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This is a critical analysis relflection I did for my Comparative History of Ideas degree, comparing my experiences in this course to my experiences on a study abroad trip to Morocco with the Honors Program:

 

After taking Anthropology of Tourism in my sophomore year, I was initially unsure how it would connect to my future studies: I had taken the course purely because it had implications for my past personal experiences with travel. The course initially really aggravated me: I felt self-conscious and antagonized, guilty and defensive. I found myself disagreeing with my professor and actively pushing on the opinions of my peers. I usually left that class feeling mildly irritated and unclear about what I thought, and how I was being implicated in the material. Nearly a year later, I went on an Exploration Seminar to Morocco, and that experience provided a sort of re-contextualization of the themes of the anthropology course, as well as a catharsis for the difficult feelings I had encountered. Upon my return from Morocco, I started to realize how relevant the tensions, theories, and concerns discussed in that course really were.

 

In Anthropology, we unpacked the idea of “authenticity” and how that concept was related to privilege and power. The political climate of the classroom discussion tended to sway towards conservative and predictable criticisms of tourism, which accused tourists of exporting their ignorance and arrogance to a foreign country, to further economically and physically marginalize local populations. Tourists were characterized as “ugly” and insensitive people who blundered into a space with particular expectations of what they would see and who they would encounter, as a sort of agent for latent colonialism. While there is much compelling evidence to support this notion, this theorization of tourists seemed awfully simplistic to me, and I found myself wondering about the validity of the distinction between tourist and traveler (and whether one or the other truly left a smaller colonial footprint, so to speak). Before taking this course, I had thought of myself as the more fashionable “traveler” rather than the unpleasant “tourist,” but following the course, I was not as confident that it was useful to think of myself as one or the other.

 

As muddled as I felt at the end of the quarter, I experienced further confusion and tension within myself while studying abroad in Morocco. While abroad, I experienced a sort of complicated reversal of the tourist gaze: as I attempted to look, I was also seen. And, because of my layered and hybrid status as a privileged tourist/traveler, student, American, and woman, I occupied a different place in the power dynamic. Though I retained a certain privileged status as an American abroad, with a shiny blue and gold-embossed passport, I ran into unexpected gendered issues. As a female, I was consumed by the male Moroccan gaze. My body was a landscape of submission and open stares. It was acceptable for males to verbally or physically enact their own masculinity upon my body. Despite being covered, I felt exposed, made uncomfortable and feeling threatened by the packs of young men leaning against narrows walls of the medina, whistling and cat calling. It was infuriating and a little scary to feel that kind of oppression so acutely. It left me feeling confused and annoyed.

 

Additionally, Morocco provided a challenge to my ideas about feminine agency, feminist solidarity, and international feminisms. When in Morocco, I did not feel secure in my identity, nor did I feel any solidarity with the Moroccan women around me. In the States, I presumed that all women would look out for each other and was confident that if I were being harassed by a male in public, it would be culturally appropriate for someone else to step in. I was not sure that would happen in Morocco. My ethnic and religious difference trumped our mutual gendered identity. This lead me to consider how feminism might function in different contexts, and how naïve I had been to assume that feminism around the world would look like feminism in America. I started to realize that Moroccan feminism was unique: the women did not have the same kind of agency and status in public spheres that I was used to, but they dominated in the domestic sphere. They ran the house, they ran the family, they teased the patriarch and played with the youngest son, calling him “Prince.” Their djellabas and headscarves (modest coverings that I distrusted) were a source of power, not of oppression.

 

This experience complicated and challenged my thoughts on agency and identity.My experiences with the academic and ideational frustrations of the Anthropology of Tourism and my confusions from my experiences abroad in Morocco have shown me the significance of tension and intersectionality. These two moments in my life have demonstrated how crucial it is to be sensitive to my own positionality in a changing landscape, and to learn how to productively process cognitive dissonance without dismissing it or assimilating opposing ideas into my own beliefs.