The grammar of folklorization: An integrated critical discourse analysis of the linguistic depiction of Amazigh social actors in selected Moroccan EFL textbooks (1980s-present)

Abstract

AbstractThis study stands at the crossroads of folklorization, ethnicity, and curriculum. It seeks to criticize how the institutionalized production of knowledge about Amazigh folklore in Morocco has contributed to the creation and maintenance of a closed system of linguistic options for representing Amazigh ethnic groups through “folklorizing” their festivals, traditions, music, space, and marriage rituals. To investigate the micropolitics of folklorization in officially produced EFL textbooks in Morocco (1980-present), an integrated critical discourse analysis approach that oscillates between linguistic analysis and sociological analysis has been used. Results show that Amazighs have been mostly activated in relation to behavioral and relational processes and are therefore depicted as passive, deprived of sociological agency, with no effect(s) on others, or on the world. Excessive folklorization, results also indicate, commodifies Amazighs by reducing them to “exotic” commodities to be gazed upon. Amazigh females are caught in the realm of the “physical” and the “sensual” and are, hence, deprived of being represented as “thinkers” and “sayers” in mental and verbal processes. Non-Amazigh festivals and forms of folklore, on the other hand, are encoded primarily in material and transactive processes. Folklorization skews aspects of Amazigh identity to a flat set of criteria, such as “entertainment” and “exoticism”, which would give students a partial view of who Amazighs are mainly by iconizing them in a “celebratory” way which lacks analytical depth, bypassing, thus, significant concepts and topics related to the discrimination and subjugation of minority groups and their symbolic fights for power and social equality.

Keywords

• folklorization
• Amazighs
• Imazighen
• Berber(s)
• EFL/ELT textbooks
• Morocco