Anthropology of the Female Body in Moroccan Popular Culture: Errachidia and Fes as a Case Study

The female body is a sociocultural construct that has been culturally performed for colonial, political, religious, and other purposes. Anthropologically, the social structure of the body and the construct of imaginaries are based on the interaction between the individual and the community with the text of culture. The present dissertation provides an anthropological study of ordinary people's views about the female body in the Moroccan popular culture, based on two case studies, both in Errachidia and Fes. This dissertation seeks to examine people’s perceptions mainly through oral culture, proverbs, al-malhoun poetry, narratives, and visual representations. Each of these discusses various aspects of the female body, including but not limited to (body piercing, dance culture, henna, body tattooing, body shapes, beauty, body modifying, and body veiling), including taste, cosmetics, sensibility, power relations, and female identity. The ethnographic data on which I based my study were collected through interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation. More particularly, this research aims at understanding the role popular culture has played in gendered bodily construction and power relations on an everyday basis. Rather than focusing on the female body from a purely feminist perspective, it attempts to speak from within anthropology, to explore the body from within anthropology, informed by feminist concerns. One of the premises of this study is to rethink the issue of the body within the anthropological, gender, and sociocultural approaches. In this vein, I adopt the feminist theory, which is mainly about both celebrating and liberating the female body. This theory fits in with my holistic approaches in the sense that it will allow the understanding of the way the body is socio-culturally inscribed through the examination of different cultural signs and symbols by adopting the symbolic and interpretive anthropological approach. This dissertation finds that the female body is a system of classification that draws boundaries between bodies and genders. It investigates a variety of attitudes and images related to women’s bodies; for instance, in aesthetics and beauty, sexuality, veiling, Islam, Sufism, and resistance. This work also reveals the ideological battleground between modernity and tradition over the female body.