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Spirit-themed dreams--whether visitations or soul travels--are altered states that pose special challenges to the anthropologist. They are rooted in subjective personal experience, but their meanings are shaped by culturally and socially constructed religious knowledge and power. This article offers a case study of one Tuareg man's dream of an elderly female spirit, based on my fieldwork in a small rural community in northern Mali, where residents include Tamajaq-speaking, Muslim, semi-nomadic, and socially stratified Tuareg, as well as Arabic-speaking Kunta, with whom the Tuareg residents have cultural ties but also long-standing tensions. This case study does not represent all local experience, but does illustrate an individual's interpretation of widespread social, religious, and political predicaments in that village and region. Many Tuareg, whose own cosmological and social systems are at odds with but also influenced by those of North African Islam, express ambivalence toward Kunta efforts to impose more 'orthodox' Islamic practices. I show that this spirit dream expresses both religious influences and ambivalence toward them. I explore the meaning of reticence surrounding the spirit's name and analyze the spirit's multiple and interpenetrating identities. More broadly, the article shows how dreaming, though psychological and subjective, is also situated in wider contexts of historical, sociopolitical, and religious encounters. Further, it reveals how the cultural models pondered in dreaming and waking interpretations of dreams can involve cultural dissonance and mixed sentiments, rather than agreed upon models, and can refer to past, present, and future concerns. I argue that several possible 'kaleidoscopic' identities emerge to describe this spirit figure, thereby reflecting interweaving and contentious models of gender and religion in the dreamer's community. The article shows the importance of ambiguity in dreams and ambivalence in dreamers as an index of intersecting and colliding meaning systems, contested social changes, and opposed interests. [Keywords: Dreams, spirit possession/mediumship, religion, gender, Africa], This article approaches dreaming through a case study revealing one dreamer's subjective experience of a community's wider social divisions and conflicts, which revolve around religion, gender, and politics. Specifically, I [...]

What occurs when local residents travel, but also continually return home, and become increasingly self-conscious about their culture and history and how these are represented? The goal of this essay is to understand the roles of culture and memory in a traveling performance of Tuareg musicians from Mali, and to show how multiple viewpoints are alternately woven together and not woven together in the fabric of the performance event and wider processes surrounding it. International performances by touring African musicians and singers offer rich perspectives on current anthropological issues of culture, identity, and memory in globalization and diaspora. This essay draws on data from longterm field research in Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq) communities in Niger and Mali, West Africa and among Tamajaq-speaking expatriates and travelers in France and the United States. Central here is a case study of a Tuareg international musical touring ensemble called Tartit from northern Mali. There is analysis of their origins in the "home culture" and background on the Tuareg more generally. This is followed by analysis of the Tartit ensemble's promotion in the media, including interviews, their performance in the United States, and additional more longterm processes surrounding that performance event. More broadly, the goal is a more nuanced understanding of representations of culture and memory that move beyond mere "hybrids" in transcultural flows. These representations, I argue, reflect meta-messages in which there is shock of not only "the Other," but also shock of "the Self," in new worlds at home as well as in the borderlands. [Tvareg, Diaspora, Music, West Africa] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In field narratives and symbolic studies the anthropologist's space as well as local social and symbolic space have been the subject of much reflection. This essay situates ethnographic practice at the intersection of local social and symbolic space and field space among the Tuareg, a semi-nomadic community in northern Republic of Niger, West Africa. It contributes to further refinement in documenting the mutuality of field encounters. I explore the role of tent as property in local ritual and in interactions in my fieldwork. The tent is a forum for control over intellectual as well as material property, and for alternately conflictual and dialogical construction of anthropological knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is need to explore interconnections between roles of local social segments and that of outside researcher in the shaping of class relationships, as well as that between researcher and subjects. I examine the use of joking in relationships shot through with inequalities, such as that between Tuareg noble and smith, and that between myself the visiting ethnographer and local residents, in a highly stratified community characterized by client-patron relationships. Institutionalized praise-songs, jokes, and pranks between persons of different social segments and between researcher and Tuareg contain themes of marriage and war, topics germane to positioning and power relations in the field. They also raise issues concerning efforts of others to negotiate how they will be represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I analyze the roles of gossip, song, and divination in the articulation of grievances in settings of conflict among the Kel Ewey Tuareg of northeastern Republic of Niger. The goal is to illuminate sources of power assertion for different social segments. The question is what legitimizes and what destroys authority in the verbal invocation of sacred and secular powers in order to shape public opinion and change behavior. I propose a frame that looks at experience and action as inherently contrary and conflictual (Bakhtin 1965; Karp and Maynard 1983), as not merely "multiple voices" reflecting contradictions and cross-cutting social ties, but also transforming dialogue, thereby providing a theoretical alternative to essentially circular arguments of individual strategizing vs. collective rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores an under-represented area of anthropological analysis: aroma, the least appreciated of all senses on the cultural sensorium. Aroma is the most difficult of the senses to represent - especially in English. Here I examine the 'aromascape' of the Tuareg of Niger, West Africa, in two interconnected dimensions of communicative experience: the meanings and uses of aroma in overlapping fields of everyday sociability and more formalized ritual. My purpose is to analyze how scents and the idea of aroma play important evocative roles in human-to-human and human-to-spirit communication, in situations not only of boundary definition and re-definition, but also of indeterminacy. Aroma, I argue, opens up boundaries and suggests alternative ways of interpreting experience, in its central features of ambiguity and deniability. The essay contributes to studies of ritual, symbolism, and African studies, as well as to efforts to move toward more evocative and reflexive ethnographic writing about the senses and emotions. [ethnography, anthropology of the senses, Africa, culture, ritual]