The Poetics and Politics of Tuareg Aging: Life Course and Personal Destiny in Niger

The Tuareg in Africa understand aging in a way that is distinctly nonlinear -- a dimension of life they measure outside a chronological time frame. For the Tuareg, the life course of an individual is more important to the notion of age than the literal age, and rituals related to marriage, childbirth, and death mark the process of aging. Laying a foundation for deeper understanding of topics related to gender, social stratum, and kinship, Rasmussen sheds light on the concept of aging as she shows the need to deconstruct standard perceptions of age for studying other cultures.