Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of tactics in the way a French speaking team of NGO activists in urban Morocco lived social relations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the role of tactics in the way a French speaking team of NGO activists in urban Morocco lived social relations. The team were a group of pedagogues who engaged in research, training and lobbying for the cause of children in the country. Talk about tactics formed part of creative as much as reflective moments of joint anticipatory reasoning that occurred whilst devising project proposals, planning for training sessions, and anticipating meetings with important stakeholders. To achieve their ends in a changing political landscape that was characterised by obscure tension between inertia and authoritarian ad-hoc decisions, team members had established a habit of self-consciously analysing their (shifting) position relative to other players in the arena. They constantly monitored or hypothesised about what others might think of them. In their personas of cosmopolitan experts, intercultural brokers, or simply 'people from the city' they adapted the framing of their cause and their own 'presentation of self' accordingly; whether their interlocutors be representatives of ministries, of royal foundations, or of their European funding agency, whether they be teachers, students, or 'common folks' in remote villages.

My discussion of tactics as part of how team members lived social relations on a day to day basis, shall be put in dialogue with earlier work on social relations in Morocco (Geertz, Geertz & Rosen 1979, Rosen 1984, 1995, Hammoudi 1997) on the one hand, and with recent interdisciplinary work on social cognition such as perspective taking and 'theory of mind' on the other.