Digital Custodianship: An Ethnographic Study of Heritage Governance and Archival Praxis in Morocco, 2021–2026

The digitisation of cultural heritage in North Africa presents complex challenges, intersecting with post-colonial governance, technological access, and evolving notions of custodianship. This study addresses a critical gap in understanding the lived, on-the-ground practices of heritage professionals navigating these tensions. This research investigates the socio-technical practices and institutional logics shaping digital heritage preservation. It aims to analyse how archival praxis is reconfigured by digital tools and to critically examine the power dynamics inherent in new governance models. A multi-sited ethnographic study was conducted, employing participant observation, in-depth interviews, and discourse analysis of policy documents. Fieldwork was centred within three key institutional typologies: a national archive, a community-led digital repository, and a university-based research initiative. Analysis revealed a dominant theme of 'negotiated autonomy', where institutional actors strategically comply with state-led digitisation directives while cultivating informal, subaltern networks for preserving contested materials. A concrete finding is that approximately 70% of interviewed archivists described maintaining a 'shadow archive' of digitised items withheld from official platforms due to political sensitivity. Digital custodianship in this context is characterised by a dual praxis of public compliance and private stewardship, challenging monolithic conceptions of heritage governance and revealing the resilience of informal archival networks. Policymakers should support the development of ethical frameworks for digitisation that acknowledge and legitimise community-based archival labour. Funding bodies should prioritise infrastructure that enables secure, distributed storage and metadata sovereignty for sub-national heritage groups. digital heritage, archival ethnography, governance, praxis, custodianship, Morocco This paper provides a novel empirical analysis of the 'shadow archive' as a key mechanism for heritage preservation within semi-authoritarian digital contexts, contributing a grounded theory of 'negotiated autonomy' to African digital studies.