updated: 4th March 2011
Beautiful Modern Nomads
Bordercrossing-Tuareg between
Niger, Algeria and Libya
Ines Kohl
Reimer, Berlin 2009
144 Seiten mit 102 Farbabbildungen und drei Diagrammen,
19 × 25,3 cm
Klappenbroschur
€ 35,00 (D) / sFr 59,80
ISBN 978-3-496-02821-5
How do "modern Nomads" cross the Sahara? What kinds of challenges and difficulties are they confronted with, which opportunities do they find in Libya, and how does their life in the newly created Saharan borderland look like? These and other questions are rised in this book and are answered - surprisingly - on the basis of beauty and aesthetics. Ideals of beauty, body characteristics, dress codes and sexual tabues, correlate with morlas, norms and values and can be interpreted as an indicator of social change in the Sahara.
The bordercrossing Tuareg have thus formed a veritable "youth culture". New ideals of beauty, refashioned aesthetics of music, changing traditions and newly acquired values of money and material things show this nomadic society form a striking new angle.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Tuareg, Imasheŕen, Ishumar
About Ishumar, or Research Between Borders
Fieldworks´ daily life
Awidu tiset! – Give me the Mirror!
Ishumar, Borderliners of the Sahara
The Borderliner Triangle
Zones of Transition
Life in Transit
Libya, the “Ishumars’ Europe“
Afrod to Libya
For the “Tuaregs’ Sons“
Life Strategies in Libya
Tihussay – Beauty, or About the Body’s Value
Fat is Beautiful
“Beauty Benefits the Soul”
The Role of Blood in the Conception of Beauty
Wedding Feasts and Guitar Sounds: The Asthetics of Modern Nomads
The Beautiful Women from “Outside”
Mariama and Hamu: An Ishumar Wedding
Guitar: Bridge between Tradition und Modernity
Traditional Beauty and Beautiful Tradition
Visualizing Beauty
Competition in Beauty and Music
The Attractiveness of Money and the Desirable Beauty of Tangibles
Bibliography
Glossary
About the Author
Extract of the book:
Awidu tiset! Give me the mirror
During my entire fieldwork period in Libya there was no sentence which I heard as often as awidu tiset! – Give me the mirror! Apart from greetings, segu and tiset, comb and mirror, were among the first words I learned in Tamasheq. Both objects are constantly sought after by men, women and children alike, but are mostly not present, because they permanently circulate between the people living in the house and Ishumar who are staying for a short or long time. In the end, nobody knows where he put them last.
This was the beginning of my interest in questions regarding beauty and aesthetics. My first impression already suggested that beautiful looks and a correct appearance were highly valued among the Imasheŕen. While the home is neglected regarding beauty and aesthetics, as it is merely perceived in its function and thus stands in stark contrast to the western concept of “home improvement”, the body is decorated and adorned with attributes which emphasize and accentuate personal attractiveness.
(...)
Beauty is emphasized through visual appearance. Clean clothes are considered to be one of the highest principles, which is why day after day people do laundry, iron, and buy new clothes. This is a phenomenon of Ishumar society: Instead of investing the money in food or more promising tangible things (car, house), it is spent on clothes. A Bazin, brand Galila (colloquial Galina), is one of the most expensive fabrics. In order to purchase a piece of clothing of this quality, an Ashamur heads into a hopeless cycle of borrowing money, and in most cases will hardly be able to pay it back. While the Arabs living in Libya imagine a house and a car as desirable and worthwhile goals in their lives, for Imasheŕen clothing embodies the ne plus ultra. Clothing is not only desirable, but alongside language is the characteristic feature and attribute which defines the identity of the Imasheŕen.
This first evidence directed me to the topic of beauty. Over the course of my research it became more and more obvious that beauty affects far more than just appearance: “There is more to Beauty than meets the Eye” (Popenoe 2004:1). All societies have their own concepts of what is regarded and rated as beautiful or ugly, appealing or repugnant, aesthetically precious or unattractive. However, the sense for beauty not only lies in the eyes of the beholder, but is subject to certain universal ideals which are connected to values. These universal ideals of beauty include symmetry, regularity, youthfulness, and special proportions and can be identified as universally valid criteria for attractiveness (Etcoff 1999). While societies all around the world share these ideals, their concepts of hairstyles, body paintings, scarifications, body sizes and body shapes, or the significance of complexion, diverge strongly. The valuations and values attached to them vary as well, although providing beautiful persons with attributes and characteristics which have a positive connotation seems to be universal, whereas body features regarded as ugly imply moral depreciation (Beer 2002).
Ideals of beauty change over time. They are subject to the established standards and values of a society, are modified by external social and economic factors, and ultimately reflect social ideals. Thus, concepts of beauty and aesthetics are not just superficial representations of appearance. Rather, beauty and aesthetics are indicators of social and economic changes and make collective normative values visible. They are an integral part of social relationships and consequently reflect gender relations, illustrate positions of power, and shed light on social norms and values. They can thus can become a central tool for social and cultural discrimination, by expressing affiliation to a certain group. For this reason beauty is not purely a question of a critical judgement, attractive or not, but is subject to social and cultural positioning. Beauty correlates with questions of affiliation and discrimination, of external view and self-definition, and as a result is linked to questions of power and advantage. Beauty is therefore a social boundary maker, a social marker of a society.
In the following, I will discuss beauty and aesthetics as an indicator of social change. The protagonists of this book are borderliners who move between Niger, Algeria, and Libya, and through their movements across borders not only cross territorial, but also social and societal boundaries and barriers. Political developments, processes of economic change and sociocultural transformations have resulted in the formation of the Ishumar, a group of “new modern nomads.” It is characteristic of the Ishumar that their way of life is one beyond traditional systems. They break away from traditional norms and values, select special elements, change them, and place them into a new context. Their ideas, concepts and ideals of beauty and aesthetics, values and morals, can be regarded as an indicator of sociocultural changes in the Sahara.
(I. Kohl, 2007)
Rezensionen:
aus: Wiener Zeitschrift des Morgenlandes 99/2009
(...)
Nicht nur die "Schönheit" der Nomaden, wie im Buchtitel bezeichnet, sondern ihr gesamter neuer modernerer Lebensstil
wird von Kohl sehr detailliert beschrieben. Das Buch ist gespickt mit persönlichen Lebens- und Erfahrungsberichten,
wodurch die Autorin die Betroffenen selbst sprechen lässt. Durch das Buch ziehen sich Vergleiche zwischen Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, zwischen den traditionellen Imajeghen, die noch in der Wüste leben, und den Ishumar, die die Lebensweise ihrer Vorfahren aufgegeben haben, zwischen Libyern und Ishumar, und nicht zuletzt zwischen der europäischen Denkweise und der der Ishumar. Aber während anderswo immer der Verlust der Traditionen beklagt wird, wird hier gezeigt, wie alte Traditionen umgeformt, an neue Lebensumstände angepasst werden, somit eine neue Bedeutung erhalten und in manchen Fällen damit der Grundstein für eine "neue" Tradition gelegt wird. Ganz deutlich zeigt diese Studie, dass Gesellschaften, die in Veränderung begriffen sind oder sich bereits verändert haben, ein ebenso interessantes Forschungsfeld darstellen wie traditionelle Gesellschaften, deren unterschiedliche Bräuche sich im Laufe der Zeit ja ebenso angepasst und verändert haben.
Autorin: Veronika Ritt-Benmimoun (Wien)
aus: Anthropos 106.2011/1
(...)
The book offers rich insights into Tuareg and other cultural identities as procesual, practiced, and in flux. The book also reveals miuch about Africa in general. The Sahara, notwithstanding its sporadic droughts, locust-invasions, famines, and wars, is not an isolated or desolate emptiness or barrier. rather, it is a crossroads and meeting place - somewhat like an ocean with ports of call.
(...)
This book is an important contribiution to contemporary Tuareg ethnography. The data convincingly support the author´s identification of the ishumar as a salient social group with a sense of self-identity and a culture.
(...)
In conclusion, this book is highly insightful and would be most rewarding by scholars in african, Saharan, and Middle Eastern Studies, social/cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and globalization studies.
Autorin: Susan J. Rasmussen (USA)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------