Identity, imaginary and tourism in the tuareg region, in Niger

Abstract

This paper aims to understand the complexity of the identity questions related to tourism while discerning the different levels of identity within the visited society. This paper therefore deals with the development of tourism among the Tuareg of Northern Niger. Focusing the analysis on identity transformations observed among local actors. The authors discuss first the western imagination relative to the Sahara and the Tuareg, an element that the Tuareg have remarkably played upon to encourage regional tourism based on “Desert tourism”. Then, from an historical perspective, they study the growth of tourism in the Agadez region, while highlighting its appropriation by the Tuareg, and the identity adaptations to which this appropriation has led. Finally, the authors consider the decline of tourism, as a result of the 2007-2009 rebellion, and the presence in the neighboring Northern Mali of the Salafist brigade Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which prohibits access to the region to foreigners for security reasons.The brutal halt in the tourist activity came with the decline of the Tuareg subculture that had been forged through their entrepreneurial dedication to tourism.