Culture and Identity in a Muslim Society

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acknowle d g ments

I owe deep thanks to my colleague Alison Geist for six years of collaborative
research in Morocco, and to Robert LeVine for his long support of this inves-
tigation. Thank you to Douglas Davis, Susan Davis, and Susan Miller for their
excellent research in Morocco and for many discussions of this study. Also
thanks to my first teachers of “culture and personality,” Theodore Schwartz
and Robert Levy, to my colleagues in the Society for Personology, especially
Bertram Cohler, Ruthellen Josselson, Revenna Helson, Avril Thorne, and Dan
McAdams, and to George Rosenwald, Elliot Mishler, Hubert Hermans, and
Chris Latiolais for crucial discussions of interviewing, narrative analysis, and
theories of identity. Thank you to the many Moroccan research assistants who
patiently tutored me in Arabic and worked with me translating the interviews.
Above all, I thank Mohammed, Hussein, Rachida, Khadija, and the other
Moroccans who narrated their life-stories to me and patiently taught me their
language and culture. This research was supported by a Fulbright Research
Fellowship and a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Maps are reproduced by permission of Carte Générale du Maroc, Rabat:

Ministère de l’Agriculture et de la Réforme Agraire, Division de la Cartographie,
1979.
Excerpts from “Underdevelopment in a North African Tribe” by Gary
S. Gregg (Journal of Social Issues, vol. 46, no. 3, 1990, pp. 71–91) are repro-
duced by permission of Blackwell Publishing.
Excerpts from Culture, Behavior, and Personality by Robert LeVine are
copyright © 1973 by Aldine Publishers. Reprinted by permission of Aldine
Transaction, a division of Transaction Publishers.
Excerpts from The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Guneli
Gun. Translation copyright © 1995 by Guneli Gun. Reprinted by permission
of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

v
 Excerpts from the Quran are from N. J. Dawood, translator, The Koran
(fifth edition). New York: Penguin. Copyright © N. J. Dawood, 1956, 1959,
1966, 1968, 1974, 1990, 1993, 1997, 1999, 2003. Reproduced by permission of
Penguin Books, Ltd.
Excerpts from Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz are reproduced by per-
mission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

vi Acknowledgments
contents

note on transliteration of arabic terms vii

introduction 3
1 Theory 14
2 A Cultural Geography 57
3 Mohammed 89
4 Hussein 129
5 Rachida 189
6 Khadija 226
7 Conclusions 282
epilogue 333
notes 335
references 353
index 367

vii
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n o t e o n t r a n s l i t e r at i o n
of arabic terms

Moroccan Arabic is an unwritten dialect, with pronunciation that varies

among regions of the country. In many cases, there is no officially correct
spelling in English letters. My thanks to Hamid Ouali at the University of
Michigan’s Department of Linguistics for helping with transliterations of the
Arabic terms. For the letters that do not have close English equivalents, we
have used the following transliterations:
d t
‘ t
u d
Š d
¶ h
m h
} s
† s
– c

š gh
q kh
Æ ‘
When I have quoted or paraphrased works by other authors that contain
Arabic terms in English letters, I have kept the transliterations these authors
have used.

ix
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Culture and Identity in a Muslim Society
This page intentionally left blank
introduction

This book presents an investigation of the cultural shaping of self or iden-

tity. Unlike most psychological and anthropological studies of culture and
self, it directly studies individuals by using “study of lives”-style interviews
with young adults living in villages and small towns in southern Morocco. It
analyzes the life narratives of two men and two women and builds a theory
of culture and identity that differs from prevailing psychological and anthro-
pological models in important respects. In contrast to modernist theories of
identity as unified, the life narratives show individuals to articulate a small
set of identities, among which they shift. But in contrast to postmodernist
theories that claim people have a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of fluid selves,
the narratives show a small set of identities, integrated by repeated use of cul-
turally specific self-symbols, metaphors, and story plots. Perhaps most impor-
tant, the life narratives show these young Moroccans’ self-representations to
be pervasively shaped by the volatile cultural struggle between Western-style
“modernity” and authentic Muslim “tradition.”

Culture and Self

In the last fifteen years, psychologists have rediscovered culture and its in-
fluence on emotion, thought, and self and focused especially on how cultures
vary in their “individualist” versus “collectivist” orientations and on how these
differences give rise to “egocentric” versus “sociocentric” selves. The results
of these studies appeared to converge and produce a consensus that:

1. the world’s cultures can be ranked on a dimension of individualist

versus collectivist, with Western cultures falling at the individualist
end and non-Western cultures at the collectivist end, and

3
 2. individualist cultures give rise to “independent” selves that have solid
boundaries that separate them from others, so that Westerners think
and act autonomously, while
3. collectivist cultures foster “interdependent” selves with permeable
boundaries that embed non-Westerners in social relationships, so that
they think and act relationally.

Most social psychology textbooks now include a section on “culture” that

highlights these conclusions, and many programs designed to promote in-
tercultural understanding teach them as the foundation for successful study-
abroad experiences and international business relationships.
There have been criticisms of this theory. Anthropologists with exten-
sive fieldwork in supposedly “collectivist” cultures have warned that nei-
ther Westerners’ individualist ideology nor non-Westerners’ collectivist
ideologies should be mistaken for the experience people actually have of
themselves.1 They also have pointed out that the new “we’re egocentric,
they’re sociocentric” view disturbingly echoes the old stereotype that the
autonomous, conscience-directed individual was the crowning creation of
Western civilization and that non-Westernized peoples were submerged in
family and tribal relationships, their behavior not governed by conscience
but by sensitivity to social shame.2 Psychologist Harry Triandis, one of the
pioneers in the study of individualism and collectivism, has long argued that
neither cultures nor selves can be ranked on a single “I”–“C” continuum.3
And Turkish psychologist Cigdem Kagitcibasi has argued that collectivism
in some social spheres is quite compatible with individualism in others.4
These cautions have had little impact on the gathering consensus, however,
and textbook writers have felt free to use dubious photos to illustrate col-
lectivist versus individualist orientations (one juxtaposes Asian schoolgirls
wearing uniforms for a festival with American students lounging about their
campus).5
In 1999, the Asian Journal of Social Psychology published a literature re-
view6 and a meta-analysis7 that concluded that the simple “I versus C” con-
trast does not hold for America and Japan, long considered the archetypal
cases. Psychological Bulletin gave its entire January 2002 issue to a compre-
hensive meta-analysis of I versus C studies8 that found only limited support
for this generalization concerning all Western versus non-Western cultures,
and included extensive comments by cross-cultural researchers who argued
that the I versus C approach needs to be drastically revised or abandoned.9
In 2004, Human Development published an even sharper critique of this line
of research that urged cross-cultural psychologists to study individuals and
how they experience and represent their cultures.10 Together, these reviews,
meta-analyses, and commentaries have undermined the seemingly solid con-
sensus about I versus C cultures and selves.11 They bring the study of culture
and self to a crisis point, casting doubt on core findings and research meth-

4 Culture and Identity in a Muslim Society

ods. The danger looms that psychologists may respond as they did several
decades ago to ethnocentric oversimplifications in studies of “national char-
acter”: by turning away from the study of culture. But the doubts also open
opportunities to rethink the relation of culture and self, to use a greater va-
riety of methods, and to develop more complex models of how culture influ-
ences selves.
This book presents an alternative to the I versus C approach, based on
direct study of individuals—of young adults living in towns and villages in
southern, “pre-Saharan” Morocco. After studying more than 100 families
in the area, I conducted six- to eighteen-hour “study of lives” interviews (in
Moroccan Arabic) with each of eleven individuals to investigate the cultural
shaping of identity. The first chapter discusses the theories of identity that
guided the study and reviews writings on identity in North African societies.
The second provides a brief introduction to the “cultural geography” of
Moroccan society, and chapters 3 through 6 analyze the life narratives I elic-
ited from two men and two women. These four studies build a theory of
culture and identity, which chapter 7 summarizes.
The theory developed from these life-narrative studies differs from pre-
vailing psychological and anthropological models in important respects: in
viewing culture as distributed among the members of a society, rather than
as shared by them; in viewing cultures and selves not as individualist or col-
lectivist, but as animated by tensions between group loyalties and personal
ambitions; and in viewing self as having three levels of psychological orga-
nization, each subject to different cultural influences that exert their main
effects in successive developmental periods. With regard to self-represen-
tation, the life narratives show identity to be defined not just by clusters of
self-attributions or hierarchies of self-schemas but by a set of identity-
defining discourses, which articulate often contradictory values and expres-
sive styles. People continually shift among these discourses—sometimes
smoothly, sometimes in distress and confusion—but their contrasting self-
representations appear integrated by repeated use of culturally specific self-
symbols, metaphors, and story plots. This model converges with other
important lines of cross-cultural research, especially that on emotion (which
shows universal emotions shaped by culturally specific display rules) and
that on acculturation (which shows widespread shifting between alterna-
tive “cultural frames”).12 Perhaps most important, the life narratives show
these young Moroccans’ identities to be pervasively shaped by the volatile
identity politics that pits Western-style modernity against authentic Mus-
lim tradition.
I did not design this study to investigate individualism versus collectiv-
ism, but Morocco provides an especially appropriate setting because Clifford
Geertz’s often-cited contrast of the relationally defined, “mosaic” Moroccan
self with the “bounded” Western self helped inspire much of the I versus C
research.13 And Oyserman and associates’ meta-analysis found that in com-

Introduction 5
parison with the United States, Middle Eastern samples were as collectivist
as East Asian ones, and even less individualist.14 The interviews, however,
clearly show a mixture of strong sociocentrism and egocentrism, as Cigdem
Kagitcibasi,15 Suad Joseph,16 and Charles Lindholm17 have noted of Arab-
Muslim societies.18 The textbook author who put in the margin by his I ver-
sus C section “If you cut off the ties of blood, you will have to worry on your
own.—proverb from Morocco (a collectivist culture)”19 neglected to add
other proverbs like aqarib agarab, or “close relatives are scorpions,” which
cynically mock homilies about filial loyalty and warn that one must look out
for oneself. The Lebanese imam who delivered the powerful sermon on fa-
milial loyalties recorded by Richard Antoun had disobeyed his father’s or-
ders to leave school, moved out of his house so he could keep studying, and
then became imam when he strode up to the mosque pulpit at the same time
as the old imam and out-orated him to the villagers’ acclaim.20 As the narra-
tives indeed show, most Moroccans sustain extended family loyalties that
most Americans do not, and this has important psychological consequences.
But this makes neither their culture nor their selves collectivist, and it does
not prevent them from thinking of themselves as individuals or acting with
often bold initiative. What proves to be much more important to the psy-
ches and selves of the young Moroccans I interviewed are the conditions of
economic and political underdevelopment in which they live and the unavoid-
able challenge of responding to the Western influences that now permeate
their society.
The young Moroccans I interviewed in 1987 and 1988 were born into
relatively traditional village settings. They all received some high school edu-
cation and have or want careers as functionaries, technicians, or teachers
rather than as farmers or herders, but beyond this, their paths to moder-
nity diverge in often contradictory ways. They belong to Morocco’s first
post-Independence generation, a generation with huge hopes and frustra-
tions that observers often cite to account for their increasing support for
“fundamentalist” Islam. The news magazine Jeunne Afrique insightfully
characterized them as “entre cora et Quran,” torn between their passions
for soccer and religion. At school, they took half their classes in Arabic and
half in French, so they speak both languages fluently. Some also speak
Tashelhait Berber and some a little English or Spanish. They say their mod-
ern educations and visits to relatives in Morocco’s big cities “opened” their
minds and vistas of possibility, inviting them as teenagers to dream grandly
about their futures. When I interviewed them in their twenties, most were
reconciling themselves to smaller or dashed dreams or struggling to keep
dreams alive. That is likely to be the story of their generation: dramatic
population growth, the absence of raw materials for industrialization, and,
many would say, rampant corruption have forced them into lives that are
neither traditional nor modern but something quite else, which the term
underdevelopment at least names.

6 Culture and Identity in a Muslim Society

The Study of Lives

I designed this research to apply study-of-lives methods in a non-European

society in order to test and extend a model of identity developed from Ameri-
can life narratives and presented in my Self Representation. Henry Murray and
his colleagues developed these methods in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s by com-
bining intensive interviews, projective tests, and observations, in the belief
that detailed examination of individual lives would yield important informa-
tion about the structure and development of personality. Works like Murray’s
Explorations in Personality,21 Robert White’s Lives in Progress,22 M. Brewster
Smith and colleagues’ Opinions and Personality,23 and Erik Erikson’s Child-
hood and Society24 laid the groundwork for nearly all subsequent studies of
life-course development. Robert Levy’s landmark Tahitians25 showed how
productively a similar method could be used in a non-Western society and
yielded important insights about the cultural patterning of development and
emotion. The method certainly has limitations, especially because the small
number of individuals who can be studied cannot be a “representative”
sample. But it directly studies individual selves, and its enduring strength lies
in its ability to provide a rich source of data in which the representational link-
ages of social structure, culture, and personality can be explored in near-
microscopic detail.
Study-of-lives research has become especially important to cultural psy-
chology for several reasons. Studies of culture and self by cross-cultural psy-
chologists typically use paper-and-pencil measures of traits, values, or
self-schemas to test for differences between group means.26 Anthropologists
studying the cultural construction of self usually rely on inferences about what
public performances—in ritual, speech, and etiquettes of self-presentation—
imply about the selves who enact them. Most writings on self in Arab-Muslim
societies—including Geertz’s article on the Moroccan “mosaic” self,27 Jon
Anderson’s analysis of self in Afghanistan,28 and Steven Caton’s work on
Yemeni selves29—analyze these sorts of data. The line of research missing from
nearly all of this literature, however, has been that on individual lives (with
Katherine Ewing’s studies of Pakistani life histories an important exception30).
Because the study-of-lives approach examines selves in an order-of-magni-
tude greater detail than any of these methods, it can play a crucial role in
resolving the current debates over egocentric versus sociocentric selves and
in moving beyond the current impasse created by reliance on either aggre-
gated or public performance data.
Developments in semiotic theory, discourse analysis, and narrative psy-
chology now provide tools for finer grained analyses of narratives than have
been done in the past. Life histories can now be not just treated as cultural
documents that indicate major life-cycle events but examined for patterns of
culturally shaped feelings and thoughts. Complementarily, decades of eth-
nographic work on Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies now make

Introduction 7
it possible to trace variations in social organization and culture with a preci-
sion that earlier researchers could not achieve. These advances enable a re-
searcher to identify the cultural region associated with characteristics observed
in a life narrative and to move from global statements about culture and self
to more nuanced inferences about the role of overlapping and intersecting
culture areas in shaping specific features of personality and identity. My analy-
ses focus on turns of phrase and shades of meaning, in the conviction that
the structures that organize personality and identity appear distributed
through the details of representation and cannot be discovered in smaller
samples of thought or behavior, in aggregate data, or in the main themes of
individual biographies. By almost microscopically tracing the symbolic routes
these individuals follow as they transform feelings of pollution into purity,
shameful fear into honorable courage, or deprivation into bounty, the nar-
rative analyses map how each of these young Moroccans selects elements from
their culture to fashion identities and orchestrate their emotional lives.
Perhaps most important in light of the West’s current “clash of civiliza-
tions” with the Arab-Muslim world, the detailed study of these lives points
beyond the simplistic and often ethnocentric national character interpreta-
tions of Middle Eastern cultures that continue to be published.31 These have
been incisively criticized32 but continue to have enormous influence: The 2002
edition of Patai’s 1973 The Arab Mind contains an introduction by the direc-
tor of Middle Eastern Studies at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School,
who writes: “At the institution where I teach military officers, The Arab Mind
forms the basis of my cultural instruction.”33 Few alternatives exist to these
national character interpretations (though see my The Middle East: A Cul-
tural Psychology), and psychological studies of Middle Eastern societies re-
main fragmented. By distinguishing three levels of personality organization
and by tracing patterns seen in the narratives to the overlapping cultural re-
gions that have shaped my respondents’ lives, this book will show the struggles
of these young adults to embrace both Western-style modernity and features
of their Moroccan-Muslim heritage.

Background, Methods, Biases

I had lived in the Ouarzazate area for three years when I began these inter-
views. During this time, my colleague Alison Geist and I studied the
agropastoral Imeghrane confederation34 in conjunction with a rangeland
conservation project. As part of that research, we studied three villages in
depth and closely followed two rich and two poor households in each village
over that period. I interviewed the senior men in 90 of the 115 households in
the foothills village of Toundout where we lived, 40 of 75 in the mountain
village of Tamzrit, and 30 of 35 in the plains village of Assaka, charted each
household’s history, diagrammed its kinship ties, and traced major decisions

8 Culture and Identity in a Muslim Society