Metamorphosis in the Culture Market of Niger

The banner of authenticity is falling in the contemporary market for non-Western culture. Taking Tuareg artisanry in Niger as a case study, I show that the neocolonial Western habit of collecting "exotic" art objects is giving way to a more collaborative proclivity toward Western objects produced in "traditional" Tuareg style. While Tuareg artisans—adjusting to social and cultural upheavals attending the urbanization of their practice and the recent Tuareg separatist rebellion—are producing such hybrid "modern" objects, some Tuareg nobles, impoverished by those same changes, have begun painting representational images of a more "authentic" Tuareg culture. The nature of the competition between Tuareg artisans and nobles, as well as the complex cross-identification between Tuaregs and their Western expatriate customers, illuminate a general perplexity about modernity in the contemporary Third World and indicate a transformation in the terms of its encounter with the West. Tuaregs, art and artisanry, authenticity, expatriates, and modernity and tradition]