Paper short abstract:

Building on fieldwork in a rural area of central Morocco where migration to Europe is pervasive, the paper explores how mobility and the native concept of 'the outside' engender specific subjectivities and relations in those who leave but also in those who, willingly or unwillingly, stay.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the fundamental role of mobility in the practical and imaginative unfolding of life in emigrant Central Morocco, engendering subjectivities and relations not only in those who leave, but also in those who, willingly or unwillingly, stay. Taking as my analytical guide, as well as my ethnographic point of departure, the experiences and effects of mobility on a peculiarly positioned group of informants - women married to migrants who are simultaneously mobile and immobile subjects - I trace how mobility has become a premise as much as a consequence of daily existence in my field-site, triggering specific forms of life and the emergence of specific kinds of subjects. I argue that the cultural and social power of mobility reveals itself in Moroccan daily life through a unique, and culturally specific, concept, that of 'l-barra' - literally 'the outside', a term referring mainly to 'Europe' or 'the West'. By tracing the ubiquitous presence of 'the outside' in the lives of migrants' wives, I trace how migration emerges in Central Morocco as a phenomenon that goes beyond the mobility of some, becoming a quality of the life of all.