Persons of Courage and Renown (eBook)

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

Susan Rasmussen (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019
234 Seiten
Lexington Books (Verlag)
978-1-4985-8258-2 (ISBN)

Infos

This book explores culture, memory, and creativity in acting and plays in Tamajaq-speaking, Muslim, semi-nomadic Tuareg society in northern Mali. Rasmussen analyzes how Tuareg actors negotiate cultural memory and encounters in communities, caught historically and currently between political violence and precarious peace.

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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.

Autor

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

Inhalt

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 MemoryChapter 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 PerformanceChapter 7 Youths and Elders: Resistance and Healing in Intergenerational Ambivalence Chapter 8 Religious Reflections and Social DissonanceConclusions Nostalgic Yearning and Cultural Critique

Produkt-Details

• Zusatzinfo: 3 Illustrations including: - 3 Halftones, Black & White including Black & White Photographs.
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Malerei / Plastik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Schlagworte: Acting • African Studies • Berber • Culture • Mali • Memory • Oral Art • Performance • Saharan Studies • Tamajaq language • Tuareg • verbal art • West Africa
• ISBN-10: 1-4985-8258-3 / 1498582583
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4985-8258-2 / 9781498582582