Fieldwork Insecurities: An (Israeli) Anthropologist in Morocco

Relying on my prolonged and ongoing fieldwork experiences in Morocco, as well as on my practice as an author of anthropologic texts, this paper discusses the ramifications of two contradicting anthropological discrepancies regarding the professionʼs (in)securities. On the one, fieldwork manifests insecurities in its actual practice. On the other hand, ethnographies produce depictions of the research as a well-crafted endeavor. I assert that the tensions resulting from these discrepancies are unsolvable; anthropologists oscillate between these two poles. Therefore, I use the fact that my own insecurities paralleled to those experienced by the people I studied (i.e., Moroccan Jews) to enable me to reflect on the tensions in real time by focusing on my interlocutors.