The makeup of destiny: Predestination and the labor of hope in a Moroccan emigrant town

Abstract

As young women in a Moroccan emigrant town search for suitable husbands, they frame seemingly irreverent practices such as using makeup and premarital romances as ways to precipitate their unknown conjugal destinies. This complex “labor of hope” flows from the Islamic precept of predestination, which, far from being a fatalistic backdrop to social life, compels people to act in the human world in view of a future that has already been divinely determined. Here, destiny effectively “folds” Islam into the very texture of mundane practices that, on the surface, may seem not just distant from Islam but even antithetical to it. This phenomenon obliges us to recast Max Weber's argument on predestination and action, as well as to reconsider current anthropological debates on “everyday Islam.” [destiny, migration, hope, courtship, future, Islam, Morocco]

Shared Precarities and Maternal Subjectivities: Navigating Motherhood and Child Custody Loss Among North American Women in Street‐Based Sex Work

“…Often denied access to the social role of “mother” and a chance to mother in their own ways, the women in our study nonetheless remain bound together with their children in deeply relational ways that reinforce the meanings associated with what it means and feels like to be a mother. The women's attempts to care for their children are rarely recognized as such by state or family, and yet these maternal subjectivities are important aspects of what Alice Elliott, writing of Morocco, calls “labors of hope, wherein one feels compelled to act in the human world in specific, hopeful ways, in a view of a future that has already been written” (, 497).…”

Migration as hope and depression: existential im/mobilities in and beyond Egypt

“…However, ethnographic work has begun to complicate previous theorisations of waiting by showing how people who are pushed into it rarely stand still. Rather they engage in various forms of temporal, spatial, and emotional labourputting faith in God's rewards (Elliot 2016), watching films (Mains 2012), and consuming drugs (O'Neil 2017)which invoke a reorientation of consciousness. Miyazaki (2004: 52) terms this a 'temporal reorientation' of knowledge that reopens the possibility of a good futurefor class mobility, migration, or finding a job.…”

‘Nothing will ever be the same again’. Personal commitment and political subjectivation in the 20 February Movement in Morocco

“…Now, our interlocutors in Morocco recurrently qualify their social experience through notions like tkarfīs (suffering), fasād (corruption, prevarication), hogra (abuse and humiliation), iħbaţ (frustration), żulm (injustice) and 'unf (violence). Such terms, redundantly employed to describe the sense of inequity in everyday life, remind us of the words of those who aspire to emigrate (Elliot 2016;Menin 2016;Vacchiano 2018aVacchiano , 2018b. They describe the perceived imbalance between aspirations and possibilities and the lack of conditions (żuruf) that qualify as 'a decent life' ('aysh karīm) in today's world.…”