| Abstract
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Discipline and Development is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with families and in primary schools in a Moroccan village near Fez. I examine the everyday lives of children and youth, situated in the context of uneven state development of this region. In carefully analyzing interactions between children and caretakers in their extended families and local schools, I found that both adults and children highly valued disciplinary practices that would seem violent to many observers. Corporal discipline was used in this context as an idiom for idealized patriarchal authority across institutional contexts, from family to state to monarchy. At the same time, kin often encouraged children to resist the discipline imposed upon them. Disciplinary practices thus taught children to embody key features of local personhood rooted in local Islamic beliefs and villagers' identities as a marginalized, yet strong, healthy, and independent people, distinct from the weak and corrupted urban population. I demonstrate how the juxtaposition of anger and pain with play, humor and affection in disciplinary episodes encouraged children to participate in the negotiation of their own discipline and relationship to authority. These practices helped them to locate themselves within the affective ties of their extended families while cultivating a strong and fearless disposition and deference towards rightful authority. Yet, corporal discipline could also cause extended suffering when someone was beaten to the point of serious injury. In these cases, villagers understood disordered relationships of authority, rather than physical pain and injury, to be at the root of these destructive interactions, and used pain narratives to differentiate between rightful and unlawful authority. Development initiatives in schools, which often targeted children and youth in their attempts to shape the next generation of citizen-workers, sought to curb practices of corporal discipline and to characterize children's bodies as weak and vulnerable. These programs were usually only superficially enacted, however, as both villagers and state actors were invested in maintaining patriarchal relationships of authority imagined to underpin social order. In considering how locally shaped affect is cultivated in young children, I demonstrate that ideas about pain, anger, and fear that underpin liberal notions of violence are not universal. My dissertation highlights how local conceptions of pain, injury, trauma, and violence are constructed and enacted in everyday life. In looking at everyday practices that are considered normative and even moral, I am able to more closely examine the grey area between acceptable and unacceptable force.
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