In The Mobile Phone Revolution in Morocco, Hsain Ilahiane examines how Moroccans use the mobile phone to redefine core notions of gender and space, honor and shame, placemaking, and surveillance and control. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with urban street vendors, urban micro-entrepreneurs, urban female domestic workers, and smallholder farmers in urban and rural Morocco, Ilahiane illustrates how the mobile phone has the endowed capacity to inform, rearrange, and transform almost every aspect of Moroccan society.

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This brief, amusing book depicts the simple mobile phone as magic, a total social artifact endowed with baraka, or blessedness, in the words of one Moroccan domestic worker. The same woman claimed that al-portable, as the mobile phone is called in Moroccan Arabic (borrowed from the French le portable), is a miracle worker deserving shrines dedicated to the worship of its inventors. Through his participant observation, Ilahiane has gathered many insights into the uses of this simple device from street vendors, micro-entrepreneurs in construction industries, farmers, and domestic workers. Recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.