ABSTRACT
Hence, Morocco appears to these French migrants as a sunny place where it is possible to achieve ambitious life plans and find a form of familiar exoticism, neither too far, nor too close: a country where advantages in terms of practicalities and social self-fulfilment are within reach for those who want to start a new life outside of France. However, as the interviews showed, this assumption seems to reveal itself to be an illusion of proximity (Therrien, forthcoming): although the interviewees moved to Morocco with the feeling that they were coming to a well-known place – not to say to an already conquered land for some of them – once there, their assumptions were quickly confronted with what is irreducibly other in Moroccans, so that they realised that cultural practices at both the personal and professional level were different from what they had assumed. Hence, these migrants’ predefined representations of the Self and the Other were undermined once they started their new life in Morocco.
