From empire to encounter: The evolution of American anthropological writing in Morocco

Abstract This article traces the transformation of modern American anthropology through its Moroccan field, examining the discipline’s passage from colonial representation to dialogical encounter. Emerging from anthropology’s postwar crisis of conscience, the interpretive and literary turns displaced claims to objectivity with reflexivity and recast fieldwork as a moral and relational practice. Rather than presenting this shift as a linear disciplinary advance, the article situates it within enduring structures of coloniality, where epistemic authority, voice, and representation remained deeply contested. While Clifford Geertz and Paul Rabinow provided key theoretical frameworks for this reorientation, the analysis centers on six American ethnographers whose Moroccan works most vividly enacted it in practice: Dale F. Eickelman, Vincent Crapanzano, Kevin Dwyer, Henry Munson, Daisy Hilse Dwyer, and Deborah A. Kapchan. Their ethnographies—ranging from social biography and psychological portraiture to oral history, dialogical exchange, and gendered performance—redefined fieldwork as an art of listening, negotiation, and co-creation. Through close textual and theoretical reading of these works, the article treats their monographs as both ethnographic experiments and disciplinary interventions, situating them within the broader epistemological debates that reshaped twentieth-century American anthropology. By reading Morocco as both an ethnographic site and a crucible of theoretical renewal, the article shows how encounter itself became a mode of interpretation. At the same time, it argues that dialogical and ethical anthropology did not mark a clean rupture from colonial epistemologies, but rather a critical reworking of their legacies within new textual, ethical, and institutional frameworks. Collectively, these case studies reveal how anthropology’s moral and narrative reconfiguration unfolded from empire to encounter, culminating in an ethics of voice that reshaped what it means to write—and to know—the Other.