Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Daily Bread And The Normative Ascription Of Cultural Value In Ahistorical Morocco, Patrick Kurth

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In his celebrated autobiographical narrative, For Bread Alone, Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri utilizes khubz, an Arabic term referring generically to bread, as a primary point of reference in describing his youthful experience of impoverishment, political marginalization, and emotive frustration in independent Morocco. Paired with anthropology’s universal and localized understandings of staple foods as embodiments of culturally constructed meaning, the populist accessibility and empathetic efficacy of Choukri’s literary idiom suggests that khubz functions as a powerful symbol of normative Moroccan social values. This composition makes an initial overture towards exploring that possibility, sketching out generalized correlations between khubzand …