Social Memory, Iconicity, and Gendered Spaces in Tuareg Sedentarization and Urbanization

Abstract

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.