Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment, and Secret Adoption in Morocco

Jamila Bargach

doi:10.5771/9781461640431

Summary

Orphans of Islam portrays the abject lives and 'excluded body' of abandoned and bastard children in contemporary Morocco, while critiquing the concept and practice of 'adoption,' which too often is considered a panacea. Through a close and historically grounded reading of legal, social, and cultural mechanisms of one predominantly Islamic country, Jamila Bargach shows how 'the surplus bastard body' is created by mainstream society. Written in part from the perspectives of the children and single mothers, intermittently from the view of 'adopting' families, and employing bastardy as a haunting and empowering motif with a potentially subversive edge, this ethnography is composed as an intricate, open-ended, and arabesque-like evocation of Moroccan society and its state institutions. It equally challenges received sociological and anthropological tropes and understandings of the Arab world.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2002
Copyright Year: 2002
ISBN-Print: 978-0-7425-0027-3
ISBN-Online: 978-1-4616-4043-1
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 291
Product Type: Monograph

1. Contents No access
2. Note on Transliteration and Transcription No access
3. Preface and Acknowledgments No access
Introduction(s): Object/Subject, Discipline/Argument No access Pages 1 - 20
1. 1. Legal Throes: Genealogies and Debates on Kafala, Adoption, and Abandoned Children No access
2. 2. Counterpoints: The Idiom of Adoption between Theological Interpretation, the Rise ofthe Nation-State and the 'Real' No access
1. 3. Of Anthropology: Nature, Nurture, and Kinship No access
2. 4. Of Rituals: Names, Affiliation, and Identity No access
3. 5. Of Culture: Loci, Lore, and Stereotypes No access
1. 6. News from the Art, Intellectual, and Media Fronts: Reflections on and Representations of Marginality No access
2. 7. Social Work at Work: Or What Politics for What Help? No access
3. 8. Civil Society and Social Work: Or the Politics of What Help? No access
Postface No access Pages 215 - 218
Notes No access Pages 219 - 284
Index No access Pages 285 - 290
About the Author No access Pages 291 - 291