Susan J Rasmussen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3584543 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan J Rasmussen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan J |
| FAMILY NAME | Rasmussen |
| SIGNATURE | RASMUSSEN S J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Houston |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 75 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 216 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Spirit Possession and Religion: Excavating the Unexpected in an Uneasy Relationship
This is a critical overview of recent and current studies of spirit possession, a condition featuring an altered state of consciousness that is culturally defined as the occupation of a person by forces that are alien and often invisible—for example, spirits, ancestors, or other entities and powers. The chapter explores how possession offers insights, but it also poses challenges in understanding the concept of religion and, more broadly, individ…
Recasting sorcery as critical psycho-social commentary, moral discourse, and local psychotherapy
This article critically reflects on future directions in cross-cultural psychiatry and cultural psychology by engaging the challenges of interpreting psycho-social theories of causation and evidence in what is conventionally called “sorcery” in anthropology. This anthropologist argues that sorcery, notwithstanding its status as an older, classic topic in the history of anthropology and its seemingly “exotic” reputation, has continuing value in re…
Transformations and Navigations of Ethnoreligious and Cultural Identity and Belonging among Kabyle Immigrant Converts to Christianity in France
This article concerns diasporic Kabyle converts to Christianity in France, exploring how these immigrant converts, a Berber/Amazigh people, former Muslims originally from Algeria, North Africa, critically reflect on, revise, and debate their understandings of their conversion to Christianity and express a complex set of transformations and navigations of identity and belonging. Addressed here is a form of conversion from one world religion to ano…
Dreaming, Temporality in Diasporic Space, and Religious Reflections among Kabyle Immigrant Converts in France
This article explores diasporic experiences and reflections on religious conversion through analyzing visitational, predictive/generative, and inspirational dreams recalled and related by Kabyle immigrant converts in France, which prompted their earlier conversion from Islam in their home region of Kabylie in Algeria, North Africa, prior to their migration to France. There is an approach to dreaming as both self-psychoanalysis and social practice…
Beyond Entertainment: Power and Performance in Two Urban Festivals in Niger
The Knowable and the Unknowable in Ethnographic Encounters: A Case of Sorcery, Rumor, and Gossip among Tuareg in Northern Niger
This article explores issues of knowledge production, its limits, and uncertainty and suspicion in ethnographic field research through the lens of what anthropologists conventionally call "sorcery" beliefs and practices involving a love target, its treatment, and its aftermath of "shapeshifting", occurring in the social context of gossip, rumor, and suspicion among the Tuareg, sometimes called Kel Tamajaq after their language, in Niger, West Afri…
Re-Thinking a Matrilineal Myth of Healing: Tuareg Medicine Women, Islam, and the Market in Niger
This article explores the changing metaphoric logic and contextual uses of a mythical-historical popular religious account of matrilineal origins of herbal medicine women among Tuareg in northern Niger. Medicine women both reproduce and modify this origin myth’s motif in their Tamajaq-speaking, Muslim, traditionally ranked, and semi-nomadic communities, where many have faced religious, socioeconomic, and political upheavals challenging local wome…
Social Memory, Iconicity, and Gendered Spaces in Tuareg Sedentarization and Urbanization
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 spati…
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 ar…
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 drought…
Global Media and Local Verbal Art Representations of Northern Malian Tuareg
This article offers a critique of widely disseminated portrayals of northern Malian Tuareg by outside media, which tend to portray all Tuareg as warriors and criminals and to project pseudo-scientific concepts of "race" onto relationships between Tuareg and other Malians, recalling the now discredited colonial "Hamitic Myth" in Rwanda. It also analyzes local oral historical accounts that present themes of Mali as both a protected fortress and wel…
Understanding honor in religious, cultural, and moral experience: Commentary on “Diasporic Virginities: Social Representations of Virginity and Constructions of Identity amongst British Arab Muslim Wo…
An important and timely topic in the study of the connections and divergences between culture and religion is the construction of concepts of honor in moral experience, and how these are expressed symbolically and socially. How can a moral concept such as honor be a sign of distinction and belonging at once, and why does honor remain important in a diasporic community, though not identical in meanings to honor in some other “home” cultures? How d…
An Ambiguous Spirit Dream and Tuareg-Kunta Relationships in Rural Northern Mali
Spirit-themed dreams-whether visitations or soul travels-are altered states that pose special challenges to the anthropologist. They are rooted in subjective personal experience, but their meanings are shaped by culturally and socially constructed religious knowledge and power. This article offers a case study of one Tuareg man's dream of an elderly female spirit, based on my fieldwork in a small rural community in northern Mali, where residents …
Veiling in Africa
Re-casting the veil: Situated meanings of covering
This commentary offers a socio-cultural anthropological critical overview of studies of covering, popularly called “veiling” and “the veil” as practiced predominantly (though not exclusively) by some (though not all) Muslim women. The goal is to review studies that enhance understanding of this practice by detaching it from ethnocentric and culture-bound images of gender and religion—especially women and Islam—pervasive in some media portrayals a…
Cultural Anthropology
This overview of cultural anthropology begins with a brief discussion of historical, recent, and current trends in theory and method. Next, there is a critical analysis of two broad issues concerning the anthropological subject: namely, tensions between approaches and perspectives emphasizing the individual, practice, and agency, on the one hand, and those emphasizing collectivities, institutions, and structure, on the other; and tensions between…
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 withdr…
Encountering being, identity, and otherness: Reconsidering Guimarães’s ‘‘Amerindian anthropology and cultural psychology’’ and Amerindian perspectivism, with insights from anthropology of religion, Af…
Images of self and other are best understood not as static categories, but as fluid and dynamic negotiations in cultural encounters and transformations. In numerous cultural expressive contexts, such as animism, totemism, cosmology/philosophy, myth, and symbol, motifs represent what it means to exist, of ‘‘being’’ in this world, in likeness and difference, and encounters with other worlds: for example, human/animal relationships, time and space t…
Kohl, Ines: Beautiful Modern Nomads. Bordercrossing Tuareg between Niger, Algeria, and Libya
Anthropos , Seite 269 - 270
Remaking Body Politics: Dilemmas Over Female Fatness as Symbolic Capital in Two Rural Tuareg Communities
Contested Performances: At the Crossroads of Local and Global Aesthetic Knowledge and Practice in "Modern" Urban Tamajaq (Tuareg) Theater in Northern Mali
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 Tamajaq-speaking residents, but which are also part of their local performing arts category called isatsa . Some plays emerged from recent NGO and media-dir…
The Slippery Sign: Cultural Constructions of Youth and Youthful Constructions of Culture in Tuareg Men's Face-Veiling
A key focus of semiotic and anthropological investigation concerns aesthetics and social poetics. In poststructural analyses of signs and symbols as fluid and dynamic phenomena, an important domain of study is visual signification: for example, dress. This essay explores nuances of shifting meanings, both within and beyond the control of the wearers, in the tug-of-war between convention and invention, and beyond, in moving toward reinventions of …
Mythico‐History, Social Memory, and Praxis: Anthropological Approaches and Directions
This 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 con…
Commentary: Opening Up Perspectives on Autonomy and Relatedness in Parent—Children Dynamics: Anthropological Insights
Many studies have shown widely varying human child-rearing practices; no child is ever a tabula rasa in the eyes of the culture. The article by McShane et al. (2009) on parenting themes of autonomy and relatedness among Inuit migrants from the northern countryside to Ottawa, a medium-sized city and the capital of Canada, offers important findings on previously less-studied child-rearing among Inuit in that southern urban setting. More broadly, th…
Ethnographic Sorcery . Harry G. West
Lack of Prayer: Ritual restrictions, social experience, and the anthropology of menstruation among the Tuareg
Menstrual taboos, I argue, can be understood only in relation to other ritual restrictions, ones observed by men as well as women, and have significant implications for our understanding of female ritual roles. Gender imagery in Tuareg menstrual ritual and cosmology is used as a metaphor for relations between participants in wider socioeconomic contexts, and it forms a symbolic medium of conflict and ambiguity for Tuareg men and women. In this ar…
Ritual Specialists, Ambiguity and Power in Tuareg Society
Les theories anthropologiques de la marginalite, des « limites » et des relations centre-peripherie sont jugees dans une perspective post-structuraliste dans le cadre des fonctions rituelles remplies par les forgerons touareg et les savants islamiques. On octroie aux specialistes rituels et aux pouvoirs mystiques qui leur sont attribues le caractere d'institution politique et de croyance religieuse, ce qui eclaire les processus socio-politiques. …
Accounting for Belief: Causation, Misfortune and Evil in Tuareg Systems of Thought
This article contributes to discourse on the problem of evil in anthropological theory through an examination based on fieldwork among the Kel Ewey Tuareg of Niger, of Tuareg attitudes towards, and theories of, misfortune, specifically illness, physical defect, and anomaly as represented in verbal art tales and selected case studies. Its purpose is to reassess two major assumptions prevalent in previous anthropological approaches to religion: nam…
When the Field Space Comes to the Home Space: New Constructions of Ethnographic Knowledge in a New African Diaspora
This essay analyzes processes of knowledge construction when Tuareg smith/artisans from the Niger Republic travel to the United States to sell their artworks. Specifically, I examine the effects of these new travels upon the roles of Tuareg smith/artisans as culture-brokers and mediators, and upon the anthropologist's similar work as messenger and translator in confronting transnational complexity, when the heretofore distant "field" space comes …
Making Better "Scents" in Anthropology: Aroma in Tuareg Sociocultural Systems and the Shaping of Ethnography
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…
The Poetics and Politics of Tuareg Aging: Life Course and Personal Destiny in Niger
In this unique ethnographical study of the people of the Kel Ewey confederation of Tuareg, Rasmussen explores concepts of age and aging in an African culture. A seminomadic community in northern Niger, the Tuareg understand aging in a way that is distinctly nonlinear - a dimension of life they measure outside of a chronological time frame. Instead, rituals related to marriage, childbirth, and death mark the process of aging. In this way the life …
Ritual Powers and Social Tensions as Moral Discourse among the Tuareg
Ritual powers traditionally glossed as "witchcraft" in anthropology need not be an archaic or exotic phenomenon, isolated from historical processes of global political and economic transformation. The author analyzes how, among the Kel Ewey Tuareg of northern Niger, these emerge as a moral discourse, an attempt to make sense of and cope with the interplay of long-standing social forms and emergent sociopolitical transformations
Interpreting Androgynous Woman: Female Aging and Personhood among the Kel Ewey Tuareg
In anthropological theory, many scholars argue that older women acquire higher status and greater authority due to their culturally status and the cessation of their sexual reproductive roles upon menopause (Turner 1957:151; Skultans 1970:639-671; Mernissi 1975:72; Fuchs 1977:61; Ortner and Whitehead 1981:8-9; Poole 1981:116-165). I examine these theories against the backdrop of Tuareg concepts of woman as person and female aging. Specifically, I…
The people of solitude: Recalling and reinventing essuf (the wild) in traditional and emergent Tuareg cultural spaces
This article explores continuities and discontinuities in conventional and changing meanings and uses of essuf, a term which denotes approximately the 'wild', 'solitude', or 'nostalgia' in dialects of the Tamajaq language spoken by Tuareg peoples in Mali and Niger. In this analysis of creative reinventions of essuf in both local and 'borderlands' spaces of psycho-social crises, oral art performances, and 'modern' literature, the wider goal is to …
Disputed Boundaries: Tuareg Discourse on Class and Ethnicity
Who defines ethnic identity? Cultural differences persist (and indeed often intensify) in situations of interethnic contact, economic interdependence, and power inequities. While this recognition has offered valuable insights into the subject of ethnic identity, it has produced two contrasting theoretical approaches. One tends either to reify ethnicity or to subsume it under social stratification and conflict (Barth 1969; Du Toit 1978; Cohen 1978…
Alms, Elders, and Ancestors: The Spirit of the Gift among the Tuareg
Throughout much anthropological literature, there are debates concerning the nature of social relationships in gift-giving (Mauss 1925; Parry 1986; Parry and Bloch 1989; Godelier 1999). There are also debates concerning the nature of personal relationships and social and ritual communication between humans and ancestors (Kopytoff 1971; Brain 1973; Fortes 1976; Steadman, Palmer, and Tilley 1996). Few works, however, have explored the Interconnecti…
Modes of Persuasion: Gossip, Song, and Divination in Tuareg Conflict Resolution
The A. analyses 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. The A. proposes a fr…
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 drought…
An Ambiguous Spirit Dream and Tuareg-Kunta Relationships in Rural Northern Mali
Spirit-themed dreams-whether visitations or soul travels-are altered states that pose special challenges to the anthropologist. They are rooted in subjective personal experience, but their meanings are shaped by culturally and socially constructed religious knowledge and power. This article offers a case study of one Tuareg man's dream of an elderly female spirit, based on my fieldwork in a small rural community in northern Mali, where residents …
Reflections on Witchcraft, Danger, and Modernity Among the Tuareg
This essay explores the varied ways so-called 'witchcraft' powers are implicated today in an African society, the Tuareg of the Republic of Niger. There is analysis of the interplay of these powers and dangers in case studies and vignettes, suggesting that recent assertions of 'witch-like' powers are grounded in moral discourse that addresses negotiated social relationships rather than linear temporal transformations from 'tradition' into 'modern…
Within the Tent and at the Crossroads: Travel and Gender Identity among the Tuareg of Niger
This essay examines the shaping of gender relations in travel among the seminomadic Tuareg in the Niger Republic. Expressive forms including narrative, conversation, poetry, and song articulate ambivalence toward changing travel practices in a society based on movement, and afundamental preoccupation with inside, outside, and the borders that separate them. Men's and women's travel experiences undermine existing institutions, consequently enmeshi…
Joking in Researcher-Resident Dialogue: The Ethnography of Hierarchy among the Tuareg
Susan J. Rasmussen, Joking in Researcher-Resident Dialogue: The Ethnography of Hierarchy among the Tuareg, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 4, Controversy: Hegemony and the Anthropological Encounter (Oct., 1993), pp. 211-220
Art as process and product: Patronage and the problem of change in Tuareg blacksmith/artisan roles
This article contributes to recent dialogues in anthropology and African humanities on the problematic translation and application of Western and non-Western aesthetic concepts-for example, 'authentic' 'original' and 'touristic'-in the domain of artisan practices. It analyses, compares and contrasts art patronage among the Nigérien Tuareg in rural and urban social settings. The role of Tuareg 'smiths', a word variously translated in local convers…
Veiled Self, Transparent Meanings: Tuareg Headdress as Social Expression
Many societies display a concern with the human head as central to personal and social identity. Treated as a dominant part of the body symbolically in art and literature, it often denotes the leader or chief, and has other connotations. A special sanctity is associated with the head, believed to be the seat or center of spiritual forces. Many authors point out that this central focus is influenced by concepts of the body and self as well as mode…
Gendered Discourses and Mediated Modernities: Urban and Rural Performances of Tuareg Smith Women
The verbal art performances of Tuareg smith women--in praise songs, dance, joking, and, more recently, in media such as radio--are becoming more complex, as their messages and styles articulate with wider audiences and changing social relationships, in particular those involving gender and relations between the sexes. This essay analyzes gendered discourses in female smiths' performances, with particular emphasis on a radio narrative in Agadez, N…
The Uses of Memory
In the essays by Middleton (2002) and Rowe, Wertsch and Kosyaeva (2002), the subject is the indeterminacy of memory and the intertextuality of narratives of history, conceived as nonlinear and contested. These authors offer new perspectives on our understanding of memory, in its official and unofficial narrative forms, as its move between the personal and social in historical consciousness and representation. Both these essays explore the implica…
Between Several Worlds: Images of Youth and Age in Tuareg Popular Performances
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…
From childbearers to culture-bearers: Transition to postchildbearing among tuareg women
This essay presents an analysis of women's lived experience of the transition from childbearing to postchildbearing among a division of the Tuareg in Niger, West Africa. The analysis suggests that biological realities associated with the end of fertility are interwined with local notions of qualities of ritual and social elderhood among women. It shows how changes in ritual and social roles, associated with increasing devotion to Islam and becomi…
Only Women Know Trees: Medicine Women and the Role of Herbal Healing in Tuareg Culture
In anthropology, there has been concern with mediating figures--African griots, hunters, and smiths/artisans--and other ritual specialists, who tread across natural and cultural boundaries, and negotiate different social interests. There has also been concern with traditional healers and alternative medical systems--for example, herbalism and midwifery--and their cultural survival in confronting established medicine, official religion, and nation…
Continuing commentary: Revitalizing Shame: Some Reflections on `Changing Idioms of Shame: Expressions of Disgrace and Dishonour in the Narratives of Turkish Women Living in Denmark
Throughout many studies, shame is approached not solely as a personal or individual sentiment or emotion, but also as a collective social and cultural preoccupation. Many studies also have asserted that shame is best understood in terms of its assumed opposite, honor, for example, as represented in so-called `honor/shame' complexes of certain regions such as the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Critical responses to these studies have included …
Interpreting Androgynous Woman: Female Aging and Personhood among the Kel Ewey Tuareg
In anthropological theory, many scholars argue that older women acquire higher status and greater authority due to their culturally status and the cessation of their sexual reproductive roles upon menopause (Turner 1957:151; Skultans 1970:639-671; Mernissi 1975:72; Fuchs 1977:61; Ortner and Whitehead 1981:8-9; Poole 1981:116-165). I examine these theories against the backdrop of Tuareg concepts of woman as person and female aging. Specifically, I…
Accounting for Belief: Causation, Misfortune and Evil in Tuareg Systems of Thought
This article contributes to discourse on the problem of evil in anthropological theory through an examination based on fieldwork among the Kel Ewey Tuareg of Niger, of Tuareg attitudes towards, and theories of, misfortune, specifically illness, physical defect, and anomaly as represented in verbal art tales and selected case studies. Its purpose is to reassess two major assumptions prevalent in previous anthropological approaches to religion: nam…
Lack of Prayer: Ritual restrictions, social experience, and the anthropology of menstruation among the Tuareg
Menstrual taboos, I argue, can be understood only in relation to other ritual restrictions, ones observed by men as well as women, and have significant implications for our understanding of female ritual roles. Gender imagery in Tuareg menstrual ritual and cosmology is used as a metaphor for relations between participants in wider socioeconomic contexts, and it forms a symbolic medium of conflict and ambiguity for Tuareg men and women. In this ar…
Veiled Self, Transparent Meanings: Tuareg Headdress as Social Expression
Many societies display a concern with the human head as central to personal and social identity. Treated as a dominant part of the body symbolically in art and literature, it often denotes the leader or chief, and has other connotations. A special sanctity is associated with the head, believed to be the seat or center of spiritual forces. Many authors point out that this central focus is influenced by concepts of the body and self as well as mode…
Modes of Persuasion: Gossip, Song, and Divination in Tuareg Conflict Resolution
The A. analyses 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. The A. proposes a fr…
Reflections on tamazai, a Tuareg idiom of suffering
Disputed Boundaries: Tuareg Discourse on Class and Ethnicity
Who defines ethnic identity? Cultural differences persist (and indeed often intensify) in situations of interethnic contact, economic interdependence, and power inequities. While this recognition has offered valuable insights into the subject of ethnic identity, it has produced two contrasting theoretical approaches. One tends either to reify ethnicity or to subsume it under social stratification and conflict (Barth 1969; Du Toit 1978; Cohen 1978…
Ritual Specialists, Ambiguity and Power in Tuareg Society
Les theories anthropologiques de la marginalite, des « limites » et des relations centre-peripherie sont jugees dans une perspective post-structuraliste dans le cadre des fonctions rituelles remplies par les forgerons touareg et les savants islamiques. On octroie aux specialistes rituels et aux pouvoirs mystiques qui leur sont attribues le caractere d'institution politique et de croyance religieuse, ce qui eclaire les processus socio-politiques. …
Dudal: Histoire De Famille Et Histoire De Troupeau Chez Un Groupe De Wodaabe Du Niger. Angelo Maliki Bonfiglioli
Creativity, Conflict, and Power in Tuareg Spirit Possession
It is now recognized that spirit possession and a work of art share common properties. Yet few analyses stop to consider the transformative effects of possession artistry in diverse contexts, extending beyond the immediate ritual process: while visiting, in leisure, gossip, courtship, and festival settings, where local residents in effect re‐create possession in commentary about its music, singing, and dancing in terms of aesthetic competence as …
Joking in Researcher-Resident Dialogue: The Ethnography of Hierarchy among the Tuareg
Susan J. Rasmussen, Joking in Researcher-Resident Dialogue: The Ethnography of Hierarchy among the Tuareg, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 4, Controversy: Hegemony and the Anthropological Encounter (Oct., 1993), pp. 211-220
Female sexuality, social reproduction, and the politics of medical intervention in Niger: Kel Ewey Tuareg perspectives
Poésies et chants Touaregs de l'Ayr: Tandis qu'ils dorment tous, je dis mon chant d'amour. Moussa Albaka and Dominique Casajus
The 'head dance', contested self, and art as a balancing act in Tuareg spirit possession
Among the Kel Ewey Tuareg of north-eastern Niger, particularly in noble circles, spirit possession is associated with Sudanic/servile cultural origins; so, too, are dancing and drumming. I argue that, in performing a sideways swaying motion of the head and shoulders referred to locally as a dance, women in possession trance transform Sudanic culture. The head dance as flowing, controlled movement, and its central trope of 'swaying like the branch…
The Poetics of Childhood and Politics of Resistance in Tuareg Society: Some Thoughts on Studying "the Other" and Adult-Child Relationships
Spirit Possession and Personhood among the Kel Ewey Tuareg
Among the Tuareg people in the Air Mountain region of Niger, women are sometimes possessed by spirits called 'the people of solitude'. The evening curing rituals of the possessed, featuring drumming and song, take place before an audience of young men and women, who joke and flirt as the ritual unfolds. In her analysis of this tolerated but unofficial cult, Susan Rasmussen analyses symbolism and aesthetic values, provides case studies of possesse…
Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa
Zarraf, a Tuareg Women's Wedding Dance
One evening, during wedding celebrations among the Kel Ewey Tuareg, Amina, a renowned singer who had just completed songs accompanying men's dancing, took me aside and gestured for me to follow her. Still at the festival grounds, but off to one side and away from the crowd, Amina and a group of about ten other women spontaneously formed a small circle, facing each other. They held their robes high, enveloping their circle, tentlike. Dancing in pl…
Art as process and product: Patronage and the problem of change in Tuareg blacksmith/artisan roles
This article contributes to recent dialogues in anthropology and African humanities on the problematic translation and application of Western and non-Western aesthetic concepts-for example, 'authentic' 'original' and 'touristic'-in the domain of artisan practices. It analyses, compares and contrasts art patronage among the Nigérien Tuareg in rural and urban social settings. The role of Tuareg 'smiths', a word variously translated in local convers…
Matters of Taste: Food, Eating, and Reflections on "The Body Politic" in Tuareg Society
In this article, I am concerned with two issues: to understand how power relations are embodied in beliefs, statements, and practices about food preparation, eating, and the body; and to determine how to represent these statements and practices in nonessentialist terms. The article explores how notions of strength/fragility, activity/passivity, and purity/pollution are used to construct, represent, and contest social distinctions in contexts of r…
Spirit Possession and Personhood among the Kel Ewey Tuareg
Journal Article Spirit Possession and Personhood among the Kel Ewey Tuareg, by Susan J. Rasmussen. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 178 pp. $49.95 Get access Shoshanah Feher Shoshanah Feher New Ethnic and Immigrant Congregations Project Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 57, Issue 4, Winter 1996, Pages 420–421, https://doi.org/10.2307/3711897 Published: 01 De…
The Tent as Cultural Symbol and Field Site: Social and Symbolic Space, "Topos," and Authority in a Tuareg Community
Dans les recits et les etudes symboliques, l'espace de l'anthropologue ainsi que l'espace social local et l'espace symbolique ont ete le sujet de nombreuses reflexions. L'A. situe la pratique ethnographique a l'intersection de l'espace social local, de l'espace symbolique et de l'espace du terrain de recherche chez les Touaregs, une communaute semi-nomade du Nord du Niger. Il etudie le role de la tente en tant que propriete dans le rituel local e…
Between Ritual, Theater, and Play: Blacksmith Praise at Tuareg Marriage
Praise performances among the Tuareg people of Niger, West Africa, inform issues in performance and ritual in folklore and anthropology : specifically, interrelationships among aesthetics, play, and power. In this essay, I focus upon a specific smith dance called tebategh. This dance is accompanied by drumming, sung lyrics, and comic repartee - this latter are collectively called tedaban and are presented before large mixed-sex and mixed-class au…
The Berbers
The Berbers. Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. 350 pp
Amagal: Medicine, Healing and Power in Tuareg Caregiving Discourse
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