Identity and Authenticity
Part I:
People like to travel for many different reasons. For me, I like to see new places and experience new cultures - food, people, ways of life, and perspectives. How do the people in the place I'm visiting see the world? How is their worldview different from mine? While I've been sunbathing in Greece and visiting the Vatican and Coliseum in Rome, these are some of the things that have crossed my mind.
Disclaimer: I was very fortunate to be able to go on a week-long Mediterranean cruise from Rome, visiting Greece and some of its islands.
However, I'm not sure how I feel about the whole cruise experience. Half the time I was on a massive cruise boat surrounded by Americans eating nice but not very culturally relevant, food (definitely delicious, but when in Rome...) I found myself questioning how genuine my experience was, considering my own personal goals and ideas surrounding travel. Those might not be everyone's goals, and for some people a cruise visiting tourist attractions where every little shop sells the same trinkets and every cafe serves the same food and there are more tourists than locals...well that might be your thing but its definitely not mine. I had a wonderful trip, and there were definitely some authentic moments, but usually because we were looking for them. For many Westerners, a somewhat superficial experience of another culture may be their only experience of it. It limits our experiences to those that are simply trying to replicate our own expectations rather than expose us to genuine and authentic culture. I can also definitely say that my time in Marseilles felt much more "real" than most of my time in Greece on the cruise. We lived, ate, and shopped with locals (shout out to the Gremaud family!) and they showed us around, yes to some tourist attractions, but they also showed us their way of life and learned a little bit about the French. Going out of your comfort zone can be hard; I've been doing it for the last three months and now that I've finally settled in, in just a week I'm going to start all over, and push myself right out again and go to Morocco for another three months. This will definitely be a bigger push than coming to a country I was familiar with and had family in, so it won't be as easy but I'm definitely looking forward to it.
So yes, vacation is good for relaxing and recharging, but when you are in another culture, how can you miss out on the opportunity to genuinely experience it? Next time you travel outside of your home country, I challenge you, and myself as well, to make sure you have at least one truly authentic experience, and come home with a more developed understanding of a culture and the world. Being in a new and different place can - maybe even should - change who you are. I know living in the UK has changed me. It has helped me shape my identity and learn new things about who I am and what I value, socially,
politically, and other just every day things.
Part II:
After experiencing Morocco, I still stand by part I but it's not the whole story on authenticity. Who am I to say whether or not a cultural experience is authentic or not? I have spent the past three months in search of an "authentic" Moroccan experience. It can be frustrating to constantly be treated like a tourist when you've been living in a country for over a month and you are there to study. It feels like every experience is served to you rather than experienced, filtered, and that doesn't align with my traveling goals. But do I, as an outsider, have the right to tell Moroccans if they can or can't commodify their culture in order to make a buck off an American, tourist or otherwise?
Tourism is a major aspect of many developing countries’ economies, including Morocco. By making tourists expectations a reality, tourism and revenue increase. Morocco and Moroccan cities are famous for many things: tagine, the desert, and being exotic. These things are commodified everywhere. It is so easy to take a trip to the desert or other parts of Morocco to ride camels. Tagines of all sizes and other “Moroccan” items that I’ve never seen in a Moroccan household are sold in the tourist sections of souks. Cities like Chefchouan, famous for being blue, are painted more blue to attract tourists, and other cities like Moulay Idriss are also starting to paint more walls blue, fitting into many ideas and expectations of tourists.
I eventually had to realize that I will never be treated like a local, or at least a like knowledgeable visitor. I will never be able to pay Moroccan prices, only tourist prices. People will always stare at me in the street. Every time I speak Arabic or explain that I am a student and have been in Morocco for over two months, it is immediately easier to bargain in shops and people treat me with more respect; however, people cannot know that about me by just looking at me, which affects my daily life, especially in the medina of Rabat. Morocco also advertises itself as a hospitable country with welcoming people. I feel people often act this way, not only because it is an aspect of their culture, but because it is expected from them and they want to show that they fit that positive stereotype.
This opens an interesting discussion. Foremost, what exactly is authentic Moroccan culture, and who has the authority or even capability to call one thing authentic and another unauthentic, or a commodification? Culture is so dynamic, and Morocco is a diverse country. The culture of a Moroccan Arab living in the Nouvelle Ville of Casablanca is likely to be completely different from an Amazigh living in the rural mountains of Northern Morocco. What aspects of Moroccan culture could or should be commodified and what aspects must remain sacred? In some aspects, these questions have answers. For example, non-Muslims may not enter mosques in most of Morocco, with the exception of a few, such as the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca; some parts of Islam, or at least places of Islam, have been commodified, while most have not. One might even argue that an increase in tourism could create a renewed local interest in culture, but at the same time, one could claim that tourism can dilute culture in a way, encouraging people and their presentation of Moroccan culture and to try to conform to the desire of the tourists as previously discussed. It is not wrong for Moroccans to want to use tourism, one of the main components of the Moroccan economy, to bring revenue into their country and advertise themselves to the world as a kind and welcoming people with exciting and interesting attractions to visit like Chefchouan or the Sahara. Those aspects of Morocco help to promote tourism and a good reputation of a country that is in a region of the world that often has a bad reputation in the West. However, sacrificing authentic culture to buy into globalization and commodifying your culture seems problematic; at the same time, who has the right to decide whether or not Moroccans can or should, or should not commodify their own culture for their own benefit?
These questions don't all have answers, but it seems to me that it is only right that Moroccans have the ability and agency to make those decisions about their own culture and economy. This connects to other questions of whether or not globalization is also Westernization, and if Moroccan culture will ultimately be absorbed into the Westernization that many argue is occurring in the Global South. However, this may be something for Moroccans to confront themselves, while as foreigners we can only hope that we will get a taste of authentic Morocco, whatever that may be.
