Since the 1980s, the reflective turn in anthropology has drawn systematic attention to the close link between ethnographic knowledge and power. One important aspect of this connection is the use of ethnographic texts in the politics of identification (cf. Brettell 1993). The rapid advance of digital communication has greatly facilitated the access to, diffusion, transmission and consumption of ethnography, more recently also by what used to be called ‘natives’ and their offspring.

This essay offers some thoughts on the problems of ethnography consumption outside academia. The recent translation into Dutch of the first part of a standard anthropological monograph on a tribal group in the central Rif (Morocco) and the use of this book by descendants of the original informants in the politics of ethnic identity formation in the Netherlands will be a case in point.

The Politics of Ethnography

Following the publication of Writing Culture (1986) and Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986) anthropology went through a period of heightened concern with reflexivity. This trend produced new forms of ethnographic writing, a blurring of genres and the dissemination of a ‘new’ relativism (Driessen 1993). Some of the changes in the politics of ethnography have partly been imported into the anthropology of the third millennium, although in the last decade we have also seen a partial restoration of ethnographic realism and a silent eclipse of post-modernism (Gingrich and Fox 2002).

More anthropologists began to take into account the global features of their research topics and sites. One example of a new theme that emerged in the 1990s concerns trans-national forms of identification in the local-global interface. A very influential factor in this recent shift has been the introduction and fast acceptance of the Internet as a new means of communication, both among anthropologists and their informants (Lee 2003). Fieldwork is increasingly being complemented and even replaced by what may be called ‘webwork’, that is navigating the web in search of ‘raw’ ethnographic data in a hunter-and-gatherer way. The Internet has also facilitated the use of ethnography by informants and their former descendants, for instance in the Berber diaspora.

The Rifian Homeland

Immigrants from the Rif constitute approximately 80 percent of the total number of legal residents of Moroccan origin in the Netherlands. Most of them have both the Dutch and Moroccan nationality and many maintain ties with their region of origin.