the case at hand, an overcoming of colonial dis-
mantling was started at a distance from other critiques of
 Abdellah HAMMOUDI
Western discourses about Morocco and the Maghreb-
Mashreq (I use Mashreq, the Arab name, to replace “Mid-
dle East”; others use “Tamzgha” for North Africa, includ-
ing Libya, Egypt, Mauritania, the Sahara in general, and
parts of the Sahel). As I attempt here, it comes as a re-
sponse to the call for decolonizing that was launched in
the sixties.
Maghrebi academics and intellectuals who called for
decolonizing knowledge through double critique were
familiar with their French colleagues who were engaged
in rethinking the discipline in the aftermath of decolo-
nization. However, major differences were also manifest.
I already indicated two of them: the rejection of anthro-
pology, and the fact that the call for decolonizing for some
powerful constituencies went with the call for the rees-
tablishment of the Arabic language as the national lan-
guage. This meant dislodging French in the Maghreb, and
English in the Mashreq. Vast social and political differ-
ences, as well as the new aspirations of the peoples, sep-
arated the newly independent societies from the former
metropoles.
Those differences would only be radicalized when the
call for decolonizing came from the United States, within
the so-called “critical turn” in anthropology in the late
seventies and early eighties. The critique of anthropol-
ogy as a discourse of power, and colonial power at that,
moved from a critique of traditional Africanism into a
systematic exploration of the same themes in a vast lit-
erature, especially on Islam and the “Middle East,” after
the critique of Orientalism (Said 1978). As we know, this
development reached global significance. Observation
and description were rejected as “objectification” of the
“Other.” Anthropology was ultimately indicted as power-
laden, and ethically contaminated in its very relationship
of production (Said 1978). Many developments ensued
from the critique of Orientalism, followed by the indict-
ment of anthropology, and morphed into postcolonial
discourses, the impact of globalization, and deconstruc-
tions of Western notions of subjectivity.
This has resulted in many salutary moves such as alter-
native narratives for modernity, eviscerations of Western
ethnocentrism, the highlighting of many forms of exploi-
tation of race, identities, class, and gender, to cite just few
examples. Yet, at a distance from the US-centric locale of
these movements, I confess I was left with rather little in
the manner of how postcolonial societies may generate
knowledge about themselves.
As an anthropologist working on Moroccan issues,
for example, I felt I had no other choice but to be atten-
288
tive to how modernities appear and change on the ground.
How do we describe the various and concrete predica-
ments of our peoples, including myself? I felt there was
some help to be found in postcolonial theories of dom-
ination (and deconstruction of neoliberal forms of sub-
jectivity), but little help when one tried to account for
oppression in the name of Islam, or how little those the-
ories offered in terms of describing forms of authority, sys-
temic exploitation of precarious lives by powerful Mo-
roccan constituencies, and destruction of the environment
by special Moroccan interests. The indictment of moder-
nity and its devastating consequences, everywhere, includ-
ing the Maghreb-Mashreq, is crucial. Still, I wanted to
understand how it works “on the ground.” In this respect,
the systematic rejection of any style of description would
end up depriving me of the elaboration of an aporetic
“eye/I,” necessary in my view, for generating knowledge
from the societies as different from, and in critical dia-
logue with, discourses on those societies. In the absence
of the sort of decolonizing that overcomes the colonial
dismantling I propose, the vast store of colonial knowl-
edge will escape the new and productive uses we may
devise for it.
At this point, it seems important to develop my initial
remarks on language. I have insisted on the production of
anthropological knowledge by our societies about them-
selves and I add here about other societies as well. Within
the dialogue, I suggest, postcolonial discourses, like others,
would be welcome in English and other languages. But,
without production and exchange, those discourses would
simply be a new form of epistemic colonizing within the
current global and dominant use of English.
However, there is a paradox in this situation that, until
now, seems to have gone unnoticed. It concerns the lan-
guage question. By that I mean the languages used in re-
search and writing in the region. I am dealing with that
as an issue that involves the position of anthropology as
a field in relation to other fields, especially Orientalism.
Here, there are many languages in use for different pur-
poses. But two of them have been central to anthropolog-
ical research: Arabic and Amazigh. The latter has been for
centuries, and until very recently, mainly a spoken lan-
guage only. In most cases, however, anthropologists worked
with their interlocutors in Amazigh, or in some form or
other of spoken Arabic. This has not changed, despite
exceptions, with “the critical turn.” The practice differs
in some postcolonial discourses in which we may find a
combination of vernacular and written forms. However,
these differing language practices have left untouched the
289
traditional disciplinary division between anthropology
and Orientalism.
A production of knowledge by the societies on them-
selves cannot, in my view, sustain such a paradox. A new
anthropology, in this case, will have to base itself on di-
alogues in the vernacular as well as on the knowledge
that has been accumulated in written Arabic on Arab
and non-Arab collectives. That knowledge, which devel-
oped over the centuries, is rich in descriptive account and
theoretical insight. It has been paradoxically left to Ori-
entalists, despite all critique and deconstructive writing.
Working with it, an Arabic anthropology, using a double
critique, would certainly bring a new dimension into the
field. Orientalism, in this context, is understood as a dis-
cipline specializing in Arab and Muslim knowledges, with
its departments and specialists. It is different from Ori-
entalism as an epistemic structure, an ethnocentric one,
which generates biased views of Arabs and Muslims (Said
1978). To take just one example, I have written on how
Arabic language authors markedly differ from Western
anthropologists in their approach to social morphology
and the politics of tribal formation. By going back and
forth between Western and Arabic language knowledge,
I have shown, in a book written in Arabic, how that knowl-
edge on the topic was more apt in accounting for social
dynamics (Hammoudi 2019: 49–104).
Decolonizing from the standpoint of the use of the
Arabic language means, in this context, overcoming the
colonial dismantling by working in both the vernacular
and the written. The same can be said about the use of
Amazigh, and about the development of an anthropol-
ogy in the Amazigh language, should the Amazigh peo-
ple decide so.
Also, writing in Arabic would naturally encourage de-
riving concepts from Arabic thought (Alatas 2014). The
issue involves the language(s) used by the ethnographer
and the ones used by his/her interlocutors in the vernac-
ular and written forms. The status of that heritage itself
would change since it would cease to be mostly used, as
has been the case until now, for documentary purposes.
For anthropologists from the region, decolonizing en-
tails researching and writing in Arabic as well as in En-
glish and other languages in order to be able to offer their
research results on a world stage. Similar efforts have been
made, though not regarding anthropology, in India, which
has a massive knowledge accumulation in Sanskrit, Hindi,
and other languages. However, language situations differ
greatly across the world. This diversity needs specific con-
sideration with reference to the diversity of knowledge
DECOLONIZING ANTHROPOLOGY AT A DISTANCE
production. The question of language could be a place
to start unpacking the “colonial difference” I mentioned
in the introduction to this essay. Colonial difference ap-
pears as ranking languages and assigning different func-
tions to them. Under colonial dominion, Arabic was ranked
after French, given a limited space in school programs,
and was assigned a function in religious instruction and
the administration of certain services, while the sciences,
technology, and the management of the colony were the
exclusive prerogative of French.
The knowledge in store in the Arabic language was
assigned a documentary status at best. It was systemati-
cally subalterned. Colonial difference meant that this was
systemic. And so, we could speak of a colonial difference
episteme, a set of assumptions and paradigms that gov-
erned knowledge about things and peoples colonially gov-
erned. European knowledges were regarded as science par
excellence, and the body of that science was delineated
by the colonially different language: French. Thus, Arabic
knowledge could only be talked or written about in the
most regulated way, through French specialists (Orien-
talists). In this context, decolonizing means bringing Ara-
bic knowledge in free confrontation with all knowledges
produced under the colonial difference’s episteme: top-
ical interests, concepts, methods, debates, dissemination,
and so forth. Language is a good place to start, but the
episteme of colonial difference concerns all the practices
by which a body of knowledge establishes status and
credibility.
In the case of Arabic knowledge, “colonial difference”
meant a Western episteme that either excluded other epis-
temes (both antecedents and contemporary), and spoke
for them instead of letting them speak. Within colonial
difference, Arabic knowledge production had a paral-
lel existence with French “science,” separated and doc-
umented rather than discussed for the advancement of
thinking and innovation
Due to its presence before, during, and after colo-
nial rule, we have come to a moment where Arabic
knowledge, now free from that rule and its rules, can
confront French and other “sciences” head-on. Perhaps
there is a space here for an anthropology in which co-
lonial difference may not continue to be impervious
to this Arabic knowledge. Indeed, such an anthropology
may not confine itself to the simple function of indi-
cating the limit to the Western episteme. It may be the
“Outside” from which other anthropologies may pro-
ceed outside and beside the enchanted circle of Western
knowledge.
 Abdellah HAMMOUDI
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Victoria Klinkert for her good remarks and
suggestions, and to Gabriela Drinovan for her generous assis-
tance in typing and editing this text. My colleague and friend
Brahim El Guabli did much to polish my initial text and ideas:
I give him my heartfelt thanks for his help. Many thanks as
well to Deborah Durham. This essay would not have been
written without the encouragement and patience of Raminder
Kaur.
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Abdellah Hammoudi
hammoudi@princeton.edu