Between Several Worlds: Images of Youth and Age in Tuareg Popular Performances

Abstract

Youth cannot be understood without examining elderhood, and age more generally. Among the Tuareg, Islamic religious rituals and liturgical music tend to be identified with the "aged" (those with children of marriageable age), and these are symbolically opposed to secular popular musical performances classified as "anti-Islamic," which are identified with "youth." These images comment upon long-standing concerns with marriage, courtship, sexuality, and descent, but they are also increasingly being translated into concerns of cultural autonomy, as local youths struggle for cultural survival in conflict between Tuareg and the central state. I analyze three types of popular musical performance and the instruments featured in them, and show how their age-related imagery, commentary, and interaction express changing intergenerational relationships. These concerns, however, do not fall into a binary of "old" and "new," or align with any one age group; rather, they suggest shifting associations of agentive power and questioning of "tradition" by youth and aged in diverse contexts. These data on age symbolism in Tuareg popular musical performances suggest more dynamic, nuanced formulations of "traditional," "modern," and "global" in anthropological theory.

Youth and Age in Tuareg Imagery

Young people make up a significant segment of the population in Africa. Yet "youth" itself, as well as the apparently opposed category of "elderly," are indexical categories that include people of diverse ages. In this essay I proceed from the premise that youth cannot be understood without examining elderhood and age more generally. Among the Tuareg of northern Niger Republic, West Africa, age are not defined according to biological or chronological markers, but rather in terms of one's social and ritual position in the life course. For example, one does not achieve fully adult status until becoming a parent and is not considered "elderly" (in Tamajaq, masc. amghar, fem. tamghart) until one's children marry (Rasmussen 1997a). Upon attaining this status, men and women alike are expected to practice greater devotion to Islam and distance themselves from youths, who are their potential and actual affines. A child becomes an adolescent or young, marriageable adult (masc., amawat or ekabkab, fem. tamawat or tekabkab) when his or her parents determine that he/she is ready for marriage. Around this time, men don the face-veil and women the head-scarf, and these young persons are encouraged to attend and to perform as musicians at these secular musical festivals, where much courtship takes place.

Tuareg social categories have been undergoing rapid transformation, in particular since the recent nationalist/separatist armed conflict and cultural revitalization movement.¹ Local aging imagery displays both continuity and change. On the one hand, in the semi-nomadic rural communities of the Aïr Mountains, much age imagery still identifies Islamic and pre-Islamic religious ritual and its prayer and liturgical music with aged persons. Secular evening festivals featuring non-liturgical music, courtship, and dancing, are classified as "anti-Islamic," and still tend to be identified with youthful, single persons. At a youth's first wedding the evening musical festival following the religious ritual emphasizes loud drumming, according to local residents, "in order to open the couple's ears." By contrast, the earlier phase of the wedding ritual at the mosque emphasizes the role of the parents and the Islamic scholar (marabout), who marries the couple. In Tuareg society older persons are supposed to become authority figures. While widowed and divorced persons may re-marry in late life, their weddings are held only at the mosque and lack the evening festival phase.

Striking is an age-related symbolism: for men and women alike, tropes of aging refer to musical performance frames. Performances with the anzad, a one-stringed, bowed lute, the tende, a mortar drum, and the recently-popular guitar, are all associated with youthful age groups. They are featured at evening festivals where there is much social license, but also much "work" such as critical social commentary, marriage negotiations, and the establishment of economic and political alliances taking place. These festivals often follow the religious phases of rites of passage (Rasmussen 1995, 1997a, 1997b, 2000). They may also occur during holidays and political party rallies, particularly in the towns. The guitar accompanies songs that originated in the Tuareg rebellion, originally called ichumar, and now called merely "guitar" music. It provides the third important performance context for age-related imagery. Guitar music is performed in "rock-style" bands at dances of youths.

The presence of older persons, while peripheral, suggests more conflict, and more rapprochement between age roles than is the case in the more traditional anzad and tende performances. All these performances—of anzad, tende, and guitar—always a relaxing of normally reserved conduct between social categories. Affines, whose conduct is marked by highly formalized reserve, may joke with each other and behave immodestly. Much flirting and courtship may occur between persons of different social origins (nobles, smiths, and descendants of slaves), who ideally do not intermarry. Many Tuareg use the terms tende and increasingly, guitar, as generic terms for all non-liturgical, popular musical performances.

In this article I explore the changing nature of social relations according to age among the Tuareg of the Aïr Mountains. I examine the changes taking place through the lens of different types of musical performance: two "traditional" forms and one "modern" form (electric guitar). I show that the way in which these musical forms are performed and enjoyed by onlookers illustrates complicated changes in age relations in Tuareg society, mixing parts of the "old" with infusions of the "new." I also show that, at a time of tension between Tuareg and the state musical expression has more to do with cultural unity and survival than it did previously, when it spoke primarily to internal issues for Tuareg (honor, social stratum, and kinship).

Youth-elder roles, interaction, and discourse in these festivals thus provide a useful frame for analyzing wider questions about performance of aging (Myerhoff 1977, 1982), and suggest revisions of conceptualizations of "tradition," "modernity," and "globalization" in anthropology (Featherstone 1990; Appadurai 1991). I examine the symbolism and social interaction comparatively in each performance, in order to illustrate how age-related concerns are played out in these settings. Many Tuareg elders, particularly the devoutly Muslim, tend to be ambivalent toward these performances. In song texts and audience interactions at these performances there is much age-related social criticism. These performances contain much inter-generational dialogue on age issues. These commentaries suggest the agentive power, as opposed to the malleability, of youths. Yet their themes do not always follow binary elder/traditional/authority vs. youth/modern/resistance alignments.

Most audiences and participants at the festivals and dances are persons culturally-defined as "youthful"—single, recently married and childless, or with children not yet of marriageable age. In contrast, those culturally-defined as "old"—persons who have married children or children of marriageable age—do not attend these evening festivals, but play prominent roles in the daytime Islamic ritual phases that precede them.² The images they use comment upon sexuality, courtship, marriage, and descent. They show that these long-standing concerns among Tuareg, while still important, are increasingly being translated into concerns of cultural autonomy, as many local youths, uprooted from their communities by migrant labor and guerrilla warfare, return, reflect upon, and sometimes dispute, those values embedded in traditional age imagery. They struggle with cultural survival and sometimes question elders' definitions of what is important in transitions over the life course. There is often conflict between elders and youths about the age imagery of these festivals. However, there is no rigid association of "traditional" or "modern" with any age group or festival frame. For example, even in the songs of the new guitar music, including those from the Tuareg rebellion in which younger groups have been active, there is not complete rejection of the interests of elders or conservative customs of nomadic Tuareg culture. Conversely, many songs and performances of the more traditional anzad and tende do not always promote elders' interests, but sometimes challenge them.

In these contexts what is happening to age roles and relations between elders and youths, and how are these roles commented upon, questioned, reinforced, and re-formulated during musical performances at rituals and festivals? In the anthropology of aging it is now almost a truism that age categories cross-culturally are based upon social, rather than chronological or linear markers. But the Tuareg data show how more nuanced processes are also occuring. Age categories and their associated imagery, as well as "tradition" and "modernity," more generally, are increasingly subject to dispute and redefinition, as Tuareg elders and youths self-consciously reflect on the value of youth and age as they cope with economic hardship and political tensions. Ronald Manheimer observed that

individuals who belong to the same generation, who share the same year of birth, are endowed, to that extent, with a common location in the historical dimension of the social process (1989: 240).

Often, however, as Myerhoff observes,

membership in a common cohort is background information, like grammatical rules, more interesting to outside analysts than members. Outsiders find and want explanations where the subjects continue un-selfconsciously in the habits of everyday life (1982: 100).

Sometimes conditions conspire to make a generational cohort acutely self-conscious and then they become active participants in their own history and provide their own sharp, insistent definitions of themselves and explanations for their destiny, past and future. They are knowing actors in a historical drama they script, rather than subjects of someone else's study. They "make" themselves, sometimes even "make themselves up," an activity which is not inevitable or automatic but reserved for special people and special circumstances. This making visible one's own identity in age-related discourse and performance illuminates the nature of what Myerhoff (p. 101) terms the "performed" individual and collective definitions, the uses and kinds of witnesses needed for these performances, and the nature and uses of memory.

Cultures include these moments for self-presentation to their members, also found in such processes and conditions as Turner's (1969, 1974) communitas and liminality, and Handelman's (1990) modeling and mirroring. But the beginning and end of such processes resist pinning-down with specific social categories. Among the Tuareg these musical festival performances, as the major forum in which these processes are played out, offer Tuareg interpretations of themselves. They comment as well as mirror.

The Performinance of Youth to Age Transitions

My attention was first drawn to the cultural imagery surrounding age during my earlier research on Tuareg rites of passage and life histories. At a rural wedding I sat with other guests in the courtyard of the groom's side of the family, where smith women had just applied henna to the groom's hands and feet. We listened as the smiths began singing their wedding praise-songs. These included many jokes, often very ribald, and much covert sexual imagery. At that moment a prominent Islamic scholar walked by and greeted our party, but remained outside the compound. When I returned his greeting and added that we were enjoying the wedding festivities and songs, he gave me a solemn look and commented, "Prayer is better, isn't it?" Another elderly Islamic scholar elaborated on this idea during an interview when he related how, over his life, he had changed his patterns of public participation:

When I was young, I attended [evening] songs, I danced, I listened to the anzad and the tende, I did these things until I had children. But then I abandoned these powers to my children. I go now to the mosque and I do my prayers; I am saved, I have forgotten everything that I did during my youth. Now, I know Qur'anic study only, I have abandoned all that, as I am old.

Retreat from secular, youthful festivals also ideally entails ceasing to play specific musical instruments. One woman, formerly a famous player of the anzad in the nearby town of Agadez, said she was now too old to play because she did not want to display herself before young people. Another woman elaborated on this theme: "The anzad is of no use to me now—prayer is better. A young girl prefers the anzad; an old woman prefers prayer." This woman, between 55 and 65 years of age, had two grown sons, both of marriageable age. She now participated only in the Islamic rites of passage—weddings, namedays, mortuary rituals.

The newly popular guitar (locally pronounced GEE'tar) music attract crowds of diverse ages. However, most persons culturally-defined as "old" do not dance, but remain on the sidelines in age-segregated groups. Islamic scholars do not attend. In the town of Agadez the only older person to approach the main performance space of the guitar music and dancing (beneath a large canopy) is a man called an animateur (Fr.) whose role as "master of ceremonies" consists of making announcements, praising the families hosting the wedding or nameday, encouraging the youths to dance, and also keeping order. He often carries a long livestock whip, although I never saw him use it. Such a person also tends to often be of low or ambiguous social origin in the pre-colonial system: a smith, or one of servile descent.³

In the next sections I examine Tuareg meanings of music, song, and festivals in relation to youth and age symbolism. I interweave descriptions of relations between the generations. I conclude with an analysis of age in household dynamics as youths and elders critically reflect on these processes in the performances. Throughout, there is analysis of age roles during social, economic, and political upheavals.⁴

Distraction From Prayer: Music, Youth, and the Orchestrating of Festivals

Anzad and Tende Performances

Music in the Sahara enjoys much prestige; yet there is also an undercurrent of disapproval, which barely tolerates it. To Islamic scholars all music is suspect, and the Devil, called Iblis, is present at musical festivals. He is all the more involved if this music is played or sung by a beautiful young woman. Musical expression, while not in itself illicit, distracts from Islamic duties of prayer and cultural values of dignity and reserve. In the opinion of many older persons certain instruments should be regarded with caution, for they are sufficiently beautiful to "transport one beyond oneself." The anzad (a one-stringed, bowed lute) and the tende (a mortar drum) are two such instruments. The anzad, very ancient and associated with women's praise of men returning from battle, is identified in myth and cosmology with heaven, the nobility in the pre-colonial stratification system, bilateral descent, and endogamous marriage. The tende, constructed by stretching a goat-hide across the top of a mortar, is identified with the earth and lower social status (former slaves, smiths, and other client peoples in the pre-colonial system).

Singing exposes the open mouth. In local body symbolism the mouth is analogous to the genitals. A proverb says that "the man's face-veil and the trousers are brothers," and one reason men cover their mouths with the veil is to display respect toward affines and elders, in particular their mothers-in-law. This symbolic association occurs as well in other musical contexts. Singers sometimes leave out words and substitute vocables during the late afternoon, when affines, with whom they practice reserve, are present. After sundown there is less reserve about singing with the mouth wide open, and fewer vocables are used.

At "secular" festivals (in local definition those featuring non-liturgical music) guests put on their best clothing and jewelry, but avoid wearing Islamic amulets. Although spirits are mentioned in the Qur'an, there are also non-Qur'anic spirits in Tuareg cosmology and these latter are believed to be pleased by the music, noise, and jokes pervasive at evening festivals. The pattern of vulnerability to such spirits is in large measure age-based and related to transitions: for example, many of these spirits are believed to threaten adolescents engaged to marry, newly-married couples, mothers who have just given birth, and newborn babies. Loud music and noise, particularly drumming, presided over by smiths, traditionally follow the more Islamic religious rituals, presided over by marabouts, marking these transitions.

Even today many rural Tuareg of all ages feel that it is not appropriate to attend such performances or to listen to non-liturgical music in the presence of someone older than themselves, particularly if there is a close kinship tie. This taboo is reciprocal: an older person avoids listening to music and sexual conversation in the presence of younger relatives. A man who is "truly noble and dignified" ideally withdraws, however gradually, from attending such youth-oriented performances, as more of his children marry over time. There is a subtle reference here to incest and avoidance or reserve, in a analogy between the music of the tende and sexual relations. All secular festivals traditionally take place out of the view of older persons, in particular, Islamic scholars. In rural areas these festivals are held outside villages and camps, on their fringes, in smith neighborhoods, and always far from the mosque. It is young single persons, or young people whose spouses are away, who are active participants.

During these musical festivals youths communicate covertly and circumvent elders' official discourse of authority. Youthful male age-mates use special festival nicknames as forms of address in joking and gossip. Much poetry in the songs is first rehearsed among age-mates, away from elders and other authority figures, outside of villages and camps. Secret hand greetings indicating favor or disfavor toward suitors' overtures often accompany the music and singing.

Yet although musical festivals feature much relaxed conduct and have the purpose of sociability between the sexes, they are not unstructured events. Traditionally, particularly at the anzad performance gathering called ahal, there is a counterbalancing force of social control: preference for what is culturally-defined as "gallant" and "dignified" conduct. One way of approaching women, for example, is first discretely to circle the gathering. Some men then beam flashlights on women's faces flirtatiously, but women should pretend not to notice. Physical violence (for example, fights over women) on the spot is considered reprehensible. There is also, ideally, much indirect expression by allusion. Men and women must not openly show preference for any one person at these gatherings. Men intermittently chant a sound—t-hum-a-hum—described as "addressing the spirits" and associated with encouragement of love, courtship, and spirits. Poetry in the songs accompanying these performances traditionally was to win the favor of the opposite sex by metaphorical allusion, for example, by commemorating a momentous, heroic deed. Song verses have a similar purpose today, often praising an individual or offering social commentary with a covert message for the audience.

The tende now is predominant over the anzad at national holidays such as Republic Day and Independence, in the evening phases of rites of passage, and at spirit possession rites, but not at Islamic holidays, prayer days, or funerals, when it is forbidden. It is usually played in neighborhoods far from the mosque. Tende music is called "the music of the earth." Until recently nobles did not play it; rather, they left it to tributaries, smiths, and servile peoples and their descendants. Ambivalence toward the tende derives, first, from its functions in pre-colonial times: its handling by non-nobles in manual labor of crushing grain. This stereotype has been breaking down, particularly in the towns since the Tuareg nationalist rebellion of the early 1990s, when leaders attempted to downplay pre-colonial social origins and encouraged wider identification along ethnic and language lines, but it has not altogether disappeared in the countryside. A rural man of noble origin once explained to me that playing the tende was "like work, and therefore only slave and smiths should play this instrument." Ambivalence toward the tende is also related to its continuing association with spirits and Iblis, the Devil, said literally to reside inside the tende. In addition to avoiding mention of specific musical instruments in the presence of elders, there is also a taboo against speaking of non-Qur'anic spirits or Iblis in the elders' and Islamic scholars' presence. Refraining from pronouncing these names indicates respect for these persons, but also suggests the power these performances have to circumvent their authority. In other words, tende festivals, with their more relaxed etiquette and song texts, provide a forum for public intergenerational disagreement, abandoning of reserve and respect, and open mixing of persons from diverse social origins in pre- and extra-marital flirting and courtship.

Both anzad and tende are potentially subversive, but they are have important cultural memory educational functions, as songs often mention social conduct, moral standards, and ideology. For example, personal qualities based upon individual merit and achievement, such as courage and men's endurance in battle, are praised. Yet while these are officially "noble" attributes, and many elderly parents still seek to arrange marriages within the same social stratum and between close cousins, most local residents now admire anyone who displays these qualities. In one tende song, for example, a noble woman wrote verses praising her lover, a man of servile descent, for such qualities, through the device of lauding his camel. In these verses she also indirectly expressed her resentment toward her lover's father for sending him away from her on caravan expeditions.⁵ Many Tuareg men must work far from home to raise sufficient means for bride-wealth and to fulfill groomservice obligations to their parents-in-law: they travel in traditional caravan trade east to Bilma for salt and dates, and south to Kano, Nigeria, for millet and other household items. Nowadays, many go for migrant labor and itinerant trade to Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, and even France and Italy.

Thus the tende is traditionally identified with facilitation of relationships between the social categories, rather than the endogamous marriages arranged by elderly parents of youths, ideally between close cousins. Yet it should be noted that the festivals are nonetheless carefully orchestrated. They are supposed to encourage flirting, courtship and conversation, but not sexual relations between persons of different social origins or before marriage, for illegitimate births among Tuareg are highly shameful. Elders warn youths going to wedding festivals to be careful because "many guests there have no shame (reserve, takarakit) . . . . Often there are travelers from distant places and non-kin groups there, and sometimes there are thefts."

Many older persons tend to blame thefts upon guests passing for anzad and tende festivals. This is their way of discouraging youths seeking romance beyond the safe choices guided by close kinship. They lament some of these guests' lack of respect, for example, their insulting hosts by allegedly unruly behavior. During one wedding in June 1998 there was disorderly conduct by normally-honored guests from nearby: the affines from the groom's side, called imartayen, when they arrived at the bride's home. These guests were criticized for being too imparient to be served, complaining loudly, and even flashing knives (albeit jokingly). The parents of the bride were poor, having lost many herds in the drought. Friends told me that their difficult position in part accounted for the delay in serving food, and the fact that some guests did not receive an expensive wedding dish, eghale (pounded millet, dates, and goat-cheese blended in water). Despite parental warning, however, unmarried adolescents consider unrelated people from a distance "much more interesting" as matches than nearby, closely-related kin. Furthermore, youths who have traveled as migrant and political exiles now constitute a "lost generation": they have difficulty reintegrating into the community, and experience conflicts with elders, particularly over marriage. Other forces also challenge these elders' carefully circumscribing the freedom of the anzad and tende festivals. The acceleration of colonial and post-colonial economies (for example, mining exploration and tourism in northern Niger) and new political structures such as the new political leaders appointed by the state have sent outsiders (soldiers, functionaries, and other travelers) who have not always respected or understood local customs into the Tuareg regions. Sometimes these outsiders misread the relatively free social interaction between young Tuareg men and women as sexual license, and in a few instances some have introduced notions of prostitution, heretofore unknown, into the rural festival context (Gast 1992: 169).

Elders still try, however, to arrange endogamous close-cousin marriages in order to keep wealth the family. Traditionally, parents have enjoyed some leverage: for example, a camel acquired in bridewealth in many regions is held in trust by the father of the bride until later in life; and livestock, date palms, and oasis gardens—important inheritance property forms—can be given to children by parents in gradual pre-inheritance gifts called alkhalal. However, the droughts in 1969-73 and 1984 have considerably diminished livestock and pastures, thereby weakening some parental, elderly, and chiefly leverage.

Youths, however, do not always benefit from this power vacuum. Most do not enjoy sufficient monetary income to replace these traditional forms of property. Thus they are in a kind of power limbo. The wave of young Tuareg ichumar men who received a secular (non-Qur'anic) education in colonial and post-colonial government schools did not receive jobs, due to the uneven development of different regions of Niger. There was massive unemployment, political tensions with the government, and 1969-73 and 1984 droughts. So many youths left Niger in the 1970s and 1980s to find work. Bridewealth (whether in livestock as in rural communities, or in money as in towns) is difficult to accumulate for these intermittently-employed youths. A number of tende songs sung by young women mock young men for returning from migrant labor without bringing back any money or presents.

Thus these anzad and tende musical performances address, and indeed provide a forum for, individual agency and assertion of power in youth-elder conflicts. But they cannot be described as either fully structural or fully anti-structural. They collapse the usual communitas and liminal frames, as well as standard associations of authority with the elderly and resistance with the youthful age roles. Many songs at festivals express love founded on admiration of individual achievement rather than social origins, and hint at defiance of older persons' authority. However, at the same time, qualities praised in many songs are often still based upon values similar to parents' values of the old noble nomadic warrior culture: courage, respect and reserve, and dignity. Many songs encourage respect for parents, as in these lines from a smith's wedding tende performance: "The girl who wishes a good bridewealth must stay close to her mothers' cushion." "May God protect the youths who have camels . . . that elderly one over there raised her daughter well; praise to the young bride and her mother."

The anzad and tende are identified with the aggregation of disparate forces in Tuareg society—cultural unity and social solidarity across kin and class lines—but also with the risks of indeterminacy in freedom of association at these festival events. As observed, these are characterized by relative relaxation and informality—joking, horseplay, and often ribald physical advances made by men toward women. Thus the tende and anzad performance forms, in their textual imagery, performer-audience interaction, and commentary, reveal changing youth-elder relationships as complex and nuanced.

Guitar Performances

Similarly the "new" guitar performances age encapsulate dilemmas and indeterminacies, rather than neat structural oppositions or a unilineal direction from "traditional to change." The guitar was introduced into Tuareg society from the western Saharan Polisario Front and Libyan Arab influences, via the ichumar separatist/rebels (derived from the French chômeur, "the unemployed" and chômer, "to be unemployed). They were probably exposed to it during their military training or exile, and first began playing it during the separatist rebellion. They sang political songs, also called at that time ichumar, and accompanied themselves on the acoustic guitar, often in mountainous battle areas. These songs have now been expanded to address topics beyond the armed conflict (albeit with persisting political themes of Tuareg nationalism and cultural revitalization) and are called simply "guitar." Guitar music as a new genre of Tuareg music resembles "rock music" in the sense that it is now performed by bands with electronic amplification of guitars, bass, and drums, with usually a soloist singing lyrics. In northern Niger towns such as Agadez these bands play as adolescent men and women dance—sometimes together, sometimes separately "solo" style, and occasionally with a same-sex partner. These bands also often perform at political rallies of Tuareg nationalist parties.

Since the songs were originally composed by the Tuareg rebels, they initially contained much political commentary and were officially banned by the government during the early 1990s. Following the 1995 Peace Pact between rebels and the central governments of Mali and Niger, the songs have become popularized. They are freely performed in public in both towns and countryside and are diversified in their subject matter. Many verses, however, continue to praise nationalist leaders and to extol the cultural revitalization movement and its leaders. Many of these leaders and singers are those unmarried youths of the new ichumar generation. Striking here is that praise of youthful rebel leaders often refers to elders and traditional cultural values of the nomadic, aristocratic warrior culture. For example, one song goes,

When one thinks that we had to attack, one thinks about the old one [amghar, also denoting leader of a descent group or camp or head of a household] also . . . those one has left to the camps, the heart becomes bitter and that returns into the soul.

(In local exegesis this means that one must control oneself for the sake of the elders, and one is worried about them). At the same time, however, most guitar songs address "brothers" ' rather than "fathers" in their lyrics, and they emphasize unity with those fictive kin who, ideally at least, share common goals. In the towns players of the new guitar in rock bands often perform before or following the tende performances at festival dances. The players come from diverse social origins, and their music often includes themes emphasizing the unity of all social categories under the banner of the Tamajaq language and culture. Thus these songs encourage a broadening of ties from kinship, parents, and household toward fellow fighters and age cohorts from other regions.

Yet many guitar songs also contain warrior imagery that lauds values oriented toward the past: for example, the saber sword, the retaliatory raid, and the protection expressed by tropes of shade and shadows, images that also appear in traditional Tuareg battle epic and love of earlier generations of youth. Guitar songs often appeal to traditional values such as courage, endurance, bravery, and toughness. Thus their themes of war and struggle appeal to many of the same values as the older sung poetry of the anzad and tende praising earlier war heroes like Kaousan, Firhun, and Boulkhou.

The symbolic repertoires of the poetic verses in the music of all three youth-oriented festivals draw from older historical memory, and their performances often occur in sequence at the same event. On the other hand, in some other songs at these events singers also occasionally insert satirical jokes mocking important elderly authority figures, even local chiefs: for example, at the wedding of the son of a chief, a smith woman sang of the groom's father being replaced in the future. She also mocked some prominent elderly Islamic scholars for making profits from manufacturing religious amulets. Other song verses clearly delineate the traditional distance between youths and elders in matters of love preferences and courtship; for example: "The elder in his place, the youth in bed . . . I do not want an elder."

The ichumar generation of youths, particularly the youngest, who were active in the 1990-95 armed conflict, tend to oppose some older leadership they identify with the past. Their new concepts of social and political identity were acquired from their schooling and migrant labor. Many fighters were rumored to have resisted older Tuareg leaders during the rebellion, and some traditional chiefs in Azawak and Aïr regions were murdered. In one incident, during a robbery attack on tourists in the Sahara during the armed conflict, a newspaper reported that older leaders in this group appeared to be trying to keep order, whereas the younger men were resisting this, attempting to harass the tourist women.

I noticed mixed reactions from the older generation to actions of these young men, but these were usually stated in private. For example, in an incident I witnessed in 1998, former fighters shot off guns during songs to praise the Prophet at an evening celebration of the Prophet's birthday. Such gunfire had not previously been featured in any celebrations, much less sacred ones. No one protested at the scene, but later an older woman expressed disapproval to me in the privacy of her compound. She lamented the gunfire as "shameless" (disrespectful) behavior. By contrast, her adolescent son referred to the shooters as "elements of the resistance" and praised them. He viewed their actions as appropriate to celebrate their heroic roles in protecting the local residents, including respected elders and Islamic scholars, from a recent incident of violence in which some outside militia had attacked their villages. Thus the gunfire was defined by this youth as in fact promoting traditional Tuareg values that are also important to the older generation. Hence the festival gunfire revealed elder and youth conflict, but not in a clear-cut manner. It revealed a haziness of boundaries between "tradition" and "modern," and the indeterminacy of their association with any one age group.

Guitar performances are not exactly disapproved of by most elders, many of whom sympathize with their appeals to these "traditional" values. I did not ever hear an older adult lament youths' enthusiasm for this music or forbid youths to participate in these dances. One older man and popular animateur at many guitar performances, upon observing young men and women dancing together during a guitar performance, commented that they danced well, but that now "we have abandoned reserve" (takarakit, reserve, respect, or shame). He said this with neither sadness nor satisfaction, but rather matter-of-factly.

Indeed, guitar concerts are popular with all ages in town and countryside. Almost everyone attends such concerts, except perhaps Islamic scholars. In much guitar music today, singers tend to be either famous adolescent performers, some of whom were former rebels (thus far predominantly male, and a very few non-combatant female singers) or primary-school children, who have learned these songs from cassette tapes or live performances. The reason children sing the music is interesting. Many older Tuareg adults believe children have no sins (bakaten), and that this confers on them a kind of benediction and protection (Rasmussen 1997a). As a consequence, children are often expected to be adults' mouthpieces for political statements that adults cannot make for fear of retaliation. On several occasions I listened to children's performances of ichumar with scathingly mocking political commentary and even insults, both sung and shouted, live and on tapes recorded by friends and field assistants. I was amused by one song in which primary school-aged children hurled insults and reproaches about current events and politicians. When I expressed surprise, these persons indicated that children often sing particularly critical political lyrics "because unlike adults, who may be punished for this, children are not taken seriously and thus are good singers [of this genre]."

Many adults nonetheless recognize the inflammatory potential of these performances, and, even at dances where the lyrics are less overtly political, there is usually an older man present whose role is to organize, introduce, comment, and keep order. The animateur acts as a broker or facilitator between, not solely youths and elders or different families and descent groups as in traditional marriages, but also between the local community and the nation-state, and host family and the guests. This elder's role is broadly instrumental and his position ambiguous. The role of the guitar festival's "master-of-ceremonies" (called animateur at dances and "the ichumar's messenger," or in local slang, "the camel of the ichumar" at political party rallies) reflects the emergent role of guitar musical performances in articulating changing age roles and intergenerational relationships.

As a relatively new instrument and musical genre in Tuareg culture, the guitar's place in traditional cosmology and elder-youth roles and relations is as yet ambiguous. It is not, however, merely an instrument of "globalization." The associations of the guitar are complex. What is clear is that, among Tuareg, it is now the major expressive medium of political nationalism and cultural revitalization movements. Its players and listeners, nonetheless, tend to be less clearly defined in local cultural imagery in terms of their religious devotion, social origins, political views, gender, and age, and its performances are more broad-based and open-ended, allowing for greater negotiability. Its audiences are even more diverse than those at evening tende performances. For example, in the towns they are often multi-ethnic. Even in the countryside many Tuareg who attend guitar performances are relatively youthful outsiders. They come from distant regions as participants in the recent post-rebellion regional reorganization programs (for example, garden and boutique cooperatives and peacekeeping forces. In these contexts, rather than being merely "uninvited guests, these visitors bringing food distributions, projects for new wells, gardens, and livestock replenishment, are welcomed with tende, guitar, and camel-race performances (Rasmussen 1994). Older generations of Tuareg have tended to fear some of these programs as sources of coercion, for example, immunizations from outside health-workers were often accompanied by political speeches (Rasmussen 1994). Thus these new performances are also carefully orchestrated beneath their surface of license and feature important cultural mediators.

Thus the guitar's age-related cultural symbolism is thus far open-ended and ambiguous. Like the more "traditional" anzad and tende, it allows much indeterminacy and agency in age relations and interaction, since its music often seeks to unify disparate elements. But its nationalist performers appeal to wider (though not "global") bases beyond kinship, age, gender, and social stratum: common identity of the Tamajaq language and pride in Tuareg culture. In public, at least, most people want to be seen as supporting revival. Elderly persons may privately hold diverse opinions on these matters, but generally they do not voice as strong opinions about the guitar as they do about the tende and anzad. Early in my field research, for example, marabouts insisted that after attending a tende n goumaten (a type of tende performance occurring during spirit possession exorcism rituals), one must remove and wash one's clothes before praying (Rasmussen 1995). I did not hear such disparaging comments concerning the guitar performances. The role of the tende itself may be undergoing transformation toward more indeterminate and ambiguous associations for elders and youths. It is more frequently complemented by the guitar to welcome visitors, narrate the wedding, praise the family, but also to praise the diverse new guest in the audience. All these persons are affected in different ways by the event celebrated by the musical festival performance, and thus audience, as much as author, control these meanings.

Analysis

These descriptions of the anzad, tende, and guitar suggest they have strong cosmological, social, and political resonance to the different age groupings in Tuareg society. They evoke alternately love, praise, and scorn, prestige and shame, reward and punishment, and generalized cultural pride, based on both individual achievement and norms of structural (albeit changing) positions in society. But they also emerge as important stages for the orchestration of dissonant interests, indicating inter-generational, but also intra-generational, unities, on the one hand, and on the other, discontinuity and disjunction of age groupings' experiences in Tuareg society. Their music and its long-standing cultural symbolism, as well as its re-shaping by outside forces, evoke ideal transformations of age roles over the life course, but also agency, in critical reflections on them. Youths and elders alike participate as active agents in both these processes, of old and new, ideal and debated values.

These musical festivals all serve as a forum for public debate on changes that persons of all ages are experiencing, albeit in ways not always predictable in age, expresssive performative consequences, or relationship between the "old/traditional authority" to the "new/modern resistance." In particular, the guitar, since it is the most-recently introduced instrument provides a forum for discourse on forces affecting youth-elder relationships. These forces include both long-standing and recent, local and wider, sources of conflict and transformation of youth and elder roles.

The marriage of children is important to elders' autonomy in later years. Thus elders are at once facilitators and innovators; they attempt to secure privileges, security, and autonomy. The household unit, while usually nuclear, consisting of husband, wife, and children, is also in rural areas based on matrifocal ties between mothers and daughters and sisters who prefer to live next-door to each other, even as husbands try to move wives to live near their own kin. Older men have tried to manage these occupations from home, like heads of firms. Nowadays, it is the children of a household and, increasingly also contract labor, who usually do these tasks. My longitudinal and life history data suggest that over the life course many men first work for elders, but this is almost always viewed as hard work with little return, and insufficient nowadays for making a living. Many need to alternate between subsistence gardening, herding, and caravan trading, or to supplement it with migrant labor, particularly to raise bridewealth. This sometimes entails greater freedom from the opinions of parents, at least temporarily. In one case, for example, I heard the opinions of children on older parents' re-marriage powerfully expressed:

One elderly man, whom I will call Moutafa, a successful Islamic scholar, the father of grown and married children, lost his wife in 1992. Several years later Moutafa married a woman many years his junior. His daughters told me they disliked the new wife. By 1995 he had moved with his new wife to a small camp near her own kin outside the village. His sons and daughters occasionally visited him there, and he continued to practice successful Islamic scholarship and Qur'anic healing, but he never came to his childrens' households. This case is interesting because it represents an inversion of ideal postmarital residence in men's late life and also, perhaps more importantly, a reversal of the usual expression of opinion in matters of marriage: here, the children disapprove of the parent's new marriage, rather than vice versa. Garden land is becoming scarce, and many younger men are compelled to start gardens at a distance from their own kin. Despite his children's genuine love and affection for him and his prominence as a respected marabout, this man was somewhat weakened by two factors: the social conflict between his new wife and his daughters, and the intermittent travel and distant work of his own sons. He literally found himself without a tent, except in his new wife's compound.

The presence of older men and women at sacred daytime rituals of birth and marriage, presided over by Islamic scholars, constitutes a symbolic expression of their ideally productive socioeconomic and authority roles in the traditional household (Rasmussen 1997a, 1998, 2000). Older men and women in effect are supposed to guide youths toward their own socioeconomic independence in these staged liminal situations, when youths are viewed as potentially endangered by jealous spirits and humans. They are supposed to provide continuity and security, when these are perceived as threatened. The musical performance forms of anzad, tende, and guitar encapsulate, in different ways, long-standing and recent contradictions, tensions, challenges, and transformations in youth-elder relations.

Conclusions

Images of age in these popular musical performances, not surprisingly, express current negotiations of youth-elder categories in the wake of the Tuareg rebellion and the cultural revitalization in Niger today. They reveal more nuanced processes: not only are age categories culturally, rather than biologically constructed, they are also undergoing transformation. New experiences and conditions confront elders and their vested interests. Youths often question elders' authority, but also respect many traditions. Youths and elders alike listen to appeals from Tuareg nationalist leaders, in festival contexts often superimposed on traditional weddings, sacred ceremonies, and other events, for the unity of all social categories in a wider Tuareg cultural identity.

For many Tuareg the performance contexts of the three musical instruments, so resonant and highly-charged in experiences and preoccupations of aging, stimulate reflection and debates concerning youth and age. More broadly for anthropology, these performances suggest refinements in ways of thinking about categories of "the old" and "the new." As in our own "youth cultures"—in age imagery of rock concerts and popular music, on the one hand, and so-called "high culture," on the other—the Tuareg performances reveal how local residents experience their own idioms of youth and age, convert them into long-standing and changing social roles and experiences, and reflect upon them in dialogues between the generations. These processes, conveyed in age tropes, are played out in these age-marked ritual contexts. These data also challenge some anthropological tendencies to associate rigid structural oppositions such as "traditional/modern" with static age categories, or to identify one age cohort with authority and the other with malleable or rebellious roles. They suggest that "traditional" and "modern" beliefs and practices do not line up so neatly with authority and subordinate roles according to one or another age or generation. Traditional and modern, and indeed "global," are too simplistic terms for characterizing the changes taking place among the different age groups in African societies and elsewhere. Among the Tuareg these are nonetheless salient categories, reflected upon and played out largely through how music is performed and enjoyed. Tuareg elders today remain ideally and officially respected authority figures, particularly in the rural communities. Yet they are also subject to criticism from youths, and their authority has intermittently been challenged by colonial and post-colonial events affecting Tuareg social and political organization. Although youths and elders often stand in conflict, many self-consciously put aside differences to unite under the banner of common concerns. This was shown in the youthful singers' guitar songs that glorified older warrior traditions.

More broadly, the Tuareg data suggest that the "modern" and the "new" are only effects of globalization in very secondary ways. The guitar music style, for example, comes from the Arab and Polisario front influences. The separatist conflict, still sporadically erupting in some regions, has been directed toward the central government to the south. Age-related themes in these contexts suggest that some anthropological formulations of modernization and globalization are ethnocentric. Traditional and modern are a false dichotomy; there is no sharp line between them, nor are they static qualities of one or another age or generation, regardless of context. Indeed, "youth" and "aged," and what is perceived and promoted as new and old have finer nuances, are attached to diverse agents, and moreover, shift in meaning according to different purposes in diverse contexts.