Tuareg Research Articles

‘You Know What the Truth Is? There are No Touareg Evacuées Here’: On Crisis and Categories of Migration

This paper analyses the practices of (im)mobilities and the accompanying emotions to question the exceptionalisation of crisis and migratory categorisations. Focusing on Kel Tamasheq (aka Tuareg) mobile livelihoods and their fluid interconnections with kinship networks and emotions across time, it argues that the multidimensionality of causes behind a migratory project, and the importance of historically contextualising the relation between a crisis, here the ‘Malian crisis’, and regional patterns of (im)mobilities, reveal the arbitrariness of making crisis exceptional and migratory categories uniquely discreet. This paper is based on a 10-month ethnography among Kel Tamasheq in Bamako.

Multiple attitudes and shifting language ideologies: a case of language shift among Libyan Tuaregs

Abstract This paper examines the pivotal role of ideologies in a case of language shift from Targia to Libyan Arabic among Libyan Tuaregs in the south–western region of Libya. I argue that foundational ideologies, the opposed and hierarchical linguistic relationship between Arabic and Targia, a southern Amazigh variety, and ideological elision, the process of shifting the meanings associated with Classical and Modern Standard Arabic (CA, MSA) to Libyan Arabic (LA) (e.g., religious piety), eventually have driven the changes in the linguistic behavior of the Tuareg people towards the attachment to Libyan Arabic and at the expense of Targia. The data is drawn from a fieldwork conducted on two Libyan Tuareg communities, Ghat and Barkat. The former is a multi-ethnic town while the latter is a village composed of only Tuaregs. The sample is comprised of 221 participants (114 from Brakat and 107 from Ghat), balanced by gender and divided into three age groups. A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches was employed for data collection and analysis. The statistical analysis showed that age group has the most significant effect on the reported use of Targia, followed by type of community and the interactive effect of both variables.

Iklan Aesthetics in Niger: Identity and Adornment from Servility to Self-agency

<i>Iklan</i> Aesthetics in Niger: Identity and Adornment from Servility to Self-agency

THE IMZAD AND TUAREG MUSIC: GENDER DEBATES VERSUS BELIEFS, VALUES AND PROMOTIONS

This paper discusses the Tuareg people of the Central Sahara, outlining salient issues relating to the imzad (a Targai musical instrument) and gender. It examines the various ways in which gender and gendered meanings are derived in musical instruments. Drawing upon Veronica Doubleday’s theory on gendered meanings constructed within relationships between humans and musical instruments, the paper examines the dual instrumental monopolies of the Targai (Tuareg women musicians) and the Targui (Tuareg men musicians) living in the region of Mali, Niger and Algeria. It argues that gendered monopolies and dominance in music and musical instruments is not a necessary debate; beliefs, value systems and hereditary among other factors, may necessitate the observed male-female monopolies in music performances (voice or instrument). Our cultural beliefs, values and safeguarding practices are of more importance when rightly channelled by our indigenous music, they can attract investors and promotions on the international scale. The paper contributes to the vast ethnomusicological literature on music and gender.

Niglá: Methodology of Discontinuous (Im)Mobilities among Malian Kel Tamasheq in Bamako

Abstract This article analyses the research methods adopted while working with Kel Tamasheq (Tuareg) families in the urban space of Bamako. With no authorisation to move outside the city, the researcher cannot but be, on the one hand, a fixed point of observation of informants' movements in and out of the city. On the other hand, the progressively acquired capacity to move through Bamako's Kel Tamasheq families – sometimes depending on others, sometimes autonomously – resituates a mobile approach within a context of general immobility. As these two levels of observations collide, this article reflects on an emerging methodological approach to 'discontinuous (im)mobility'. The article suggests that strategic (im)mobility is key to comprehending the extension and organisation of different relationships. By discontinuous (im)mobility this article means a not-necessarily pre-planned organisation of the researcher's mobility while doing fieldwork. Initially this might seem to lead to great confusion in collecting and analysing qualitative ethnographic data. However, in the long run it provides a rich and varied corpus of observations and interactions that are inclusive and intra-scalar. Readiness to be (im)mobile, to navigate volatility, is the norm that is not grasped by equilibrium-driven methodological approaches based on ordered and sequential fieldwork design. This discontinuous (im) mobility allows us to comprehend the entanglement and ongoing reproduction of such variabilities, whose change is hastened by the shifting socio-political context in Mali. To support my argument, the article takes the example of tbushak, a practice of visiting relatives and friends.

Images of loneliness in Tuareg narratives of travel, dispersion, and return.

This article examines how social, economic, and political upheavals in the Sahara have stimulated re-thinking about loneliness in relation to trauma from mobility, dispersion, and return home in communities of Tamajaq-speaking, Muslim, and semi-nomadic Tuareg in northern Niger and Mali. How do Tuareg, sometimes called Kel Tamajaq after their language, draw on and re-formulate longstanding and new ways of coping with loneliness in regional droughts and wars, which have driven many to alternately disperse from their communities and return to homes that are no longer the same? What is the connection between changing modes of travel, concepts of loneliness, and ways of coping with this experience? In these communities, loneliness is a recurrent theme in personal life histories-in particular, in narratives of both geographic travel and spiritual travel in medico-ritual healing-and is alluded to in poetry, song, and everyday conversation. This article explores the meanings of loneliness and ways of coping with it in this society through analysis of this emotion in symbol, subjective perception, and social experience. The focus is upon representations of loneliness in narratives by travelers who have confronted this emotion, and upon relevant Tamajaq terms often used to express loneliness: namely, essuf (the wild, solitude, and nostalgia); tamazai (approximately, a depression); and tarama (unrequited love), illustrating with cases and examples. More broadly, the article is guided by and builds on insights in psychological anthropology into emotion and affect as well as suffering and subjectivity.

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

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.

Exile in the Desert with Sarmi Moussa

Exile in the Desert with Sarmi Moussa Melinda Smith (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Patrick Gruban In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything. —Thomas Merton [End Page 47] It was past midnight, and the bench I sat on in the small mud-brick airport in Ouargla was hard. It kept me from sleeping. I was in transit in this remote oasis town, waiting until just before sunrise to board the flight to Djanet in the southeastern Algerian Sahara. It was here that I saw Tuareg men for the first time. Two large draped forms filled the bench across from me—men dressed in their traditional indigo caftans with white turbans called cheches wrapped around their heads and draped across their faces so only dark eyes were visible. Tuareg men are sometimes referred to as “blue men” because the indigo dye can stain their skin. The pictures I had seen of Tuareg people didn’t do justice to these two imposing figures, and I watched them doze off. The Berber-speaking Tuaregs of North Africa were known for their camel-caravan journeys across the Sahara. Now they take planes when they need to, and drought has forced them to sell off their herds and crowd into tented camps and oasis towns. As the long shadows of morning stretched across the stark landscape, we landed on a sandy airstrip on the outskirts of Djanet, the small town that served as the gateway to the Tassili n’Ajjer. Near the Libyan border to the east, the Tassili n’Ajjer, which means “plateau of rivers” in the local Berber language, was named when water, trees, and grass were part of an ecosystem far different from the arid, rocky landscape it has become. The Tassili is home to more than fifteen thousand Neolithic paintings and engravings depicting the vanished savannah, where herds of cattle and other large animals foraged for grass and crocodiles swam in streams and swamps. This open-air museum was well known to the Tuareg people but was “discovered” by French archaeologists only in 1933. It has since brought a slow stream of adventurers and scientists to see the record of people who lived in this high desert nine or ten thousand years ago. I’d decided that before I left Algeria, I too needed to see this remarkable landscape and its treasures. It was the 1974 winter break from my job teaching English at the University of Oran, the major higher education institution in western Algeria. I was living in Algeria because I couldn’t bear to be an American anymore. By the early 1970s, after years of street protests against the Vietnam War, after being tear-gased and arrested and demoralized, I needed to go away. The Watergate scandal had just erupted. President Nixon had ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor, North Vietnam’s [End Page 48] only port. Media images of the burning flesh of screaming Vietnamese children stalked me. In 1972, after I turned twenty-five, I found a way out. I didn’t flee to Canada like so many war resisters. After all, my life wasn’t threatened by the draft or the war, only my sense of identity. I fled to North Africa, an unlikely place. Algeria chose me, not the other way around. The country was recruiting English teachers for its three universities. I had a newly minted MA in teaching English as a foreign language, pursued as a passport out of the US, not a career choice. Algeria had waged an iconic struggle for independence from 132 years of French colonization. The revolution was held up as the world’s blueprint by other countries fighting for self-determination, from South Africa to Palestine. One million Algerians had died in the war. The French, in their final coup de grâce, burned the library at the University of Algiers before abandoning their colony. The country began building its own institutions, educating a new generation of skilled leaders and workers. I happily accepted a job offer. Algeria had severed diplomatic ties with the US after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. I was glad to be...

Jane HirshfieldLedger

Equally fascinating are the texts following the poems—where we also get a glimpse into the surprising complexity of translation approaches employed across this map of this endangered poetic world. For example, the Tamajaght poetry quoted above is a third cousin to the original— first transcribed by the poet, Hawad, from Tamajaght into a graphic illustrated version , rendering the poetry using a modified Tifinagh alphabet with added vowels; then it has passed through French translation by his scholar-wife, Hélène Claudot-Hawad, thence into English by Judith Fleiss. By the way, this poem about Ti-n-El (“She of the season of new grasses”) and others explore the forced exile and unresolved fate of the Tuareg people. Because of the dizzying variety of translation strategies and challenges, there is a necessary unevenness in translation, with some stilted lines and other minor stylistic clutter creeping in. No matter. This volume enchants, dignifies, educates, uplifts, transports , and ultimately may even help redeem and heal us, in our presently unhinged global frenzy—if only we let it. There is much more to do, of course— these sixty poets/languages represent but a slightest fraction of our endangered literary heritage now disappearing by the month. Even so, Chris McCabe has made something exceptional here. This is that rare collection that every one of us can treasure and pass on. I cannot hope strongly enough that this book may find its way into our libraries—and our hearts. Andrew Singer Trafika Europe Elisabeth Åsbrink And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain:The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War Trans. Saskia Vogel. New York. Other Press. 2020. 421 pages. A LIFETIME—seventy-five years— has passed since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, and other hellholes emblematic of the European extermination of perceived Otherness. Lest we forget, we need books like And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: a slow-burning, relentless investigation of the persecution of the Jews and, at the same time, a compassionate study of an exiled child and family bonds stretched to breaking point. Elisabeth Åsbrink is a brilliant journalist with a personal stake in exposing dark periods in contemporary history. The core narrative in 1947, her wonderfully readable “biography of a year,” is the post–World War II struggle of Europe’s surviving Jewry to find a refuge in Israel; the historical account is illuminated by the story of her father, a Jewish-Hungarian boy whose family is gradually eliminated. And in the Vienna Woods is an earlier work, and the child adrift is another Jewish boy, Otto Ullmann. Otto’s parents loved him, their only child, so well that they sent the thirteen-year-old away from Vienna within a year of Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Just a few months later, it had become clear that Jews would be brutally punished for existing at all. Books in Review Jane Hirshfield Ledger New York. Knopf. 2020. 128 pages. A NEW VOLUME of poems by acclaimed poet Jane Hirshfield is an event. After reading the poems in Ledger—a capacious, varied volume—it seems as if ordinary life is richer and deeper than before, yet it is hard to pin down why. Her limpid style, sometimes riddling yet never obscure, provides part of the answer. With every word, Hirshfield allows us to enter her poems and feel at home there. Even when she challenges us most forcefully , she does so together with us, holding our gaze, inhabiting a shared space. Not for nothing does she see poetry as a vehicle for transformation—and yet the poetic speaker feels like a friend rather than a guide or moralist . Humility is often her very subject: “In the end, / I was like others. / A person.” Hirshfield’s poems work against our typical , daily egocentrism. This interest unifies her oeuvre, allowing us to recognize her poems by their perspective and curiously voiceless voice rather than by more conventional means, such as imagery or leitmotifs. A Hirshfield poem is an exercise in opening the self. This is not an evacuation as much as an endless multiplication: until we see each character in a story...

A Southern View on the Tuareg Rebellions in Mali

Abstract:Since Mali’s independence in 1960, the Tuareg, a minority ethnic group, have staged successive rebellions, with the major ones occurring in 1963, 1990, 2006, and 2012. While discussions of “the Tuareg issue” have sometimes led both the Malian and the international press, as well as scholars, to make inaccurate generalizations, it is true that almost all the armed conflicts of the past fifty years in Mali were originated by people of the Tuareg group. Therefore, many of their Malian compatriots hold the Tuareg people responsible for the destruction of life and human rights violations that have taken place since the beginning of 2012. This article focuses on the events of 2012 and their aftermath and explores some social, cultural, and political differences between northern Tuareg and southern Bamana peoples in particular. It asks two specific questions: Is there something about Tuareg society, culture, and politics (i.e., Tuareg identity) that causes an incompatibility with the Mali Republic? And if not, where has the Malian government failed through the successive regimes since independence?

Source Codes, Scripts, and Dataset for the paper: "A matter of ephemerality. The study of Kel Tadrart Tuareg (SW Libya) campsites via quantitative spatial analysis"

Source Codes, Scripts, and Dataset for the paper: "A matter of ephemerality. The study of Kel Tadrart Tuareg (SW Libya) campsites via quantitative spatial analysis"

Reflections on Azawad Crisis and Malian Democracy: The Statehood, its Deficiencies and Inclusion Failure

The 1992 decentralization reform in Mali failed to address the deficiencies embedded within the state. The resurgence of the Azawad crisis and the coup d’état of March 2012 have made these limits striking. After a brief account of the causes behind the century-long decay of Tuareg people, I will show that the 2013 elections may only represent an ephemeral solution unless strong policies of institution strengthening are deployed and the northern elites are put in condition to exert legitimate authority. The decentralization reform and peace agreements of the 1990s and 2000s have further increased the weakness of security forces. Moreover, they proved unable to provide northern elites with adequate means for securing legitimation and activating a process of institutional anchoring.

Burning without slashing. Cultural and environmental implications of a traditional charcoal making technology in the central Sahara

We describe in this paper a traditional charcoal making technology occasionally adopted by Tuareg people in the hyper-arid central Sahara (SW Libya). This methodology (called esed) has been identified thanks to ethnobotanic and ethnographic interviews with people living in the Tadrart Acacus massif (the kel Tadrart Tuareg) and confirmed by macroscopic and micromorphological analyses of residual field evidence. Esed consisted of burning in situ trunks of dead Acacia tortilis (Forssk.) Hayne; subsequently, small portions of collapsed and still-burning wood were buried with sand in an attempt to ensure combustion under anoxic conditions. Our interviews elucidated that the esed technology is well known by people living in the region and has possibly been practiced for a long time. Surprisingly, local informants highlighted that esed was employed to made charcoal only during years marked by abrupt reduction of precipitation and consequently of natural resources. The last employment of esed dates to the dry phase of the mid-1970s, when charcoal was used as an exchangeable good. The discovery of this charcoal making technology shed new light on the capability of Tuareg to manage the few natural resources available in marginal environments and to cope with rapid climate changes.

A Little to One Side: Caregiving, Spatial Seclusion, and Spiritual Border-Crossing in Frail Old Age among the Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq)

This essay examines the meanings of the seclusion of frail elders and the roles of small children who act as their primary caregivers in rural Tuareg communities of northern Niger, and explores the implications of these arrangements for intergenerational relationships. Data suggests that both cosmological and socioeconomic forces shape the seclusion and caregiving of frail elders. It is argued that, despite some physical decline and social withdrawal in these circumstances, particularly on approaching death, nonetheless there is enhanced spiritual power in which these elders and their small caregivers cross thresholds toward new sources of meaning. More broadly, the essay contributes to debates over the meanings of disengagement over the life course and the semiotics of peripheral and secluded spaces.

Some medicinal plants of Arabian Pennisula

Many nations of the world have traditional medicine. Arabs were the first to distil alcohol. The existence and use of plants to treat human diseases is as old as man. Some plants have opportunity, either to be or of being transferred from their original natural environment to another. To determine whether traditional medicines were available for the treatment of diseases in Arabian Pennisula, a literature review of the plants used by Arabs was completed which led to identification of about 150 medicinal plants used in the treatment of human diseases in the Pennisula. Some of the listed plants are already available in Nigeria perhaps as a result of interaction between Arabs/Jews from Middle East and Arab-Barbas, Tuaregs, Fulanis and Hausas in Africa through trans Sahara trade and pilgrimages. Key words: Medicinal plants, Arabs, Middle East.

Mythico‐History, Social Memory, and Praxis: Anthropological Approaches and Directions

AbstractThis article explores the interface and tension between myth, history, and memory, in relation to ideology and praxis of identity. There is a critical overview of anthropological and other approaches in the humanities and social sciences to ‘mythico‐history’ and social memory, their mutual influences, and current debates and directions in this literature. In particular, emphasis is upon the uses of oral narratives in historiography and social context in the constructions of personal and collective identities of difference, for example, ethnicity and gender in ‘narratives of nation’ and ‘myths of matriliny’ and their connections to social practice, drawing on secondary cross‐cultural data and primary data from this anthropologist's research in Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq) communities of northern Niger and Mali.

Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb

This paper is organized into four chapters that focus on the terrorist group Al Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The four chapters examine different facets of the collective environment that have allowed AQIM to succeed and even thrive at times. The first chapter begins with Algeria’s war of independence with the French. The second chapter focuses on the nomadic Tuareg people. It seeks to show how the Tuaregs were deprived by French occupiers and how European colonization cost the Tuaregs access to vital trade routes used for centuries. The third chapter will very briefly examine Algeria’s civil war and the emergence of modern terrorist groups. The fourth chapter will discuss the post-9/11 world in terms of “shaping operations” for the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT ) and how this caused an evolution in terrorism as a reaction to actual or perceived American hegemonic ambitions.This paper is not a compendium of every event or in any way a complete history of the region. It is intended to reinforce the author’s notion of outlying antecedents that normally coalesce around a central issue and how the addition of a political agenda can lead these antecedents toward a fusion point. When the fusion point is met, ethno-nationalist ambitions are catapulted down the road of terrorism and the fundamental message is lost in the debris of another attack. Such is the story of AQIM... This article is available in Journal of Strategic Security: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol2/iss2/2 53 Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb

The New Touareg an SuV of the Next generation

The New Touareg an SuV of the Next generation

Package and Ergonomics of the New Touareg

Package and Ergonomics of the New Touareg

MALI: Clash with Touareg Rebels

MALI: Clash with Touareg Rebels