Alumni Insights

Moropeans: Shaping New Subjectivities in the European Wedding Industry 

From Otherness to the Negotiation of Belongingness

Rim Affaya, Class of 2011 

The conceptual proposition of “Moropeanness “is used to translate the feeling of belonging to several political spaces and cultural styles, opening up a conversation about a new “imaginary geography“(Diouf 2002) of individuals. Much like the concept of Afropeanism, which was shaped by culture, the term “Moropean“aims to address a question that is both political and subjective, in connection with the experience of descendants of Moroccan immigrants living in Europe. This contraction of Europeanness and Moroccanness is reminiscent of the “Afropeanness“ initiated by music and literary movements among artists from the Sub-Saharan African diaspora. 

Today, in France, but also in Belgium or the Netherlands, Moroccan weddings have taken much more grandiose proportions in terms of how they are staged, the budget allocated to them, and the levels of sophistication involved. Couples of solely or mixed Moroccan origin call upon local wedding professionals (negafates, in the plural) in their place of residence in order to organize festivities modeled on the latest trends in revisited Moroccan clothing, music, and culinary traditions. These festivities are an opportunity not only to show off the young women in their finest attire but also to display their filiation with Moroccan wedding traditions, thanks to caftans and jewelry, food and drink, music and decor. The economy gravitating around these objects and rituals is growing every year and the actors involved have developed the market by mobilizing networks of circulation between Europe and Morocco. This booming economy also illustrates these individuals’ capacity to construct themselves in an in-between space, on a mode that combines narrative, performance, mimetism, and creativity. 

IDENTITY ECONOMICS: MOROPEANNESS BETWEEN COMMODIFICATION AND INCORPORATION 

This wedding industry involves recreating an atmosphere using a variety of tools ranging from the music played by orchestras to the dishes cooked by chefs, the outfits designed by seamstresses, and the seats made by upholsters, as well as a range of logistical arrangements ensuring the circulation of ideas, trends, and styles. It therefore draws on consumer, commercial, and diasporic practices that, viewed together, serve to reveal how commodification processes respond to the sociological tensions that run through a post migrant community. Moreover, studying the profession of negafa from a purely culturalist perspective means losing sight of the dialectical relationship between the individual and society that lies at its core. Tangaft, as an accompaniment service for Moroccan weddings, brings together individual and collective experiences that reveal how certain actors transcend the divide between origins and new citizenship by developing registers of representations that, instead of opposing each other, combine the multiple affiliations with which they identify. The moropeanity shows how plural identities are made both in the intimacies that are founded in marriage and in the development of business between Morocco and Europe. 

The role played by a negafa in a Moroccan wedding perpetuates a tradition in which she is a key figure dictating the rhythm of the ceremony, determining the appearance and reputation of the families, and preserving the gestures and rituals associated with this kind of celebration. However, her body and her gestures are more than simply a presence and a technique: together they form “codified body movements with a view to practical or symbolic efficacy“ (Lebreton 1991, 138). Much more than simply a folk practice, it is a genuine anthropological space with the potential to reveal “the movement through which relationships between individuals are incessantly reshaped, in turn like the bridge that connects and the door that separates“ (Lardellier 2020, 2). 

Entrepreneurs in this specific industry, as well as their clients, contribute to reinforcing and bringing into circulation rituals that create or close these connections between traditions. In several ways, they contribute to transforming them and to building bridges between individuals and spaces that they endow with symbolic value. They serve as mediators and profit from this symbolic interplay by making available to the Moroccan diaspora the material apparatus they require in order to exercise their own understanding of cultural ways of “being-Moroccan“ in Europe. This is clearly one of the manifestations of Moropeanness. Through these objects and services expressing a mode of celebration belonging to Moroccans in Europe, we can see the commodification of cultural products and practices, like other “ethno-commodities“ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) belonging to populations of Latin American and Asian origin in other countries of immigration. Illustrating the negafates’ full adoption of capitalist modes of commodification, the industry now refers to “packs “whereas a few years ago it would have been unthinkable in Morocco to view these rituals as “products“ that could be framed in such terms. The packs in question correspond to the range of products and services on the market and each comes at a fixed price, with options to suit different budgets. Typically, three packs are offered, targeting the working classes, the middle classes, and the upper classes. 

In its own way, a wedding is a space, moment, and economy liable to reveal “drives and intimate feelings such as the ambitions and social dependencies of an urban individual and a nourishing entrepreneur“ (Hassoun 2014). It has the potential to show how the borders between country of origin and host country can become blurred and be redefined, while at the same time staging social positions, changing tastes, sources of inspiration, and the elaboration of consumer practices that, in the name of pleasure, sharing, and celebration, also serve as identificatory references for these new entrepreneurs and clients. While consumer practices and the dissemination of celebratory styles and fashion trends have allowed us to touch upon a range of expressions of “being-Moroccan“ in Europe, other manifestations of these hybridities and fusions can also be found. The economic and business worlds reveal multiple shifts in subjectivity that take different forms in other areas, which seem more distant, such as cinema, literature, music, and painting. In order to provide a broad out- line of Moropeanness, we must strive to link together the various enunciative spaces in which it emerges and unfolds.