Persons of Courage and Renown

Tuareg Actors, Acting, Plays, and Cultural Memory in Northern Mali

Susan Rasmussen

Persons of Courage and Renown is a theoretically engaged ethnography by a social/cultural anthropologist that explores issues of culture, memory, creativity, and power by analyzing beloved, yet vulnerable, actors, acting, and play performances in Tamajaq-speaking, predominantly Muslim, traditionally stratified, and semi-nomadic Tuareg communities in northern Mali. The town and region of Kidal are the primary sites of field research. This book traces how Tuareg actors powerfully negotiate cultural memory and encounters in communities caught, between political violence and peacekeeping efforts in northern Mali. Urban, state, and nongovernmental bureaucracies there seek to reshape Tuareg verbal art performances to comply with official agendas aimed at transforming local culture. This book shows how acting and plays are crucial in continuing, but also debating and redefining, the meanings of older verbal art performances of Tuareg tales, songs, and epics, as well as wider cultural knowledge and social practice. Their arts offer important possibilities for peacemaking in a turbulent and unpredictable world.

Lexington Books

Pages: 234 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-8257-5 • Hardback • January 2019 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-4985-8258-2 • eBook • January 2019 • $99.50 • (£77.00)

Subjects: Political Science / World / African, Art / African, Social Science / World / Africa

Persons of Courage and Renown

Tuareg Actors, Acting, Plays, and Cultural Memory in Northern Mali

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Persons of Courage and Renown is a theoretically engaged ethnography by a social/cultural anthropologist that explores issues of culture, memory, creativity, and power by analyzing beloved, yet vulnerable, actors, acting, and play performances in Tamajaq-speaking, predominantly Muslim, traditionally stratified, and semi-nomadic Tuareg communities in northern Mali. The town and region of Kidal are the primary sites of field research. This book traces how Tuareg actors powerfully negotiate cultural memory and encounters in communities caught, between political violence and peacekeeping efforts in northern Mali. Urban, state, and nongovernmental bureaucracies there seek to reshape Tuareg verbal art performances to comply with official agendas aimed at transforming local culture. This book shows how acting and plays are crucial in continuing, but also debating and redefining, the meanings of older verbal art performances of Tuareg tales, songs, and epics, as well as wider cultural knowledge and social practice. Their arts offer important possibilities for peacemaking in a turbulent and unpredictable world.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 234 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-8257-5 • Hardback • January 2019 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-4985-8258-2 • eBook • January 2019 • $99.50 • (£77.00)

Subjects: Political Science / World / African, Art / African, Social Science / World / Africa

Author

Susan Rasmussen is professor of anthropology in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 General Background on the Tuareg, the Kel Adagh, and the Town and Region of Kidal

Chapter 2 Situating Acting and Creativity in Culture, Place, and Memory

Chapter 3 The Poetics and Politics of Aesthetic Style and Genre and The Ibaraden Actors

Chapter 4 Acting and Cultural Translation: Actors and Audiences as Interpreters and Mediators in Reformulating “Traditional” and “Modern”

Chapter 5 Rural-Urban and Nomadic-Sedentarized Encounters

Chapter 6 Disputed Gender, Relations Between the Sexes, and Embodied Performance

Chapter 7 Youths and Elders: Resistance and Healing in Intergenerational Ambivalence

Chapter 8 Religious Reflections and Social Dissonance

Conclusions Nostalgic Yearning and Cultural Critique

Reviews

“Rasmussen has written a richly detailed and compelling study of Tuareg theater in northern Mali and Niger. She skillfully weaves together the aesthetic, social, and political dimensions of these performances and gives us a rare insight into the lives and artistic practices of the actors who bring the plays to life.”
— Mary Jo Arnoldi, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Susan Rasmussen examines a new form of theatrical performances to skilfully provide a rare insight into the verbal art of Tuareg society.

— Journal Of The Royal Anthropological Institute