Word: tuareg
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sahara Man: Travelling with the Tuareg (John Murray; 274 pages), British anthropologist Jeremy Keenan returns to that land of lusty mountains, his first visit to Algeria in three decades. In the 1960s, he lived in the camps of the blue-veiled tribesmen, immersed in their language and culture. He studied the people intensely?"as academic subjects," he now says, "not as human beings"?before leaving to tell the world. His academic ambitions and the region's politics prevented his return. It wasn't until 1999 that this man, who still considers himself a Tuareg expert, realized that he couldn...
...Even in the '60s, Tuareg society was struggling. Drought and government decree were relegating traditions?nomadism, historic hierarchies, the methodology for naming children?to the social scrap heap. The pace of change has only quickened. Tamanrasset, once a sleepy Sahara town, is now a real city, full of "big trucks, smaller trucks, jalopies, pickups of every conceivable make and era, cars, mopeds and bicycles; but no camels." Many Tuareg who have shunned city life make camp with government-issue tents instead of animal skins and wooden poles. Tagella, an unleavened flatbread, is still a staple. But these days...
...Such Tuareg arcana emerge in dribs and drabs, interspersed with the travels mentioned in the subtitle. But Travelling with the Tuareg isn't about traveling with the Tuareg at all. Instead, the Tuareg are traveling with Keenan, on a single-minded (i.e., Keenan's) mission: to find rock...
...Cave paintings, all pre-Tuareg, don't interest the tribesmen. But Keenan says they should. After all, what wealthy Westerner wouldn't pay to view ancient paintings in a gallery carved by the elements? So he and his entourage roam, from the black-and-white chessboard flats of Amadror?"I had no idea Nature could be so kitsch"?to the stone steeples of the Tin Ghergoh range, searching for fading ocher smears of mountain goats and jellyfish. Much of the art has been damaged, some by Islamic fundamentalists on a Taliban-like crusade to chisel the world into compliance with...
...impromptu gazelle hunts, terrifying sandstorms and quiet nights under the Sahara sky, he somehow does. Pity then that he subjects his work to treatment strangely similar to the desecration he decries. For in his book, there is beauty beneath, a vivid portrait of his embattled Sahara Man, the Tuareg. But to see it, you have to look past the marks of an outsider, the signature of one who likes to say, all too often, "Jeremy Keenan was here...