Seductive Communities: On Non-representational Constructions

This chapter discusses additional insights into possession gained from an instance of unexpected and unintended catapulting of this researcher into the role of patient, analyzing its dual significance for both local residents and participating researcher, through the histories they brought to that experience. It also explores parallels between spirit travel, ethnographic interpretation, and local semi-nomadism in Tamajaq-speaking Tuareg communities of northern Niger. The Tuareg ritual exorcism context offers a rich perspective from which to explore anthropologist’s and local residents’ symbolic as well as literal nomadism; for geographic and spiritual nomadism are explicitly connected in local cultural symbolic parallels between nomadic wandering in the desert, emotional transformation in healing rituals, and transformations in poetic creativity and life course transitions. Most Tuareg adhere to Islam, are socially-stratified, and live by semi-nomadic livestock herding, oasis gardening, caravan and other itinerant trade, artisan work, and labor migration.