Art of being Tuareg : Sahara nomads in a modern world
This excellent volume is an essential addition to the limited scholarship resulting from more than a century of Euro-American fascination with Africa's Tuareg peoples. This catalog, from a collaboratively produced exhibition, examines the Tuareg in multiple contexts, enriching anthropological and art historical studies with essays on Tuareg poetry, music, dress, and gender roles. Attention to Tuareg music usefully balances the study of artfully crafted instruments and traditional musical forms with the contemporary music, often electrically amplified, that has a growing presence in popular world music today. This volume will interest audiences in anthropology, African studies, and geography, in addition to students of global art history. Artists who work with textiles, jewelry, and metalwork will find here beautiful and fascinating artworks that are rarely examined in such depth. Analysis of the signs and symbols repeated in these objects and in other decorative patterns (i.e., architectural decoration) shows how the interpretation of their meanings varies widely, in part because the Tuareg nomads have historically preferred the oral tradition to written documentation
Print Book, English, ©2006
Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University : UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles, ©2006