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This article explores selective memories of nomadic gendered spaces, as expressed in the iconicity of housing built forms and their surrounding motifs and practices in terms of their meanings in relation to changing social contexts among the previously more nomadic Saharan Tuareg in sedentarization and urbanization. The approach here takes the apparently temporal idea of historical change in a formerly nomadic society and connects it to the spatial continuities and transformations in settled and urban organization and practice, analyzing their impact upon gender constructs and relations between the sexes, and exploring ways women and men actively respond to and manipulate these new spaces through evoking selective memories of their rural nomadic milieu. It is shown how local and national social constructions of memory and history sometimes converge, sometimes diverge, and have changed under wider pressures, while Tuareg women's lives and their place as makers of much material culture have been transformed. It is argued that agency in gendered spaces in oases and towns of Niger and Mali alternately obliterates and commemorates important gender constructs central to cultural identity. More broadly, this article argues that spatial and iconic meanings emerge only when animated by practices focused on both remembering and forgetting, practices not always rigidly opposed or mutually exclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores nuanced, debated and changing meanings of female fatness as a bodily aesthetic ideal in rural Tuareg communities in northern Niger and Mali. I compare two communities-one where nomadic herding, of longstanding importance among the Tuareg, remains prevalent, and intermarriage is rare between aristocratic and formerly servile persons, and the other where residents have become more settled in hamlets, now garden, and where intermarriage between social categories is frequent. Both communities have experienced conflict with colonial and postcolonial nation-states, but the more nomadic herders have had especially tense relations with French colonial and postcolonial state regimes. Although many oasis residents express greater ambivalence toward female fatness, these communities do not express neatly polarized attitudes but admire it to varying degrees, for different reasons, and attach different meanings to it from their experience of different double-binds over achieving it. Fundamental to understanding these meanings, I argue, are psychosocial dilemmas arising from historical change and regional variation affecting power relationships between persons of aristocratic and those of servile origins, between husbands and wives and between nomadic herders and the nation-state. More broadly, these data show the importance of reversals of power in symbolic capital and suggest more nuanced processes surrounding body politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, based upon this author's cultural anthropological field research among the Tamajaq-speaking Tuareg in the town of Kidal in northern Mali, documents diversity even in local voices by examining local concepts of changing aesthetics in contemporary plays widely considered "modern" by Tamajaqspeaking residents, but which are also part of their local performing arts category called isatsa. Some plays emerged from recent NGO and media-directed theatrical programs, but others emerged from more longstanding poetry, songs, and tales. The data reveal a continued valuing of local cultural production, despite multiple factors integrated into its formation, suggesting more broadly that terms and labels in artistic production are always situated, negotiable, and interested. The essay contributes to wider efforts to translate local aesthetics of verbal art performance across cultural knowledge systems, and to explore how local art forms and those who practice them are situated and situate themselves in broader political contexts. Longstanding expressive forms are not simply shaped by local and/or global forces, but are reflected on, exploited, and adapted in a range of processes fueled by ideologies, current events, and political and economic interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently in social/cultural anthropology and ethnography, there have been discussions concerning revisions of the old culture concept and its European philosophical bases (Marcus and Fischer 1986; Moore 1996 ). There have been efforts to incorporate emergent global cultural spaces and post-colonial indigenous intellectual traditions into reformulations of the anthropological subject (Said 1978; Rabinow 1989; Ong and Nonini 1996; Nandi 1992; Safi 1993). In these efforts, significant work has been done in African philosophy and ‘folklore’ (Hountondji 1983; Mudimbe 1988; Masolo 1994; Ag Erless 1998; Ag Soliman 1999). This essay contributes to these currents of thought, assessing what role cultural anthropology can play in the multipolar, globalized, post-colonial world. Specifically, the essay examines local philosophical discourses and concepts relating to cultural identity and difference among the Tuareg (also known as Kel Tamajaq, after their language) in the northern regions of Niger and Mali, where this author has conducted cultural anthropological field research. There is analysis of data on Tamajaq linguistic categories of space and time and cosmological and mythological categories of geography and identity, as well as discussion of their wider implications, in order to facilitate a local re-reading and revision of Euroamerican regional, cultural, social, and national categories. The analysis proceeds on two levels: epistemology and infrastructure. Epistemologically, a specifically-Tuareg/Tamajaq vocabulary of representation is compared to anthropological theories and interpretations of cultural spaces, their similarities and their differences. Infrastructurally, there is analysis of wider conditions and dynamic practices of knowledge-power connections in order to assess how a viable Tuareg/Tamajaq concept of culture can impact the humanities and social sciences. More broadly, the essay attempts to expand the possibilities for knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences concerning cross-cultural comparisons of individual subjectivity and collective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the impact of men's labor migration on gender relations between the sexes at home and women's active responses to labor migration among the Tuaregs who live in Mali, Algeria, Niger and Burkina Faso. It examines constraints and opportunities within the Tuareg household, where most women remain at home while men migrate. It highlights the interconnections among labor migration, gender and household dynamics.

Youth cannot be understood without examining elderhood, and age more generally. Among the Tuareg, Islamic religious rituals and liturgical music tend to be identified with the "aged" (those with children of marriageable age), and these are symbolically opposed to secular popular musical performances classified as "anti-Islamic, " which are identified with "youth." These images comment upon long-standing concerns with marriage, courtship, sexuality, and descent, but they are also increasingly being translated into concerns of cultural autonomy, as local youths struggle for cultural survival in conflict between Tuareg and the central state. I analyze three types of popular musical performance and the instruments featured in them, and show how their age-related imagery, commentary, and interaction express changing intergenerational relationships. These concerns, however, do not fall into a binary of "old" and "new, " or align with any one age group; rather, they suggest shifting associations of agentive power and questioning of "tradition" by youth and aged in diverse contexts. These data on age symbolism in Tuareg popular musical performances suggest more dynamic, nuanced formulations of "traditional," "modern," and "global" in anthropological theory. [Africa, Tuareg, aging, performance, globalization] [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] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses about a specific praise performance among the Tuareg people of Niger, West Africa called tebategh which is a smith dance. Tuareg Blacksmith Theater as an experience; Discussion of the tension between play and seriousness in dance and tebategh's in-jokes; Tebategh as media event; Presentation of the wedding ritual; Games and interference between play and war; Analysis of tebategh's location.

Examines the interrelationships among witch-craft practices, regional politicoeconomic processes, and social tensions among the Kel Ewey Tuareg of Niger West Africa. Possibility that there have been hints of misuse of these mediating powers; Penalization of nobles in rural areas; Difficulty in practicing nomadic pastoralism; Information on the gender roles and relationships between the sexes; Reference to an incident which occurred in August 1995.

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]