Abstract
In a preliminary way, this vignette suggests a precarious balancing of personal love sentiments and larger economic considerations of benefit to the household over longterm—a reverberating theme in Tuareg love arrangements over the life course. More generally, the topic of love illustrates the limits of participant-observation in ethnography. Love, an affective personal experience whose semiotic signs are expressed in sociability, but are inwardly perceived very subjectively, but also subject to much outsider “meta-commentary” beyond the lovers themselves, is ambiguous. Dynamic study of this emotion poses analytical challenges, but also offers insights into inter-individual and intra-individual variation and change over time, the theme of the present volume. In keeping with this theme and its aim—to bring into one framework various directions of construction of methodology of dynamic processes in the social sciences—the present essay analyzes Tuareg cultural elaborations of late-life love sentiments and attachments in relation to age constructs, thereby situating persons and social groups in their individual cases as they work to produce performance differences (Valsiner, Molenaar, Lyra, & Chaudhary, this volume).
Ahmed (pseudonym), a Tuareg smith man in the town of Agadez, Niger, related to me how he had encouraged his son to travel to Burkina Faso to sell his artisan works, in order to amass bridewealth for a marriage the father hoped would take place between him and a cousin. But once his son became economically successful there, Ahmed lamented, his son had gone ahead and married, without his father’s permission, a Fulani woman he had fallen in love with there.
When Ahmed, a widower, himself remarried approximately two years after his first wife died of cancer, he somewhat sheepishly minimized his own romantic love motives, however. Blushing slightly, he denied any romance in this match, insisting, “She (the second wife) has white hair (i.e., her advanced age precluded “romance” in his view)! I married her only so that she can care for my remaining younger children at home…they need someone there.”
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- 1.
Data for this essay are based on my residence and field research between approximately 1976 and 2007 in Tamajaq-speaking Tuareg rural and urban communities in Niger and more recently Mali, West Africa, and briefly, also among expatriates in France. I gratefully acknowledge support from Fulbright Hays, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Council, National Geographic, Indiana University, and University of Houston in my projects on ritual (spirit possession, mediumship, and divination), healing (herbalism and other specialisms), aging and the life course, rural and urban smiths/artisans, gender, verbal art performance, and theatrical plays.
- 2.
The endowments of herds and date-palms called akh ihuderan (“living milk”) are intended to compensate women for Qur’anic inheritance favoring male heirs. Living milk property is reserved for sisters, daughters, and nieces, and cannot be sold or given to others. See Nicolaisen and Nicolaisen (1997); Worley (1991).
- 3.
The face-veil/turban (called tagelmust in Niger and asinker in Mali) that men wear is a sign of male gender-role modesty, and also conveys respect/reserve toward parents-in-law, chiefs, and Islamic scholars. See Murphy (1967) for details. Women do not veil the face, but instead wear, in some regions, a head-scarf, and in others, a robe wrapped “toga” or “sari”-like about the head and body.
- 4.
The background of the sporadic Tuareg armed rebellions in northern regions of Niger and Mali, the first of which lasted from 5 to 6 years, (approximately from 1990–96), and more recently since 2006, has resurged, is complex. Both nations were formerly part of French West Africa, and there was unequal development of their different regions, resulting in marginalization of Tuareg and other pastoral nomads. Post-colonial governments inherited a set of problems including desertification, drought, unemployment, and tensions between nomads and farmers. For historical background of this conflict, see Bourgeot (1990, 1994); Claudot-Hawad (1993); Dayak (1992); DeCalo (1996). The 1995 and 1996 peace accords in Niger and Mali called for installing Tuareg in functionary and law-enforcement positions in predominantly-Tuareg regions such as Air, Adagh, and Azawak, and increased support of development projects in these regions. More recently in northern Niger, armed conflict has centered around transnational companies in that region and division of uranium resources.
- 5.
Also valuable are warnings by anthropologists against making totalizing equivalences between entire cultures and moral and psychological constructs, for example, “honor” and “shame” (Brandes, 1980).
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Rasmussen, S. (2009). Dynamic Processes and the Anthropology of Emotions in the Life Course and Aging: Late-Life Love Sentiments and Household Dynamics in Tuareg Psycho-Biographies. In: Valsiner, J., Molenaar, P., Lyra, M., Chaudhary, N. (eds) Dynamic Process Methodology in the Social and Developmental Sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-95922-1_24
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