Youth as actors and mediators in Tuareg theater and social life (Urban Niger and Mali)

Abstract

Valuable studies of youth in anthropology consider local concepts of what it means to be “youth” in relation to changing intergenerational relationships. However, there is still the need to convey more nuanced concepts of age as relational, dynamic, and debated, rather than categorical or consensual. In northern Niger and Mali, West Africa, droughts, settling of some nomads in towns, return of labor migrants, marginal employment, and recurrent armed conflicts have prompted different generations of Tuareg (also known as Kel Tamajaq, or “people who speak Tamajaq”)—traditionally semi-nomadic, stratified, and predominantly Muslim—to reflect on dangers and opportunities for the different generations in these upheavals. In particular, there is widespread preoccupation with what many refer to as the experience of youth. This essay analyzes enactments and reformulations of the meanings of youth and intergenerational relationships in popular play plots in Agadez, Niger, and Kidal, Mali, explores what it means to be culturally defined, among Tuareg, as “youth(s),” and examines the connections between acting and its performing specialists, many of whom are culturally defined as “youthful” in emerging new plays considered by many local audiences as “modern.” The goal is to contribute to anthropological studies of how youth and age more generally are socially constructed, as revealed through popular culture.