Abstract

This article comes from ethnographic research that investigated the relationship between young Moroccans’ consumption of western media texts and their desire to emigrate to the West. Fieldwork was conducted in Casablanca and in Ait Nuh, a small Amazigh1 Douar2 in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains from 2000 to 2002. Research targeted four subgroups of young Moroccans between the ages of 18-35 from different socio-economic and cultural strata. These included, young Islamists, young people from working class quarters of Casablanca, young people from Gautier ‘a middle class area in Casablanca’ and young Amazighs from the Douar of Ait Nuh. The ethnographic material demonstrated that the subgroups had different readings of the West, western media texts and western modernity. For the purpose of this article, I will only draw on research conducted in Ait Nuh and argue that young Amazighs’ desire to emigrate to the West is the product of interplay between socio-economic and symbolic dimensions. The article will also demonstrate how long-term consumption of western media texts provides the young Amazigh with a new contested space of identification where Islamic and Amazigh traditions are ceaselessly troubled and re-negotiated vis-à-vis modernity and its mediated messages.

Keywords: modernity, western media, Ait Nuh, migration, Eromen, Islam, tradition, Amazighs

How to Cite:

Sabry, T., (2017) “Young Amazighs, the Land of Eromen and Pamela Anderson as the embodiment of modernity”, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 1(1), 38-51. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.202