Abstract
The Outside: Migration as life in Morocco, by Alice Elliot, is a rich, deep, and nuanced ethnographic account of the transformations that migration generates in sending communities in the Tadla plain in central Morocco. The book is a thought-provoking account of migration where migrants are not the center of the attention. Instead, building on long-term fieldwork in both urban and rural Morocco, Elliot delves into the everyday reality of the families, the neighbors, and the people orbiting around those who live in ‘the outside.’ The Outside centers the reader's attention on the possibilities, tensions, and transformations that migration produces on and through what the literature has always (and reductively) labelled as ‘those who stay behind.’ The focus on the perspective and experience of people who live their lives in the shadow, in the waiting, in the incipient realization of migration makes The Outside a book that is quite unique in its genre. Elliot's work provides an amazing complementary reading to the extensive literature on the lives of people on the move (Gross-Wyrtzen 2020), on the human effects of border control (Jusionyte 2018), and on the transformations that migration produces in destination regions (Alexander et al. 2020).
The Outside is composed of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. The different chapters explore how the immanence of migration affects the everyday life of origin communities: how it paces the course of day, of the summer, of the year (Chapter 1); how it reshapes family relationships and gendered economies of value (Chapter 2 and 5); and how it creates forms of productive aspiration across unmarried women and their families (Chapter 4). The book also looks at how The Outside affects the people who go, but it does so mostly from the perspective of the people who stay. It is from the wives, neighbors, and acquaintances of migrant men that we learn that The Outside deeply transforms people (Chapter 2) and that emigrants are expected to bring a specific amount of change to their origin communities to publicly display their successful migration experience (Chapter 5). The space that Elliot leaves to the voices of the people orbiting around migration brings the gendered expectations placed on emigrants (and the tensions that ensue) under an extremely clear light. Chapter 6 goes back to the concept of The Outside, the elusive yet immanent presence that has lingered on the reader throughout the whole book in the same way that it lingers on the life of people in the Tadla.
Four main points make this book particularly refreshing and thought-provoking. First, it is an extraordinary attempt to read politics from below – from intimate places, from everyday places, from sites left off the map of the political. Second, by bringing ‘those who stay behind’ to the center of the discussion, the book obliges us to rethink our assumptions about ‘immobility.’ Elliot shows in a very convincing way that migration activates and is sustained by forms of social, emotional, and bureaucratic labor performed by origin communities. Third, the book complicates our understanding of the gendered impact of migration by highlighting how both women and men can see the economic and reproductive expectations placed on them enhanced by mobility and the tight timescales of border control. Finally, The Outside is an amazing example of what I would call a ‘humble anthropology,’ an anthropology that derives its strength by its capacity to take a step back and to allow research participants to tell the researcher what really matters in their lives. This kind of approach can only be achieved through patient, long-term, dedicated work that gives the utmost importance (and time) to building a relationship of trust with the community on which the project focuses.
The only weak spot I can find in this book is that it is not so accessible to a non-academic audience as it deserves to be. The dense theoretical discussions make it more difficult for practitioners to learn about the expectations, tensions, and deep social transformations triggered by migration (and its control) in origin communities. Learning from the book findings would allow social workers, teachers, and development practitioners to understand that migration is not a process that starts and ends with a single individual: its effect reverberate and become intimate parts of an entire community. I can only hope the author will do justice to her work by engaging in public scholarship initiatives to reach a broad range of non-academic audiences. The Outside remains an excellent book that will interest scholars and students in anthropology, sociology, geography, and area studies.