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Europe and the Tuareg. The construction of an image in the study of a nomadic group - European scholars and travelers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the first to consider the different Berber speaking nomadic tribes of the Sahara and Sahel as one ethnic unity, designed by the name ’Tuareg’. Strangely enough, these authors did not treat the Tuareg as African data; instead they located them explicitly in the world of the Orient. Within this Oriental setting, Arab society was used as a frame of reference. In the comparison Tuareg-Arabs, the former stand out as surprisingly familiar — one might even say European — in sharp contrast with the latter. Several aspects played a prominent role in this ’Europeanisation’ of the Tuareg, e.g. the elevated position of women in Tuareg society; a number of moral characteristics, apparently closely related to Western ethics (monogamy, ’true love’, etc.); their ’democratic’ political organisation... . But most probably, arguments on religion occupied the key position. The Tuareg was depicted as ’not really Islamic’ and several authors even claimed a Christian origin of Tuareg society. This image of the ’European Tuareg’, however, threatened to conflict with another powerful image, that of the nomad as the ’noble savage’ par excellence. Both images seemed to exclude one another, but compromise offered the solution: the ’Europe’ of the Tuareg was transferred to the medieval past, obviously not yet at the level of modern Europe, but containing within its womb all the germs to reach the same degree of civilisation. It would be interesting to examine whether and to what extent this image, constructed in colonial times as part of the ’Orientalist discourse’, still influences modern anthropology studies of the Tuareg.
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How to Cite: Walgraeve, T. (1989) “Europa en de Touaregs: de constructie van een beeld bij de studie van een nomadengroep”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen. 34(4). doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.95025