ABSTRACT
I arrived in Paris with heavy cartons of brittle old literary reviews and shiny fashion magazines, reams of field notes, and kilos of photocopied articles. There were shoeboxes full of cassette tapes and numbered floppy discs with transcriptions of interviews. Spiral notebooks with information on salon budgets, sketches of supply networks and the floor plans of dozens of beauty establishments were piled high on the dining table. Field notes and books seemed to multiply as I arranged them on shelves that soon heaved under their weight. My formerly insubstantial belongings had multiplied in Rabat: this included new paintings for my walls and in my portfolio. Two of these are particularly helpful in reflecting on how fieldwork was going. I made “Tables et Tabliers” in 1991 while living on rue Malherbe/Mafalouti. I made “Table Tress” in Rabat in 1995. Together, they present fitting “before and after” pictures of what had changed since I had left Paris for Morocco a second time, three years earlier.
