ABSTRACT
Throughout the world, music is widely valued, but also often debated and embedded in wider socio-political and moral discourses. It is often the focus of contention between generations, religious orientations, and agents of social and political change. In times of upheaval, music often appears “center stage.” Among the Tuareg of Niger and Mali, Tamajaq-speaking, Muslim and predominantly semi-nomadic, music, poetry and song are widely enjoyed. In the past, stratified social groups specialized in different occupations, musical genres and instruments, based on descent in the pre-colonial hierarchical system. Today, social origins no longer coincide rigidly with inherited occupation or musical specialty. Yet metaphors and other tropes continue to imbue musical genres, styles, and instruments with distinctive sociopolitical and moral attributes. As in some other Muslim communities, the production and consumption of music has been a matter of ambiguity and controversy, and many debate the moral significance and implications of musical performance in the wake of armed invasions, political and religious conflicts, droughts, and unemployment. This chapter analyzes local moral discourse and symbolism surrounding music in the interlocking contexts of Tuareg cultural interpretations of Islam, socioeconomic upheavals, and political resistance movements. I argue that imagery surrounding musical genres, popular instruments, and performances reflect religious and social contradictions, debates, and changes in Tuareg communities. More broadly, the goal is to forge connections between theories of metaphor and theories of resistance/protest in anthropology and African studies through situating the aesthetics of performance in the politics of religious and social movements in Africa.
