Resumen de Ethnography and Demography: Moroccan Households and Cultural Change
This essay highlights the profundity of recent demographic change in Morocco, and explores its implications in a selection of ethnographic studies. The rural/urban divide is an especially important backdrop to this issue because of the distinct economic costs and benefits that children represent in subsistence versus capitalist contexts. Obviously, in subsistence-oriented agriculture, children are the main source of labor, and thus a necessary economic asset, while in capitalist contexts children are a net economic expense. Though not simply ascribable to this, in the areas of Morocco where the primary survival strategy remains household agricultural labor, high fertility rates continue. Everywhere else, things have changed dramatically. New ethnographic work attends to this significantly transformed demographic reality and how Moroccans understand it, and sheds light on some of the classic debates in Moroccan ethnography
