Paper Short Abstract:

This paper analyzes carnival masking practices during the Sefrou Cherry Festival in Morocco, exploring the relationships between cultural performances and the politics of identity in contemporary global Morocco, through an innovative methodological lens, focusing on the interactions between the agency of masks and actors and cultural and memorial resources available to them, and on the condition of cultural extension ratified by the performance of the Cherry Queen.

Paper Abstract:

This paper offers a cultural analysis of carnival masking practices carried out by specific actors within the framework of the "carnaval" held annually during the Cherry Festival in Sefrou, a town located in the Fès-Meknès Region, Morocco. Using the methodological lens of the anthropology of performance and of political anthropology and drawing on the dramaturgical models of Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz as well as Jacques Derrida's concept of citationality, this paper proposes an innovative interpretation of the functioning, dynamics of success and failure of the various embodied performances that characterize Sefrou's carnival parade. It highlights, above all, the close relationship between cultural performances and the politics of identity in the process of constructing and incorporating national and cultural identity in the contemporary global Morocco.

Moreover, it focuses on the degrees of critical disconnection that mark the practices of the involved subjects associated with taking “cultural roles”, namely the interaction between the agency of masks and actors and the cultural and memorial resources available to them. In particular, the carnivalesque performance of the Cherry Queen (a paradigmatic and emergent figure), who embodies a "conjunctive" representation of the indicative mode of the cultural process within a festival organized and sponsored by political authorities, will be analyzed. On a local level, this performance achieves the condition of cultural extension that ratifies the substantial success of the performance, effectively marking the gradual opening of new spaces in the public sphere to female presence.