This dissertation examines the complex relationship between a modern university in Morocco and the social world in which it is situated. Approaching higher education as an ethnographic topic, it addresses the nature and formation of university students as social subjects through questions concerning notions of selfhood, senses of place and space, the distinctive rhythms marking the university off from the rest of social life, the disjunction between the "student present" and postgraduate future, and the role of the university as opposed to other institutions in the construction of social identity.
A brief survey of the history of the modern university and the position it occupies within contemporary social discourse in Moroccan society is followed by specific ethnographic accounts indicating the ways the university provides students with new senses of place, space and time, and the range of alternative modes of thought, conduct and social interaction made available through the educatory experience. Cast in terms of tensions between what is characterized as "local" and "supralocal" and more recent discussions concerning transnational identities, attention is given to how what university education introduces in the way of innovation articulates with other, less formal social institutions such as the family, and the ways in which reconfigurations of identity and practice associated with university education are achieved, attenuated, or obstructed. An in-depth account of the lives of two students addresses the relationship between forms of narrative, notions of selfhood, and social existence, and examines how a modern institution produces identities that remain themselves largely uninstitutionalizable. Specific attention is given to the culturally intermediate status of the university in relation to the social formation at large, and to how the experience of modernity and the identities made available through the educatory experience are often both precarious and socially marginalized.
I conclude by arguing for an ethnography of modern institutions that addresses their relationship to discordant or dialogical discourses which, in turn, increasingly characterize the dilemma of those who, engaged with such institutions, must contend with contradictory claims to social identity.
