ABSTRACT
This chapter describes my experiences during approximately 11 months spent learning the ways of Fez’s unofficial tour guides. Theirs is a dangerous job. The guides face jail, extortion, or worse, in addition to the demands of honor and identity that all young Moroccan men and women face. The guides I met survive by forming syndicates which afford some protection, but also create new demands. The group I came to know is essentially a mutual assistance association drawn from neighborhoods and families in which informal control mechanisms have deteriorated or disappeared altogether. The guide is adrift in an ocean of relatively wealthy foreigners who are able to sample the planet’s cultures as from a box of chocolates. Tourists consume what they take to be the finest the guides’ own society affords, paying often exorbitant sums (in relative terms) for so-called peak experiences which none of my informants could ever have afforded, were they not someone’s guide. What is it like to guide, translating bits and pieces of one’s own social and material culture to foreigners? What is hidden from outsiders and why?
