From Debdou’s Little Seville to America’s Guess: Rural Artisans and Global Designers – Aomar Boum
In this talk, Prof. Boum will develop the concept of aesthetic funds of knowledge to name the embodied, socially transmitted, and commercially usable repertoires through which Sephardic Moroccan Jews built aesthetic and sartorial competence across Debdou, France, and the Americas. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic and archival research in the Moroccan Jewish community in Los Angeles and building on Luis Moll’s account of the relation among household, community, and education, he examines how the Marcianos and other LA- and Montreal-based Moroccan Jews, whose family history links rural Moroccan Jewish life to transnational fashion commerce, negotiated Sephardic cultural identity and...