The Case of the Recurring - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

The Case of the Recurring
Wodaabe
Visual Obsessions in Globalizing Markets

Corinne A. Kratz

The Wodaabe people of the Sahel have been the

subject of over seventeen documentary films—
In der Tat, in both 1988 Und 2007, three were
released (Tisch 1). Filmmakers from Robert
Gardner and Werner Herzog to National
Geographic to individual researchers have
turned their lenses on Wodaabe life, particularly their visually
spectacular geerewol and yaake dances (Figs. 1–2). Likewise,
Wodaabe have featured in sumptuous coffee table books (Feige. 3),
the cover of National Geographic, Elle magazine, a World Bank
brochure, advertising, CD and album covers. Their images have
inspired painters and appeared on canvas bags, mugs, and mouse
pads (Figs. 4–5). This concentration on the Wodaabe—a seeming
visual obsession—is striking given the great diversity of culture
and performance on the African continent.

Wodaabe are a pastoral Fulani group of roughly 100,000 peo-
Bitte, sometimes known as Bororo.1 Most live in Niger, where they
are denigrated and marginalized for their nomadic life and non-
Islamic religion. Wodaabe are known particularly for their geerewol
and yaake performances, which occur during annual rainy season
gatherings. Both involve competitions between young men from
two lineages and moieties and selection of the most beautiful
dancers (Feige. 6). Seit 1950 the dances have also been performed
as entertainment and cultural spectacle for various audiences.

This paper considers questions related to these recurring images
but it is only partly about Wodaabe. It is more about the circu-
lation, Proliferation, and reframing of cultural images and about
cultural obsession. But the obsessions are ours, even though pre-
sented as theirs. I will sketch the process of proliferation and the
story of how this global Wodaabe cornucopia came about.

Wodaabe films, books, and images have circulated in Europe,
the US, and African countries.2 Wodaabe themselves have per-
formed internationally in France, Denmark, Belgien, Spanien,
Kanada, Morocco, Burkina Faso, and other African and European

Corinne A. Kratz is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies
Emerita at Emory University and Research Associate at the Museum of
International Folk Art. ckratz@emory.edu

24 | african arts SPRING 2018 VOL. 51, NEIN. 1

Länder, as a warm-up group for Baaba Mal in Paris (Boesen
2008A:159) and at Eurodisney (Lassibille 2006:116). In Niger, Sie
perform for visiting dignitaries, heads of state, and tourists, bei
agricultural shows, and an annual post-Ramadan celebration in
the Niamey sports stadium (Loftsdóttir 2008:178). Tourists, jour-
nalists, diplomats, and expatriate aid workers attend dances that
Wodaabe organize for themselves outside town settings (Boesen
2008A:147, 153; Bovin 1998:106–108, 2001:60; Lassibille 2006,
2009; Loftsdóttir 2002:12, 2008:178, 194). The Wodaabe-Tuareg
musical group Etran Finatawa also incorporates dress from the
dances when they perform their “nomad blues” (Feige. 7), touring
in Europe, Nord-und Südamerika, Australia, and west, south,
and central Africa.3 In short, Wodaabe dance and images have
gained widespread international currency over the last sixty-five
years and might now be considered a global phenomenon.

The proliferation and spread of Wodaabe imagery and perfor-
mances offer a way to understand how cultural resources—in this
case visual representations, Menschen, and performances—circulate
in global economies. The Wodaabe case highlights complications
and convolutions in those disparate circulations and social pro-
cesses and shows how they can entwine across locales and scales.
African art is no stranger to the marketplace, but the Wodaabe
case points to transformations in how markets are defined,
how interconnections and circulations work, and how cultural
resources—knowledge, Produkte, and practice—are involved in
creative production. Transformations might be local, regional,
cross-regional, International, multinational, and at times global,
with conjunctions that produce collaborations, debates, tensions,
and conflicts of many sorts, with positive and negative outcomes
(Kratz and Karp 2006:2; Karp, Kratz et al. 2006).

These shifts, recontextualizations, reinterpretations, und interak-
tions might lead to a range of transformations and changes. Formal
changes include Wodaabe circle dances restaged in lines facing
European festival audiences and framed by a presenter (Lassibille
2006:120-122; Loftsdóttir 2008:195), or mixing dress and make-up
styles, genders, and generations in tourist performances (Lassibille
2009:328; Loftsdóttir 2008:195).4 Structural changes include expan-
sion of Wodaabe performance venues to towns, agricultural shows,

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and international settings, coordination with tourist itineraries,
and articulations with market processes. Processual changes often
encompass transformed social relations: shifts in production as
lineage associations organize tour performances or the new annual
Assembly begun in 2004; in brokerage relations and new transna-
tional networks linking performances and development projects;
in monetization through photography fees and jewelry sales; Und

of course, in commodification of images (Lassibille 2006, 2009;
Loftsdóttir 2008).5

Scholars have analyzed such phenomena by focusing on par-
ticular globalizing processes and domains, using models of
layered motion to conceptualize systems and networks where
parts move, intersect, and transform in different ways. Das
includes work on marketing identity and tourism and analyses

1–2 Dramatic images of young Wodaabe men
dancing geerewol (Feige. 1, über) and yaake (Feige.
2, Rechts) have circulated widely, emphasizing their
elaborate dress, face paint, and facial gestures.
Wodaabe photographs by Carol Beckwith first
appeared in beautiful coffee table books such
as Nomads of Niger (Feige. 1) and later in the
two-volume African Ceremonies (Feige. 2) that she
published with Angela Fisher, but they have also
appeared in many other contexts.
Photos: courtesy Carol Beckwith

VOL. 51, NEIN. 1 SPRING 2018 afrikanische Kunst | 25

of the politics and production of heritage that show how meta-
cultural processes in self-presentation reshape relations to one’s
own culture, traditions, and practice (Stanley 1998; Comaroff and
Comaroff 2009; Geismar 2013; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 2006;
Witz 2012; Franquesa 2013; Peterson et al. 2015). Also important is
work on intellectual property and on financial arrangements and
creative production in world music and indigenous art, Wo
ideologies and ontologies of design, Eigentum, and ethnicity
might clash (Feld 1996, 2000; Braun 2003; Meintjes 2003; Seeger
and Chaudhuri 2004; Myers 2005; Sanga 2010; Karp and Kratz
2015). Mobilities and cultural transformations are also addressed
in work on cosmopolitanisms and on migration and refugees—a
status Wodaabe experienced during dire droughts (Appiah 2006,
2007; Cheah and Robbins 1998).

Scholars take different stances on globalizing-localizing
Dynamik, finding both exploitative cultural imperialism and
empowering situations that offer economic opportunities
and promote cultural diversity and understanding. Steve Feld

TABLE 1. SEVENTEEN FILMS ABOUT THE WODAABE

Year

Title (running time)

Director

1954

Les Nomades du Soleil (44 Mindest.) Henry Brandt (Swiss)

1972

1979

1980

1981

1988

Les Hommes du Dernier Soleil
(62 Mindest.)

Habbanaae: the Animal of
Friendship

Paul Lambert (Swiss)

Oxfam/America

La Femme Volée (16 Mindest.)
(set in Cameroon)

Nena Baratier & Geneviève
Louveau (Frankreich)

Deep Hearts (53 Mindest.)

Robert Gardner (US)

Way of the Wodaabe (26 Mindest.)

National Geographic (mit
Carol Beckwith) (US)

Leslie Woodhead with Mette
Bovin (Disappearing World
Serie)

Werner Herzog (Deutsch)

Adrian Malone (Millennium:
Tribal Wisdom and the Modern
World series)

Mette Bovin (Danish)

John-Paul Davidson; writer:
Michael Palin (BBC series)

Sandrine Loncke (French)

Christopher Roy (US) (Art and
Life in Africa series)

1988 The Wodaabe (51 Mindest.)

1988

Wodaabe—Herdsmen of the Sun
(52 Mindest.)

1992 The Art of Living (60 Mindest.)

1992

Strange Relations (60 Mindest.)

På Tchad-söens Bund— En Film
om et Venskab (On the Bottom
of Lake Chad—A Film about
Friendship) (35 Mindest.)

Sahara with Michael Palin,
episode 3: “Absolute Desert”
(60 Mindest.)

Wodaabe, le Plus Beau des Com-
bats (52 Mindest.)

Birds of the Wilderness: Der
Beauty Competition of the
Wodaabe People of Niger (62
Mindest.)

1992

2002

2006

2007

2010

26 | african arts SPRING 2018 VOL. 51, NEIN. 1

Fulani: Art and Life of a Nomad-
ic People (84 Mindest.)

Christopher Roy (US) (Art and
Life in Africa series)

Tribal Secrets: The Wodaabe (46
Mindest.)

La Danse des Wodaabe (90
Mindest.)

National Geographic (US)

Sandrine Loncke (French)

identifies these contrasting anxious or celebratory representations
in writing about globalization, increasingly in tense combination
(2000:153–54). We could stage this like a debate on erstwhile
host Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, with t-shirts for anxious Team
Exploitation, celebratory Team Empowerment, and a third, Team
Local Conditions, that emphasizes how these dynamics work
within local politics of ethnicity and nation. A variant, call it
Team Multilocal Conditions, traces social processes and trans-
formations across sites, situating actors and dynamics in varied
situations (Kratz and Karp 2006). The debate format might sug-
gest one team wins, but the more subtle understanding would
recruit them all.

Yet while the Wodaabe phenomenon clearly entails a far-
flung distribution of images and performances based on equally
wide-reaching international interactions, most films, popu-
lar photo books, and performances are framed by a different
narrative. They present a different Wodaabe, described as tradi-
tional, unchanging, authentic, “people of the taboo”—not people
embedded in global economies who perform internationally.
Their culture is portrayed as ancient, connected to rock paint-
ings in the region, and their nomadic life and lack of permanent
housing underline exotic contrasts.6 Some late 1980s films com-
ment on recent droughts and Wodaabe movement to towns and
refugee camps, framed as endangered cultures. This template is
all too familiar, and far from unique to Wodaabe. Deconstructing
stereotypes of timelessness, Isolierung, primitivism and disappear-
ance is the starting place for analyzing representations of African
societies and other seemingly “exotic others.” But that doesn’t
seem to change the images and representations much.

The Wodaabe proliferation is notable, Dann, but not unique.
Just looking in the film collection at Emory University, where I
arbeiten, I found a dozen films about Maasai and eighteen about
Zulu. Both have long representational histories that include trade
cards, stereographs, staged popular presentations, films, photo
books, games, and advertising (Kratz and Gordon 2002:250;
Sobania 2002; Schmied 2013) (Figs. 8–9). It is precisely through such
dispersed but ubiquitous repetition—crossing media, formats,
and contexts—that stereotypes and archetypes are reproduced
and perpetuated, often casting pastoralists in the romanticized,
“noble savage” slot.7

Yet two things are striking about the Wodaabe films and images.
Erste, they have marked thematic consistency. Emory’s eighteen
Zulu films focus on health and healing, religion, migrant labor,
Geschichte, und Musik, with several feature films; Maasai films have
a similar range. But while the twelve Wodaabe films I’ve seen
offer general ethnographic portraits, with just one exception,
young men’s dances are prominent visually and thematically.
Dance preparations or performances are on screen half the time
in some, a quarter of the time in others, and 10–15 percent in
a few that explicitly survey Wodaabe or Fulani life. Even films
with lower total screen times, obwohl, emphasize dance images
by using them as dramatic start and climactic finale. The way the
dances figure in their verbal narratives adds more emphasis.

Zweite, Wodaabe seem a more recent addition to the cast of
cultures in this imaginary of otherness. I found very few early
occurrences tracing Wodaabe images back to explorers, colonial
government documentation, postcards, or stereographs; nur
two—likely from the 1920s–1930s (Figs. 10–11)—came up when I
followed postcard auctions for a few months. Fulani were known

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3 These four titles are just a sampling of the
photo books that have featured images of the
Wodaabe people. The top two are devoted entire-
ly to Wodaabe; the bottom two include Wodaabe
sections in their regional coverage of Africa.
Foto: Corinne Kratz

I identify structural features of visual
proliferations where cultural resources
circulate in global economies.9 The pro-
cess seems to have four components,
though the fascination with Wodaabe
images is overdetermined by coinciding
cultural, politisch, wirtschaftlich, and visual
factors.

Erste, there may be enabling factors, local
conditions that draw attention to certain
images or practices. Zweite, a set of asso-
ciations, affinities, resonances, and logics
pave the way for potential extralocal recep-
tion and popularity, creating what I call a
“receptive imaginary.” A particular cul-
tural practice or group seems to provide a
link, a contrast, or a translation of familiar
practices or values relevant to those who
become an audience. These imaginative
contexts bridge cultural difference and
motivate interest for viewers. The third
component consists of particular conjunc-
tures—cultural, historisch, and political
economic conditions that together cre-
ate circumstances congenial to those
resonances and logics being activated on a
wide scale. Endlich, there are sparks—pre-
cipitating events, Objekte, or encounters that catapult the images
into a wider range of settings and uses, igniting wider circulation.
Natürlich, these four aspects overlap, interagieren, and blur.

SETTING THE STAGE: ENABLING FACTORS AND RECEPTIVE
IMAGINARY
Let me now tell the story of how this Wodaabe-rama devel-
geöffnet, as I’ve pieced it together. The story has gaps, missing
episodes, absent actors and events, and unknown connections—
almost every story of transnational circulation will. But tracing
the process may be suggestive.

Among enabling factors are the importance and cultural
salience that yaake and geerewol competitions hold for Wodaabe
selbst (Bovin 2001:46–48, 50, 52; Boesen 2008a:151–52) (Feige.
12). Being a beautiful dancer is a topic of Wodaabe proverbs and
the object of much work; it brings fame for winners, nostalgic
memories for others (Bovin 2001:40, 44, 52). Boesen calls the
dances “the core of communal aesthetico-ritual self-experience”
(2008A:160). Likewise, others in the region recognize the arrest-
ing spectacle of Wodaabe dances (Bocquené 2002:153–54).

VOL. 51, NEIN. 1 SPRING 2018 afrikanische Kunst | 27

and pictured on colonial postcards, as were Tuareg (vgl. Loftsdóttir
2008:48, n.21), but scholars with extensive knowledge of stereo-
graphs and colonial postcards of Africa could not recall early
images of Wodaabe dancers like those now so widespread.8 In
the early twentieth century, Wodaabe images were not circulat-
ing widely, marking a distinctive, visually striking identity. If we
think about the now recurrent images as one of many such prolif-
erations, Dann, the Wodaabe case provides a visually focused way
to unravel how they went from invisible, virtually nonexistent, Zu
ubiquitous. That story illuminates how the broad imaginary of
otherness has been reproduced and perpetuated.

STRUCTURE AND STORY: HOW WODAABE IMAGES
PROLIFERATED
Popular primitivism and exoticism are historical phenomena
with diverse visual histories. They include visual proliferations
occurring at different times, under different conditions, mit
varied trajectories. Yet while cases differ, at the same time they
are part of a shared history, drawing upon related ideas and
processes. In reconstructing this story, the Wodaabe episode,

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The associations, affinities, resonances, and logics that created
a “receptive imaginary” for Wodaabe images combine three
interwoven aspects. Erste, as noted, is the extensive set of images
related to the West’s popular primitivism, emphasizing “isolated
tribes” and exotic practices. With those images and their geneal-
ogies goes the second: the more specific, longstanding romance
with the figure of the pastoralist as an independent, Manchmal
mysterious individualist. Certain ethnic groups became regional
exemplars—Maasai, Zulu, Himba (Kratz and Gordon 2002).10
But these were semi-nomadic peoples, agro-pastoralists, und das
Zulu were also a kingdom. The nomad represented the “purest”
version of this romantic figure.11 Indeed the first Wodaabe film
and book I’ve found, by Henry Brandt, is called Nomades du Soleil
(see Fig. 3), and the nomad identification threads through films
and popular books. Tuareg had been the better-known nomad
exemplar in west Africa, with a representational history of colo-
nial postcards and display at the 1907 Colonial Exhibition.12
When Wodaabe performed in Europe nearly a century later,
audiences and festival organizers confused the two and thought
they were booking Tuareg, citing notions of “blue-men” and
nomadic purity (Lassibille 2006:119, 125).

The pastoral nomad figure provided an episteme and template
that easily fit Wodaabe images, defining expectations that helped
propel them into wide circulation.13 Wodaabe epitomized the
figure, the most nomad of nomads. Films emphasize their fre-
quent movements and lack of shelters (though a camp is highly
structured by gender and age [Stenning 1959:106; Bovin 2001:62–
65]). National Geographic’s 2007 film describes their home “at

4 This oil painting, Wodaabe, by Pasadena artist George
Combs, is available as a giclee print or on greeting cards
through Fine Art America.
Foto: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/wodaabe-george-
combs.html, zugegriffen 11 August 2015

5 This canvas bag with an image of a Wodaabe man
applying makeup is one example of the Wodaabe-decorated
merchandise available online. Screenshot by Corinne Kratz
An 29 April 2015.
Foto: courtesy Zazzle.com (http://www.zazzle.com/
wodaabe_canvas_bags-149174157010595251)

the heart of the Sahel” and a Fulani autobiography remarks that
Jafun Fulani see Wodaabe as “the most bush of the bush-men”
(Bocquené 2002:158). Just as Wodaabe seem to heighten notions
associated with the nomad, dance images of young men present
the most exotic face of Wodaabe (Pyper 1998:2). Their wide-
spread popularity simultaneously heightens and narrows the
representation, narrowing the Wodaabe identity that becomes
known while creating “larger-than-life representations that take
on a life of their own” (Kratz and Gordon 2002:256).

This links to the third aspect of the receptive imaginary, based
on the visual spectacle of geerewol and yaake dances themselves.
These striking, beautiful, and graceful scenes visually feed notions
of the exotic and are embedded in descriptions that foreground
exotic customs and sexual liaisons, giving the images particular
gendered spins (Kratz and Gordon 2002:248). The spin builds
on gender dislocations from a Euro-American perspective: Are
the dancers male or female? Photos and films capitalize on the
ambiguity. To our eyes, geerewol and yaake invert and echo
our own pageants and rituals of gender: beauty contests, vogu-
ing, cross-dressing, and flirtatious adornment and seduction.
Though based on glaring cross-cultural misreadings, these are
the memorable images eventually recycled in the media, mag-
azine advertising, commercials for McDonalds, and elsewhere. ICH
return to this later, but now to the first conjuncture.

CONJUNCTURE AND SPARK I: FROM THE 1950s
The dances’ local cultural salience and the ways Wodaabe
invoked Euro-American popular primitivism, nomadophilia,
and gender fascinations set the stage for particular conjunctures
and sparks to come together. There are two chapters, two con-
junctures and sparks to consider. The first starts in the 1950s, mit
a confluence of new attention to Wodaabe in research, documen-
Station, and prominent performances.

Professional anthropological research with Wodaabe started
in the early 1950s (Tisch 2), when the International African
Institute commissioned research by Derrick Stenning in Nigeria,
Marguerite Dupire in Niger and Cameroon (1962), and C.E.
Hopen on pastoral Fulani in Nigeria (Forde 1959:ix–x). At the
gleiche Zeit, Jean Gabus, director of the Swiss Musée d’Ethnogra-
phie de Neuchâtel, sent filmmaker Henry Brandt to Niger for six
months (Feige. 13). Brandt produced Nomades du Soleil, the first
film about Wodaabe, and then a book by the same name, the first

28 | african arts SPRING 2018 VOL. 51, NEIN. 1

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6 Young Wodaabe women judge the geerewol danc-
ers, as shown in this photo from a final series of imag-
es in Nomads of Niger. They “kneel modestly” before
the line of dancers, “left hands up as if to conceal their
scrutiny” (Beckwith and van Offelen 1982:218–19).
Foto: courtesy Carol Beckwith

7 Founded in 2004, the group Etran Finatawa
includes both Wodaabe and Tuareg musicians. Sie
incorporate dress, face paint, and facial gestures relat-
ed to Wodaabe men’s dances into their performance
Stil, as seen on the cover of their third CD, Tarkat
Tajje/Let’s Go!
Foto: courtesy Riverboat Records/World Music Network
(Vereinigtes Königreich) Ltd. (http://www.worldmusic.net/)

Brandt first notes the “passion that binds them closely to their
large herds of black zebu cattle” (Brandt 1956:5, my translation);
the film narration says cattle are their reason for living. Beauty is
not the immediate focus, but rainy season gatherings and young
men’s dance images are the book’s climax, with fold-out color
images in a largely black-and-white book (Feige. 14). Brandt’s film
parallels the book’s structure, with dance images first appearing
25 minutes into the 44 minute film.

Brandt’s final section includes themes familiar from the sub-
sequent flood of Wodaabe films and books, but there are telling
differences. After a dance scene with young men and women
alike, young women feature and the first discussion of beauty is
accompanied by pictures of young women. The geerewol gath-
ering follows, with descriptions of dress and adornment similar
to recent ones, but young women and men alike are described
as beautifying themselves (Feige. 15). The film likewise balances
images of young men and women. Other emphases also differ.
The dance is a “solemn presentation of young men, the strange
beauty contest that opposes several lineages [called tribes]”
(Brandt 1956:107), but the contest aspect returns only later, nach
evocative portrayals that stress the songs’ hypnotic effect. Endlich,
Brandt’s book does not sexualize the event like more recent

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VOL. 51, NEIN. 1 SPRING 2018 afrikanische Kunst | 29

of five Wodaabe film-book pairings over the years.14 This cluster
of researchers defined two strands of work which continue to the
present, with markedly different trajectories of circulation.

The first focused on history, social structure, cultural ecology,
Hochzeit, and politics (Stenning, Dupire, Hopen) and has circulated
mainly in scholarly circles. Some facets are taken up in develop-
ment work, which is how this strand took visual form. Habbanaae,
A 1979 film strip-cassette program produced by Oxfam, described
a herd reconstitution program based on Wodaabe cattle lending
Praktiken Methoden Ausübungen (Scott and Gormley 1980). This interesting didactic piece
recycles tropes of nomadic freedom and includes images of camps,
sandstorms, Wodaabe portraits, lots of livestock shots, drought
scenes of cattle bones, and a thin refugee.15 Dance images are totally
absent, and Wodaabe are described as “known … for their special
love of animals” (Oxfam 1979: frame 26), not for dances or beauty
contests. Given the format, topic, and producer, I think Habbanaae
had limited circulation. Vor allem, obwohl, Stenning’s book also pays
little attention to geerewol and yaake dances, devoting to them just
two paragraphs (1959:157). The introduction to a new edition in
1994, when these images were widely known, puzzles over this
(Burnham 1994:xii–xiii).

The other research strand, represented in the 1950s by Henry
Brandt, has been heavily visualized.16 It too presented an ethno-
graphic portrait of social relations, Hochzeit, and the importance
of domestic herds. Brandt’s book has poetic descriptions of
Wodaabe life across seasons. As in the Habbanaae film-tape,

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8 “House-building by Masai Women,
Their Husbands Looking On—East Africa.”
Stereoscopic image, C. 1909. Published by
Keystone, V11997.
Foto: Collection of the author

depictions. He uses the word “seduction” just once, about catching the judge’s eye. His
demure version of what happens next explains that couples come together for verbal
jousting, for eloquent speaking is also valued. He goes on, “What happens next, nur
the Bororo and the night know. But it is certain that one does not go much beyond
long amorous discussion, and great reserve rules the attitude of each couple” (Brandt
1956:134, my translation). These differences seem small, but given how uniform later
representations are, Brandt’s more balanced gender treatment, attention to song, Und
lack of emphasis on sexual encounters is distinctive.

TABLE 2
SOME WODAABE RESEARCHERS (PARTIAL; ONLY FILMS AND BOOKS SHOWN)

Name

Research Period

Comments

Henry Brandt (Swiss)

early 1950s

film: Les Nomades du Soleil (1954); Buch: Nomades du Soleil (1956)

C.E. Hopen (Canadian)

Derrick Stenning (British)

Margaret Dupire (French)

early 1950s (Sokoto Province,
Nigeria)

The Pastoral Fulbe Family in Gwandu (1958)

early 1950s (Bornu Province,
Nigeria)

Savannah Nomads: A Study of the Wodaabe Pastoral Fulani of Western Bornu Prov-
ince, Northern Region, Nigeria (1959)

early 1950s (Niger & nördlich
Cameroon)

Peuls Nomades: étude descriptive des Wodaabe du Sahel Nigérien (1962); L’Organisa-
tion Social des Peul (1970)

Paul Reisman (US)

1967–1968 (Upper Volta)

Niger Range and Livestock
Project

Mette Bovin (Danish)

1979–1983

Freedom in Fulani Social Life (1974). Reisman didn’t work with Wodaabe, aber sein
research with Jelgobe Fulani was influential

Research on pastoralism and economy with Wodaabe and others by A. Bonfiglioli,
J. Swift, C. White and others. USAID + Niger support

1985–2000 (other work in the
area from 1968)

films: Disappearing World series: The Wodaabe (1988, with Leslie Whitehead), På
Tchad-söens bund—En film om et venskab (On the Bottom of Lake Chad—A Film
about Friendship) (1992); Buch: Nomads Who Cultivate Beauty (2001)

Marion van Offelen (Belgian)

1980S

Mahalia Lassibille (French)

1994–2000s

Kristin Loftsdóttir (Icelandic)

1996–1998 + later visits

Elisabeth Boesen (Deutsch)

1999–2008

Sandrine Loncke (French)

1994–2014

30 | african arts SPRING 2018 VOL. 51, NEIN. 1

Nomads of Niger (with Carol Beckwith, 1983); van Offelen holds an MA in anthro-
pology and does development work for the Belgian government

2004 dissertation (EHESS, Paris), Danses Nomades (Mouvements et Beauté chez les
WoDaaBe du Niger)

2000 dissertation (University of Arizona); The Bush is Sweet: Identity, Power, Und
Development among the WoDaaBe Fulani in Niger (2008)

Scham und Schönheit. Über Identität und Selbstvergewisserung bei den Fulbe Nordbe-
nins (1999, research in Benin; followed by research with Wodaabe starting 1999)

2002 dissertation, Lignages et lignes de chant chez les Peuls Wodaabe du Niger; film:
La Danse des Wodaabe (2010); Buch: Geerewol: Musique, Danse et Lien Social chez
les Peuls Nomades Wodaabe du Niger (2015)

Jean Rouch calls Nomades du Soleil a classic and counts Brandt among the handful
of pioneers at the time, als 16 mm format and synchronous sound recording forged a
technological revolution in portability that made possible the combined role of eth-
nographer-filmmaker (2003:57, 34–35, 269–70). I don’t know how widely it was shown.
Rouch says “it has never been distributed commercially” (2003:57; vgl. Gardner 2006:184),
but it certainly registered on later authors, filmmakers, and presumably other viewers.
I see Brandt’s film and book as the spark in this 1950s conjuncture, important vehicles
through which Wodaabe images began to circulate more widely.

The film received an award at the Lucarno film festival in 1955, impressed viewers
at a 1955 showing at the Musée de l’Homme organized by Rouch, and was screened
in Belgium by the Comité International du Film Ethnographique (DAV 2010:4; von
Heusch 2007:367, 370). Stenning’s monograph footnotes it with admiration (1959:157),

(counterclockwise from top)
9 “Heroic Sports of the Kraal—a Zulu War
Dance, Zululand, South Africa.” Stereoscopic
Bild, 1901. Published by Underwood &
Underwood.
Foto: Collection of the author

10 “Visage du Niger. Peul Bororo.” Postcard, C.
1930. Photographer J.M. Bertrand. Published by
l’ONT.
Foto: Collection of the author

11 “Tchad–Bororos en costume de fête.”
Postcard, C. 1920–1930. Photographer René
Moreau. Published by R. Bègne.
Foto: Collection of the author

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VOL. 51, NEIN. 1 SPRING 2018 afrikanische Kunst | 31

and effortlessly, mindful only of such elemental considerations as
water and pasture. They would be musical, fond of dance and above
all content with the natural order which a pastoral mode must fol-
niedrig. There is a short but memorable film made in the fifties called
Nomades du Soleil …. [T]his film, I’m sure, helped to fixate my
mind on certain qualities of appearance, environment and empha-
sis with which I then invested all herding groups (1971:1).

Likewise Danish anthropologist Mette Bovin mentions the film
(1974–75:466) and Brandt’s book is noted in the 1983 book Nomads
of Niger by photographer Carol Beckwith and Belgian anthropol-
ogist Marion van Offelen (1983:224). Bovin later made two films
(1988, 1992) and published the book Nomads Who Cultivate Beauty
(2001); Beckwith was involved with three other Wodaabe films.17

Brandt’s work and images, Dann, animated the first American-
made Wodaabe film decades later and informed the next set of
people who figure in the proliferation of Wodaabe images. In
tracing image circulation, chapters can be like cycles; they don’t
always end, but a conjuncture’s elements and sparks have a certain
reach and period of prominence, even if their traces and influ-
ence percolate into later chapters.18 Before turning to the second
conjuncture, let me note the final piece of this 1950s conjuncture
of attention, an expansion in Wodaabe performance venues.

Europeans showed some interest in Wodaabe dances during
colonial times. Officials encouraged youth “to form dancing
troupes that can be called upon whenever a ‘folkloric’ display is
required for tourists or visiting dignitaries” (Burnham 1994:xii).19
Wodaabe danced on a national stage, Jedoch, In 1959, at inde-
pendence celebrations.20 One reaction suggests they were not yet
known widely: “All … present, both Blacks and Whites, agreed on
pronouncing that these were the most amazing people they had
ever seen” (Wenek 1962a:7, also quoted in Loftsdóttir 2008:192;
Wenek 1962b). These performance extensions foreshadowed the
international circuits where Wodaabe now perform and helped
bring wider notice beyond Niger.

CONJUNCTURE AND SPARKS II: FROM THE 1980s
The 1980s began the second conjuncture—a second, greater
confluence of attention to Wodaabe, including eight new films
zwischen 1980 Und 1992, influential coffee table books, and two
new researchers who worked with visual projects. Things get

and missionary Père Henri Bocquené saw it at a cinema in 1962,
his “first ‘visual’ contact with this unknown world” (2002:xiv).
Brandt’s film and book are cited as inspiration or source by the
next cluster of researcher/filmmakers who worked with Wodaabe
in the 1970s or early 1980s, the second conjuncture of this story.

Zum Beispiel, Robert Gardner saw Brandt’s film in the late 1950s
(Gardner 2006:184). In 1971, seven years before filming Deep
Hearts (1981), er sagte,

I became quite obsessed with the image of people moving across a
wider landscape. Such people, I imagined, would move gracefully

12 Mette Bovin’s book includes this 1975 Bild
of Wodaabe dancers (2001:99). The large mirrors
they wear were part of the style of the 1970s. Alle
three men were beauty contest champions. Der
photo was taken in a village studio after a dance,
suggesting they wanted to mark the occasion as
important.
Foto: courtesy The Nordic Africa Institute

13 Henry Brandt produced the first film (1954)
and book (1956) pairing about the Wodaabe, beide
under the name Nomades du Soleil and based on
research done under the auspices of the Musée
d’Ethnographie de Neuchâtel. The book includes
several image sequences that focus on geerewol.
These images, on pages 138–39, are part of a
series of seven.
Foto: courtesy Bibliothèque cantonale et
universitaire–Lausanne

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complicated because Wodaabe images cross into other realms
of circulation, including television, and sparks occur in several
realms. At the same time, Wodaabe began performing more
regularly in Niger for opening ceremonies, agricultural shows,
and diplomatic visits, and on national television. Dance troupes
also went to Europe, though that was more common after 1990
(Bovin 1998:106–108, 2001:60–61).21

Three cultural and political economic shifts in the 1980s
bolstered interest, enhancing the receptive imaginary. Erste, dev-
astating Sahelian droughts in the 1970s and mid-1980s brought
attention to the region. After Gardner’s Deep Hearts and the short
French film La Femme Volée in the early 1980s, the cluster of films
from the late 1980s include this ecological theme. Resumption of
geerewol gatherings becomes a sign in the environmental drama
of recovery. “At the same time, the Wodaabe were also ‘discovered’
in their own country” (Boesen 2008a:147) when large numbers
arrived in urban centers during droughts, and many incorpo-
rated “seasonal urban activities” into their pastoral rounds.

Zweite, the politics of gender and sexuality had changed since
the 1950s. By the 1980s, feminist and gay politics had entered
mainstream social discourse and visual culture in Europe and the
US22 and Wodaabe films and books began foregrounding gen-
der and sexuality in geerewol interpretations (vgl. Pyper 1998:3).
The relative gender balance in Brandt’s book, with little overt
sexualization, gives way to strong emphasis on geerewol, sexual
encounters, and gender misreadings. Let me review how films
of this period handle this theme before discussing the third shift
and the sparks of this conjuncture.

REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY
Gardner spent a month in Niger in 1978 filming Deep Hearts,
released in 1981 (Gardner 2006:181–215). Geerewol is the focus.23
His sparse voiceover interprets it as competing “for approval as
physical and moral specimens …. [Y]ounger men risk their pride
as dancers and as embodiments of Bororo virtue … It is a contest
between two lineages,” he says, “for women who will be stolen

14 The fold-out color spread in Henry Brandt’s
Nomades du Soleil (S. 121–24) shows dramat-
ic scenes from a geerewol dance, the left side
focused on young women and the right on male
dancers.
Foto: courtesy Bibliothèque cantonale et
universitaire–Lausanne

15 Brandt’s pairing (S. 108–109) puts equal
emphasis on beautification by young women and
young men. His captions for these images are:
“Preparations for the festival.” (links) and “Young
men adorn themselves for as long and as careful-
ly as young women.” (Rechts) (my translation).
Foto: courtesy Bibliothèque cantonale et
universitaire–Lausanne

VOL. 51, NEIN. 1 SPRING 2018 afrikanische Kunst | 33

and between members of the same lineage for acknowledgment
as the most desirable among them” (Gardner 1981). He eschews
sexual interpretations and in his journal declares, “there is no
room for personal or romantic notions; it is principally social
in significance” (Gardner 1981, 2006:213).24 La Femme Volée
appeared the year before, with the sexual emphasis that became
prominent, asserting that geerewol is intended to seduce women.
The three films released in 1988 split on this theme. All were
made for television: one in Granada Television’s Disappearing
World series; a National Geographic profile with Carol Beckwith;
and Werner Herzog’s Herdsmen of the Sun, made for French tele-
vision. Note that these films put Wodaabe on television in three
Länder, available for wider distribution. Geerewol figures in the
first two, but dominates neither, and neither comments on sexual
opportunities at the dance.

16 The gender of Wodaabe dancers was sometimes misread. In US reviews
and film showings, they were sometimes likened to the men in Paris is
Burning, A 1991 film about competitive drag balls in New York.
Foto: courtesy Miramax

17 Wodaabe dancers’ gender can seem ambiguous in closeups that show
only their painted faces, headdresses and jewelry, such as this image from the
Millennium book that accompanied the television series of the same name.
Foto: courtesy Carol Beckwith

18 In this scene, the young Wodaabe woman declares, “I will be full woman
tonight.” Screenshot frame from The Art of Living episode of the Millennium
television series, 1992.
Foto: PBS Video

Herzog’s film, Jedoch, has a significant focus on geerewol,25
even as it shows other scenes and Wodaabe talk about the
drought. He describes it as a marriage market, celebration of
Schönheit, and an occasion where sexual encounters are expected.
He says, “young women have taken up their positions; each …
will choose her beau for the night.” Interview-like conversations
among Wodaabe, a delightful feature of the film, develop this fur-
ther. A final interview with the winner and the woman who chose
him takes place, we are told, after they spent the night together.
“Do you love me because of my beauty or my charms?” he asks.
She tells him, “I have chosen you with my heart.” One reviewer
connected with Wodaabe through the interviews, she says, seit
they seem like us: “worrying about relationships” (Philips 1991).

Geerewol dress, makeup, and dance carry no sense of feminine
inversion or cross-dressing for Wodaabe, and Herzog’s verbal
presentation of geerewol is entirely heterosexual. Yet the film’s
opening introduces gender ambiguity for Euro-American viewers.
It shows slow motion head shots with characteristic facial ges-
tures: Dancers widen their eyes, flash their teeth, and turn their
heads. The soundtrack is a scratchy recording of Gounod’s “Ave
Maria.”26 Herzog says this redefines the realm of truth, indicating
it is a story of beauty and desire, not documentary per se (Cronin
2002:214). The combination—so far contextless—certainly raises
questions about beauty and purity, but perhaps also of gender
and sexual identity, even for viewers unaware that the 1901 singer

34 | african arts SPRING 2018 VOL. 51, NEIN. 1

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19 Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop,
appears with Wodaabe and evokes their wisdom
in this ad, which appeared in New York magazine
in November 1995.
Foto: The Body Shop/L’Oreal

20 Some images in Beckwith’s book showed
scenes or interactions that went beyond the usual
portrayals of Maasai.
Foto: courtesy Carol Beckwith

21 Carol Beckwith features as cultural interpreter
in Way of the Wodaabe, wearing her own hair in
the style of Wodaabe women. Screenshot frame
from Way of the Wodaabe, 1988.
Foto: National Geographic

is Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato of the Vatican (Cronin
2002:214; Prager 2007:184). Later scenes have similar musical jux-
tapositions as Wodaabe men apply masklike facial makeup, but by
then narration has made clear that these are men.

These juxtapositions are subtle, fleeting, but striking. Whatever
they communicated, the film’s reception highlighted sexual pro-
miscuity and cross-dressing. The same review observes breezily,
“camels nothwithstanding, [Es] looks more like Paris is Burning
than National Geographic,” referring to the 1991 documentary
about gay men competing in New York drag balls (Philips 1991)
(Feige. 16). Tatsächlich, the two films played together in Chicago and
in New York (Maslin 1991). Some commentaries just assume
the gender misreading, as analogy collapses into assertions that
geerewol are “transvestite courting rituals” (Atkinson 2001) von
“Desert Drag Queens” (Jolique 2000).

Gender can be visually ambiguous and unstable. Wenn wir
don’t recognize contextual signs that disambiguate gender
Identität, we tend to read it through our own familiar signs
and assumptions. “Beauty contest” signals female competition
for Euro-Americans (Pyper 1998:3; Cohen, Wilk, and Stoeltje
1996:2; Hayes 2005:527). Dramatic headshots of dancers’ faces
minimize other disambiguating signs and contrasts (TV Guide
n.d.) (Feige. 17). With norms of gender and sexuality still in flux,
the dazzling Wodaabe geerewol captivated viewers’ gendered
imaginations and offered exotic titillation.27

The last two films of this period give geerewol a sexual framing,
cast as romance. Two episodes of the 1992 Millennium television
series had Wodaabe segments, one on The Art of Living and one
about marriage and family, Strange Relations.28 Geerewol is cen-
tral; contrived “dramatized documentary” foregrounds budding
romance between individuals, with accented English narration
written in the protagonists’ voices. Geerewol footage builds this
by cutting between the pair to create both tension and narrative
relation. In Strange Relations, the suitor says, “I will love you to
exhaustion.” A new sexual wrinkle appears in The Art of Living
(Feige. 18). The young woman sits with her beau and his friend near
the segment’s end. Her “English voice” declares, “I will be full
woman tonight, I will love both.”29

RETURN TO CONJUNCTURE AND SPARKS II
Let me return to the third development shaping the receptive
imaginary: growing interest and markets for cultural diversity,
indigeneity, world music, and related products in the 1980s and
1990S. The politics of indigeneity gained visibility in the mid-
1970s and early 1980s,30 linked with environmentalism (Conklin
and Graham 1995). Concurrently, the “commercial potential of
world music began developing rapidly in the 1980s,” mediated
at first through pop star curation (Feld 2000:149–51). Diese
trends carried to other marketing spheres and stoked an appe-
tite for images and experiences related to indigenous peoples.

VOL. 51, NEIN. 1 SPRING 2018 afrikanische Kunst | 35

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The Body Shop is a prime example. Sponsor of the Millennium
series on “tribal wisdom” (during the UN’s International Year for
the World’s Indigenous People), the Body Shop used Wodaabe
images in magazine advertising (Feige. 19), on billboards, Und
in The Body Shop Book (1994). Founder Anita Roddick visited
Wodaabe, apparently searched for skin cream ingredients there,
introduced the Millennium book (Roddick 1992), and com-
mented on Wodaabe “beauty pageants” in interviews (Bastin
2003; Newsweek 1994; Martinez and Villariba 1996; Loftsdóttir
2008:50–55). This is just one piece of how Wodaabe films and
images were caught in this wave and rode it to ubiquity.

These three shifts—concern with Sahelian droughts, chang-
ing politics of gender and sexuality, and greater interest in and
marketing of indigeneity and diversity—reoriented the recep-
tive imaginary as new sparks bolstered attention to Wodaabe
materials and accelerated their circulation. I mentioned that
this complex second conjuncture had several sparks, in different
realms of circulation. Controversies also garnered more attention
and images spread further through juxtapositions commenting
on Euro-American practices, as with Paris is Burning. Films by
Gardner and Herzog were two significant sparks, one early in
the 1980s and one late in the decade. The third came in between,
almost concurrent with Gardner’s Deep Hearts, but in print
Format: Carol Beckwith’s photographic book, Nomads of Niger
(1983). Since I’ve already introduced the two films, let me con-
sider the nature of their sparkiness before turning to Beckwith.

Robert Gardner’s ethnographic films are some of the most
widely viewed. They circulate most extensively in educational set-
tings, but Deep Hearts also shows in film festivals.31 Deep Hearts
sparked circulation of Wodaabe images in these contexts because
of his prominence and the pedagogical popularity of his films,
but also because he is a polarizing figure for what Loizos calls his
“rejection of realism” (1993; Ruby 2000:95–113). Gardner seeks to
portray universal themes rather than the lives and perspectives of
those filmed. Some see his films as poetic compositions (Loizos
1993), others as imposed interpretations unengaged with those
filmed. Camera work and montage can seem arbitrary and choppy;
36 | african arts SPRING 2018 VOL. 51, NEIN. 1

22 Images on the front and back covers of
Ornette Coleman’s 1988 Virgin Beauty album jux-
tapose a color photograph of Wodaabe men per-
forming the yaake dance with a black-and-white
photo of people in attire that recalls 17th century
French fashion and features feather headdresses.
Records/Sony Music Entertainment.
Photos: Front cover: Angela Fisher. Back cover: cour-
tesy the collection of Prince Jean Louis Faucegney

narration can be portentous, contextualization minimal. In Deep
Hearts, Gardner used Wodaabe performance to think about choice
and constraint. The film has quick pans and zooms, seemingly
arbitrary slow motion, shots that cut off people’s heads, seemingly
unmotivated shots of a woman bathing, and many images of feet.
But debates about Gardner’s work increase its visibility and bring
his Wodaabe images wider viewing.32

Later in the decade, Herzog’s Herdsmen of the Sun propelled
filmic Wodaabe images into wide public view. The other Wodaabe
television shows that year were part of this, but Herzog’s film was
released more widely. A filmmaker of his stature garnered major
reviews33 and commercial screenings. Herdsmen still shows reg-
ularly in film festivals and retrospectives.34 A continuing spark,
Herdsmen has arguably kept Wodaabe film images in circulation
more than any other film.

Carol Beckwith’s 1983 Buch, Nomads of Niger is the third spark
(Feige. 3), though the spark might better be seen as Beckwith her-
self as a phenomenon. Three years before, her first book, Maasai
(1980), appeared with gorgeous photos that amplified stereotyp-
ical images with lush color and sensuous detail but also went
beyond the usual, like showing the impish side of the Maasai
warrior during a jocular moment with an elder (Feige. 20). Nächste
Beckwith went to the Wodaabe, photographing for eighteen
months—pictures that brought Wodaabe still images into popu-
lar circulation worldwide. She was later involved in film projects.
Erste, in National Geographic’s Way of the Wodaabe (1988),
Beckwith was onscreen cultural guide, sporting a Wodaabe

coiffure (Feige. 21). Four years later the Millennium series listed
Beckwith as associate producer on both Wodaabe segments.

Beckwith’s partner in later books was Angela Fisher, whose
1984 Africa Adorned includes geerewol and yaake photos taken
while visiting Beckwith (1984:6, 147–65). Beckwith and Fisher
have since been a veritable joint industry of sensational African
Bilder, with a formidable PR and marketing arm. Of sixteen
books, one focuses on Wodaabe, and Wodaabe feature in four
other collections between 1999 Und 2004.35 As all this started in
the early 1980s, Beckwith’s Wodaabe images began to travel far
and wide and across domains—from a 1983 National Geographic
cover story when her book appeared, to a 1989 photo essay in the
Zone Books volume Fragments for a History of the Human Body,
to museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide.36

Apart from her energy, talent, and marketing drive, Beckwith
significantly boosted the visibility of Wodaabe images because
she made them available in photographic format. Single images
could be readily separated from texts and contexts to circulate
widely, be incorporated into other formats and uses, and recast37:
in press coverage, postcards, calendars, advertising, the mass mar-
ket Millennium and Body Shop books, and elsewhere. Ornette
Coleman’s 1988 Virgin Beauty album uses one of Fisher’s images
for both its English and Japanese versions.38 This cover is now in
the Design Archives of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.39

Coleman’s album carried the Wodaabe image into jazz arenas,
but it also shows how the images are used to comment on our
own histories and practice, as with Paris is Burning. The album’s
other photograph—apparently a costume party from the interwar
years of the early twentieth century—creates a juxtaposition—
perhaps ironic—that lifts the Wodaabe out of the exotic to show
parallels, or perhaps expands exotic realms to include us all (Feige.
22).40 It is a juxtaposition that raises provocative questions about
Schönheit, Geschlecht, Kleid, and performance.41

23 Wodaabe images can be found on a wide array of
inexpensive merchandise available online, including mouse
pads. Screenshot by Corinne Kratz on 4 Mai 2015.
Foto: courtesy Zazzle.com (http://www.zazzle.com/
wodaabe_men_in_niger_mouse_pad-144063738901974079)

24 While images of Wodaabe men have circulated most
widely, Wodaabe women feature in this widely circulat-
Hrsg 2010 advertisement. It was part of an international,
multi-ad campaign by HSBC bank. HSBC ad from The New
Yorker, 4 Oktober 2010.
Foto: HSBC

Even as the Beckwith-Fisher Wodaabe images circulated pro-
lifically, others joined the expanding array. In 2000, Benneton’s
magazine Colors included what they called “Wodaabe warriors”42
and Wodaabe dancers appeared on a 2003 World Bank brochure
(Loftsdóttir 2008:51). Merchandise spinoffs continued: mugs,
t-shirts, bags, keychains, CD covers (Feige. 23).43 And HSBC bank
ran a 2010 advertising campaign under the rubric “Unlocking
the World’s Potential” that foregrounded a Wodaabe image by
Beckwith, but this time of women (Feige. 24).

The political economies, cross-cultural aesthetics, and timing
in this second conjuncture set conditions for Wodaabe images
to circulate globally—spreading, recurring, and gaining new
uses and meanings. Early in the 1980s, Gardner’s film and the
Beckwith-Fisher books and photographs established the images
in the educational realm, caught the public eye with dramatic pho-
tos and exotic-seeming practices, and provided portable versions
of stunning pictures that could be reproduced across domains of
üben. The decade’s end brought new impetus to the prolifer-
ation. Herzog’s Herdsmen of the Sun brought artistic stature to
international television presentations between 1988 Und 1992 Und
has sustained a filmic Wodaabe presence ever since. Beckwith
and Fisher continued to produce new books with Wodaabe
Bilder. These three sparks—supported by other films, photos,
and media stories—kept a steady stream of Wodaabe images in
the public eye, sedimenting the wide-eyed painted faces of young
Wodaabe men into Euro-American popular culture (Feige. 25), Und
sustaining a worldwide circulation of Wodaabe images that took
on other lives in advertising, music album covers, and more.

But let’s not forget Wodaabe themselves, for they too were
cultivating a presence on the world stage (Boesen 2008a).
Developments in Niger during this conjuncture show local and
national interactions with the growing circulation of Wodaabe
Bilder, with shifts in Wodaabe dance performances, social orga-
nization, and international engagements as they and others in
Niger shaped and responded to growing interest in their perfor-
mances and images. Let me briefly outline these developments,
as well as the latest Wodaabe films.

“Wodaabe have learned to market themselves, d.h., their craft
Produkte, … cultural performances and … exotic nomadic way of
life” and are now “a folkloristic emblem of their country” (Boesen

VOL. 51, NEIN. 1 SPRING 2018 afrikanische Kunst | 37

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25 This two-page spread from Carol Beckwith’s
book Nomads of Niger shows the kind of
Wodaabe images that were becoming ubiquitous
in the 1980s.
Foto: courtesy Carol Beckwith

2008A:147; vgl. Lassibille 2006:116–17). Wodaabe began selling
crafts after the 1980s drought (Figs. 26–27); some remained in
town or incorporated urban activities in their nomadic cycle
(Loftsdóttir 2002:20, 2008:144–45; Boesen 2008b:595).44 Dance
performances were an income source as young Wodaabe per-
formed in more venues. Those near Niamey began performing in
Europe in the 1980s, although this was more common after 1990
(Bovin 1998:106–108, 2001:60).

Synergy between increasing tourism at home, Aufführungen
abroad, the circulating images, and Nigérien media attention
brought more performance opportunities for Wodaabe in the
1990s and 2000s (Lassibille 2006:116, 2009; Bovin 2001:61).
This led to shifts in performance schedules and form. Geerewol
is performed annually at rainy season gatherings, but tourists
want performances all year, so Wodaabe stage yaake for them
(Lassibille 2006:114). Other performance contexts include cer-
emonies Wodaabe have done for generations; cultural festivals,
agricultural shows, or diplomatic occasions in towns; and inter-
national festivals (Lassibille 2006:116).
38 | african arts SPRING 2018 VOL. 51, NEIN. 1

I already mentioned changes to adapt international perfor-
mances to European expectations, such as performing in lines
facing the audience and having presenters explain customs
(Lassibille 2006:120–22, 2009:328; Loftsdóttir 2008:195). In Paris
In 2003, the performance included on-stage dance preparation,
with the audience fascinated to watch young men apply makeup
(Boesen 2008a:159). As performances increased, young Wodaabe
men initiated a significant organizational change, forming town-
based pastoralist associations to coordinate performance tours
and take more control of their work conditions. Based on lineage
segments, like the dance competitions, associations also began
to work with NGOs and on land rights. Von 2004, there were six-
teen such associations (Boesen 2008a:156–57; Lassibille 2006:117,
2009:312); now there are over thirty.

In 1998, the Nigérien government integrated into the tour-
ist circuit the Cure Salée, the so-called Festival of the Nomads,
when Tuareg and Wodaabe gathered yearly.45 In 2004 Wodaabe
stopped participating and began their own annual Assemblée
Générale des Peuls Wodaabe du Niger. The Assembly was started
by Djingo, a new collective of the pastoral associations formed in
the previous decade (Lassibille 2009:312).46 The Assembly sought
to address a situation in which Wodaabe were unsupported and
unpaid, although their dances were the major tourist attrac-
tion, and where Tuareg controlled tour group access and fees
(Lassibille 2009).47

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26–27 Wodaabe often sell their crafts at per-
formances now. The totes for sale at left feature
hand embroidery by Wodaabe women in an
artisan cooperative in Fouduk, Niger. Wodaabe
crafts also reach a wider market through online
marketers such as the Denver-based Africa
Direct, which provides information on each piece
and has a staff “Curator of African Art.”
Photos: Links: RAIN staff in Fouduk; courtesy Rain for
the Sahel and Sahara. Rechts: screenshot by Corinne
Kratz, 15 September 2012, courtesy Africa Direct

28 Musical group Etran Finatawa’s first four CDs.
Screenshot by Corinne Kratz, 15 Mai 2015.
Foto: courtesy Riverboat Records/World Music
Netzwerk (Vereinigtes Königreich) Ltd. (http://www.worldmusic.net/)

29 The website for Etran Finatawa includes an
array of images that emphasize nomadic scenes
and elements of Wodaabe dress. Screenshot by
Corinne Kratz, 7 April 2011.
Foto: courtesy Etran Finatawa

Etran Finatawa is another product of intersecting interests in
world music, nomads, and tourism (Feige. 28). Formed in 2004,
it combines Wodaabe and Tuareg musicians as “a gesture of
reconciliation and recognition of differences between the two
sometimes-feuding groups” (National Public Radio 2008),
although that same year Wodaabe started their own Assembly
in Niger.48 Both on stage and on CDs, they use dress and facial
gestures from the dances (Feige. 29). All these phenomena have
been fueled, in part, by decades of circulating Wodaabe images—
some of their on-the-ground repercussions. They underline the
metacultural, and often political, understandings that develop
when daily practices and traditions become “heritage” or per-
Form, some of the implications of “being ourselves for you”
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006; Stanley 1998).

As these developments extended into the 1990s and 2000s,
defining a later phase of the second conjuncture, attention to
Wodaabe and their images continued. New researchers began
working with Wodaabe in the mid-1990s, focusing on urban

VOL. 51, NEIN. 1 SPRING 2018 afrikanische Kunst | 39

30 Ouba Hassane teaches his son about
Wodaabe tradition, creating a pedagogical frame
for presenting cultural interpretation in Sandrine
Loncke’s film. Screenshot frame from La Danse
des Wodaabe, dir. Sandrine Loncke, 2010. Berkeley
Media LLC.
Foto: courtesy Sandrine Loncke

31 Sandrine Loncke’s film includes “back
stage” scenes that extend viewers’ sense of how
Wodaabe dances and ceremonies unfold and
the relations that play out through them. In diesem
scene, elders scold young men who do not want
to dance. Screenshot frame from La Danse des
Wodaabe, dir. Sandrine Loncke, 2010. Berkeley
Media LLC.
Foto: courtesy Sandrine Loncke

migration, trading, Musik, and tourism and bringing new insights
to contemporary Wodaabe circumstances.49 New films appeared
nach 2000 and photographs continued circulating. In 2002,
Michael Palin’s travel series Sahara became the fifth film-book
pairing presenting Wodaabe and geerewol, though in a small role.
Another cluster of films appeared late in the decade. In 2007
National Geographic released Tribal Secrets: The Wodaabe;
three other films were made by researchers Christopher Roy
and Sandrine Loncke. Tribal Secrets contrasts markedly with the
others as “old school.” Voice-over and cutesy commentary seem
almost caricatured at times, with built in commercial breaks and
lines such as:

•

“It’s love Wodaabe style as National Geographic presents
Tribal Secrets: The Wodaabe.”
“Coming up: Kounche and Mena spend the day at the races
and decide to attend the geerewol without their wives.”
“When we return: It takes a lot of work to look this
beautiful.”

That same year, Christopher Roy produced two DVDs, well-
suited for teaching, in his Art and Life in Africa series. Filmed
mostly in Burkina Faso, Fulani: Art and Life of a Nomadic People
covers many topics, ending with eight minutes of geerewol in
Niger. The other, Birds of the Wilderness, focuses on geerewol with
some of the same footage (Klemm 2009:95).

The most recent Wodaabe film is
ethno musicologist Sandrine Loncke’s
2010 La Danse des Wodaabe, awarded the
Prix Nanook-Jean Rouch. Its treatment is
anders, with fresh images and commen-
tary. After ten years of research, Loncke
worked with Ouba Hassane and his wife
Kedi to present Wodaabe understandings
of geerewol; they are the voices and guides
throughout (Loncke n.d.:5, 9, 13; 2015).
The film uses a pedagogical framing:
Ouba teaches his son about Wodaabe tra-
ditions, with explanation, commentary,
myth references, and a far fuller sense of
the occasion beyond the dance (Feige. 30).

Entirely in subtitled Fulfulde,50 the film
describes geerewol as ritual war and a lin-
eage contest over marriage—not primarily
in terms of individual romance and sexual
encounter, although individuals describe
their feelings and memories.51 A broader
space/time framing includes scenes where
older men exhort youth reluctant to dance

40 | african arts SPRING 2018 VOL. 51, NEIN. 1

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32 With umbrella shade cutting across the Wodaabe
dancer’s face, the cover of Mette Bovin’s book differs
sharply from the bright, perfectly lit images that had
become canonical through widespread circulation of
Wodaabe images by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher.
Foto: courtesy The Nordic Africa Institute

33 While images of young Wodaabe men have circu-
lated most widely, photos of young Wodaabe women
have also been appearing in advertisements and else-
where in the recent years. This image first appeared in
Angela Fisher’s 1984 book Africa Adorned.
Foto: courtesy Angela Fisher

and other interlineage events (Feige. 31). Dance scenes are longer,
giving a better sense of songs and showing those leading call lines.
Camp scenes also differ. Cloth shades convey a sense of domestic
Raum, not just vast desert sand. The first animals on screen are not
majestic cows, but donkeys; the last are goats. Endlich, the credits
are unique among Wodaabe films: They give full names for lead
singers and those who comment on screen.

These are just a few contrasts. Gesamt, Loncke’s film offers an
effective, compelling reframing. Earlier films interview Wodaabe,
but keep their comments on geerewol narrowly focused on beauty,
the competition, and sexual and romantic storylines. La Danse
des Wodaabe allows Wodaabe to explain the event more fully, Zu
show its cultural and emotional significance. In this way, the film
provides a more complex, varied sense of Wodaabe perspectives
and experience. It remains to be seen whether it significantly
alters the web of Wodaabe images and interpretations already
sedimented into place.52

CODA
I’ve told something of a shaggy dog story, almost unavoidable
when tracing the paths and transformations of cultural resources
through global economies. Sixty-five years ago, Wodaabe images
were just beginning to circulate; thirty-five years ago they began
to proliferate. Von 2000, they were widespread and familiar. Once
such a “canon” of images is established, others begin to play off the
canon with implicit critiques. Loncke’s film might be seen in this
light. Likewise Bovin’s pictures contrast with Beckwith’s luminous
Bilder, with umbrella shade right across dancers’ faces (2001:105).
This seems intentional, when it is on the cover of a book (Feige. 32).
Images of geerewol dancers are most widely circulated and
seen, but images of young women also circulate now, mainly
photos by Beckwith and Fisher (Feige. 33). Are they even recog-
nized as counterparts to the male dancers? Differences among
the Wodaabe films are as interesting as their proliferation and
there is much more to think about: how images are used and
combined, how they construct narratives and treat soundtracks,
and more.53 But that will have to wait. For now, I’ve considered
how the Wodaabe case suggests a structure of visual proliferation
and offered a winding story to trace how this occurred.

It was a story centrally about circulation, and the complicated
Schleifen, jumps, eddies, and quirky transformations involved. Es
mapped how a convention—at times seeming a visual obses-
sion—becomes established in a global media space, then returns

VOL. 51, NEIN. 1 SPRING 2018 afrikanische Kunst | 41

to local settings before returning back again to a global market.
Many circulations were involved—from films and photographs
to markets for ethnicity to new forms of self-fashioning and
self-marketing among Wodaabe themselves. As local practices
and forms of visuality circulated globally in image form, neu
recursive loops were produced both in Wodaabe practice and in
how new images were crafted by non-Wodaabe—with a recursive
practice among Euro-American filmmakers, zum Beispiel, sowie
as among Wodaabe dancers. These complex circulations interact
in unpredictable ways in the global market but create both new
stereotypes and new conceptual resources going forward.

As images and performances circulated beyond the Sahel, view-
ers attributed to them meanings and understandings congruous
with a Euro-American receptive imaginary, resonating with
notions of the exotic and indigenous, changing ideas about gender
and sexuality, and the ever-romanticized figure of the nomad. In
the process, Wodaabe and their images were objectified, sexual-
isiert, and commodified—varied processes that often underpin and
fuel visual proliferations in global markets. Wodaabe have received
relatively little remuneration from the worldwide use of their

Bilder, but they have been able to turn their visual fame, mindestens
in part, to local purposes of political recognition and mobilization,
income generation, and community development.

The Wodaabe images are one of many visual proliferations that
occur at different times, like an erupting volcano, with varied
histories and trajectories sparked from particular conjunctures.
Other scholars have traced multifaceted objects, like kente cloth,
across time and space to tell complex stories of cultural identity,
political engagement, and aesthetic adaptation (Ross 1998), or ana-
lyzed how circulating images form “a visual grammar that over
Zeit, through successive reproduction and repetition, defined” the
Bahamas as “tropical” (Thompson 2006:34; vgl. Kratz and Gordon
2002, Kunzle 1997). These episodes are different but at the same
time part of a common history of visual encounter and representa-
tion of cultural difference. In each case, available technologies and
circumstances of communication and circulation at the time shape
the range, extent, and rate of proliferation as well. I hope the struc-
ture and story of the Wodaabe case will help understand other,
parallel processes and proliferations and the histories involved
when cultural resources circulate in global economies.

Notes

I started thinking about the proliferation of Wodaabe
images at the Institute for Advanced Study in the African
Humanities in 1991–1992 when I arranged a program
showing the four films I knew then. I continued such
screenings in my African Popular Culture courses. Das
paper was prepared and delivered as the keynote for
the 15th Triennial Symposium on African Art (2011)
in Los Angeles. Special thanks to Doran Ross, Programm
chair, Wer war, as always, supportive and irreverent. ICH
presented revised versions as the Distinguished Dean’s
Lecture at University of the Western Cape, a public
lecture for the School for Advanced Research, and at
the Harvard African Studies Workshop. Ivan Karp read
and commented as this paper took shape; his absence is
an ever-present void. Many others discussed the project
with me: Mary Jo Arnoldi, Johannes Fabian, Steve Feld,
Christraud Geary, Melissa Gilstrap, Patricia Hayes, Dalia
Judovitz, Chris Kreamer, Kristin Loftsdóttir, Sandrine
Loncke, Joe Masco, Mike McGovern, Susan Rasmussen,
Neal Sobania, Bilinda Straight, Jay Straker, Lisa Tedesco,
and Leslie Witz. Sandrine Loncke kindly sent copies of
her film and the Brandt film. This paper involved obscure
sources, stretched loan periods, and other challenges that
colleagues at Emory’s Woodruff Library met with aplomb
and efficiency: Liz McBride, Colin Bragg, Marie Hansen,
and Chase Lovelette. Final revisions were completed while
I was a Heilbrun Distinguished Emeritus Fellow.

1 Boesen (2008B:582) and Loftsdóttir (2008:11)
both give this estimate. Some Wodaabe live in Cam-
eroon and Nigeria. Some use the spelling WoDaaBe
to show the glottalized consonants in the Fulfulde
Sprache (Loftsdóttir 2008:9 n.1). See Loftsdóttir
(2007) on the history of ethnic names for Wodaabe
Und (2001) on representations of Wodaabe.

2 A Japanese example is on Ornette Cole-
man’s Virgin Beauty (http://www.ebay.ca/sch/ sis.
html?_nkw=ORNETTE%20COLEMAN%20
PRIME%20TIME%20VIRGIN%20BEAUTY%20
JAPAN%20BLU%20SPEC%20CD2%20D73&_
itemId=271533704088, zugegriffen 14 Oktober 2014).

http://www.etran finatawa.com/tour.html,
zugegriffen 6 Februar 2011; http://fidjomusic.com/
etran-finatawa.html, zugegriffen 27 April 2015.

4 Websites offering Wodaabe tours include http://
tinarawene.com/tour-cure-salee.html, and http://www.
gwenbooks.com/?p=50 (both accessed 27 November
2014).

42 | african arts SPRING 2018 VOL. 51, NEIN. 1

http://nomadfoundation.org/about, zugegriffen 17

September 2017.

6 Cf. Loffsdóttir (2008:48–56); Lassibille (2009:309);

Bovin (2001:9). They were “often characterized in
older sources as the ‘purest’ form of Fulani culture, fällig
to their close attachment to herding and nomadism”
(Loffsdóttir 2008:12). Early portrayals of Wodaabe and
Fulani also had racial dimensions (Loffsdóttir 2008:48–
50). Fascination with Wodaabe origins and possible
rock art connections, a common theme in the films and
books, may be a remnant of this earlier construal.

Sobania (2002) contrasts more romantic Maasai
portrayals with Zulu portrayals as warlike. Both were
part of German Volkerschauen circuits in the late
1800S, and among the earliest named African groups
in European images (Kratz and Gordon 2002:250).
Thanks to Neal Sobania for giving me the stereographs
in Figures 8 Und 9.

8 Neal Sobania, persönliche Kommunikation; Chris-

traud Geary, persönliche Kommunikation

9 Many kinds of cultural resources are also part
of such circulations. Feld and Shipley track musical
examples (Feld 1996, 2000; Shipley 2013). Gordon
(1997) traces how photos and international coverage of
a 1920s expedition shaped and circulated represen-
tations of Bushmen. Carse (2014) reviews current
work on circulation. Hevia’s (2009) concept of the
“photography complex” draws on Latour to examine
photography in imperial practice, looking at photog-
raphy as a technology, Verfahren, set of relations, Und
archive and seeing some photographs functioning as
“immutable mobiles” as they circulate in publications
and other outlets.

10 The Tutsi might also be included here, obwohl
their portrayal in the 1950s films King Solomon’s Mines
(1950) and Watusi (1959) emphasized royal status and
intrigues.

11 The figure was also promoted filmically in the
1925 documentary Grass about Bakhtiari migrations
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_%281925_
film%29, zugegriffen 28 Februar 2011). Literary scholars
have constructed a theory based on this idealized
figure; “nomadology” is said to resist a single settled
perspective to emphasize resistant deterritorialization
(Noyes 2004; Okoye 2004). Others find it full of con-
tradiction, with a dubious ethical stance (Müller 1998:
Kapitel 6; Conteh-Morgan 2000).

12 Fulani appeared on colonial postcards, Aber

Wodaabe dancers were rarely shown. Bovin notes that
Maasai and Tuareg were better known in Europe and
had performed in festivals where Wodaabe were later
booked (2001:9, 60). Gilvin (2014:44–47) examines
how fashion designer Alphadi claims Wodaabe
embroidery as a sign of the Nigerien nation.

13 Ähnlich, Krista Thompson shows how a
visual canon of images defined stock figures and
landscapes that helped “tropicalize” the Caribbean
(Thompson 2006).

14 In most cases the film came first; the accom-
panying book sometimes echoes the film structure.
After Brandt, Bovin worked on two films (1988,
1992) and later did a book (2001); two television
series with Wodaabe segments were accompanied
by books (Millennium [1992] and Michael Palin’s
Sahara [2002]). Moving in the opposite direction,
Beckwith’s book (1983) led to involvement in film
Projekte (1988 and the Millennium series). Rouch
(2003:57) and Buache (1998:13) say Brandt spent a
year filming, but Brandt says in his film it was six
months (vgl. DAV 2010). Corthésy (2013) describes
how Brandt’s book came about.

15 It does not name individuals but portraits and
quotes personalize the setting and issues. The conven-
tions of using individual characters and direct dialogue
became prominent in ethnographic film in the 1970s,
developed earlier by Rouch, MacDougal and others,
and echoed in Habbanaae. This approach is common
to other Wodaabe films except for Gardner’s Deep
Hearts, with its distant, totalizing sense of Wodaabe.
16 Research on history and socioeconomic orga-
nization continued in the 1980s with the Niger Range
and Livestock Project (Loftsdóttir 2008:235), while
Bovin (1974–75, 1998, 2001) and Beckwith and van
Offelen (1983) continued the visual emphasis, Vordergrund-
grounding Wodaabe beauty and dances in books and
films. Fine research in the past decade on Wodaabe
urban migration, trading, and tourism performance
bridges these foci (Boesen 2008a, 2008B; Lassibille
2006, 2009; Loftsdóttir 2002, 2008).

17 National Geographic’s Way of the Wodaabe (1988)

features Beckwith and she is associate producer on two
Millennium episodes (1992) with Wodaabe segments.
18 Brandt’s film still shows occasionally in Swiss
and French ethnographic film programs. Between his
film and Gardner’s, I identified two other Wodaabe
films: Les Hommes du Dernier Soleil (1972) by Swiss

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filmmaker Paul Lambert and the short La Femme Volée
(1980) by French filmmakers Nena Baratier and Gen-
eviève Louveau. I have not been able to view them but
synopses suggest that both foreground the geerewol.
Lambert covers Tuareg and Wodaabe at the Cure Salée
rainy season gathering. La Femme Volée appeared just
before Deep Hearts. It centers on beauty and dance, Aber
introduces the sexual emphasis that becomes prom-
inent in the 1980s. The two films are rarely cited by
later researchers, though La Femme Volée sometimes
shows at French documentary festivals (Bibliothèque
Nationale de France 2008:6).

19 In den 1990ern, Loftsdóttir heard about people in
the colonial era coming to the bush to ask for perfor-
mances (Loftsdóttir 2008:193).

20 Niger became independent in 1960, so this may
refer to celebrations when the First Republic of Niger
was established in 1959, semi-independent under
Frankreich.

21 Bovin sees expanded performances as fighting

marginalization. Performances have also become
“more colourful and extravagant since the 1970s”
(1998:108).

22 Gay rights groups burgeoned in the United

States after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York
City. A decade later, im 1980 US presidential elec-
tion, the Democratic National Convention supported
gay rights and the Village Voice newspaper became the
first business to offer domestic partnership benefits in
1982 (Head n.d.). ActUp (AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power) formed in 1987 and began highly visible
demonstrations as the second group of Wodaabe films
in this conjuncture began to appear.

23 At least half the screen time is spent on makeup

and dance shots.

24 The film commentary underlines this too:
“The winner will be known as the Bull, though his
election is based not on sexual mastery, but only on
appearance“ (Gardner 1981). Only one brief line
offers any support for later misreadings of geerewol as
transvestism: “Only in the geerewol dances do the men
wear skirts made from women’s cloth“ (1981). Das
observation has no support from other sources.

25 Slightly less than half the screen time is spent on

makeup and dance shots.

26 See the opening sequence at http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=MlnO1QDqpaQ, zugegriffen 22 September
2017.

27 In another case of misconstrued gender identity,

a German newspaper in 2001 identified a photo
as “female Wodaabe seduction dancers” since the
otherness created by their makeup and facial gestures
is often considered “effeminate” or “androgynous” by
Europeans and Americans (Boesen 2008a:148 n.20).
My “Okiek Portraits” exhibition met similar gender
misreadings of photographs from Kenya because of
different gender conventions related to hair and names
(Kratz 2002:205–206).

28 Metta Bovin released a third Wodaabe film in
Danish in 1992. På Tchad-söens bund—En film om et
venskab (On the bottom of Lake Chad—A film about
friendship) has had limited distribution. I have not
been able to view it.

29 This may refer to a practice described by
Beckwith and Fisher: Male cousins may court the
same woman and sleep with the other’s wife, with her
consent (1999:178; 2004:77–79).

30 Indicators include the first international con-
ference of indigenous peoples in 1974 and the first
meeting of the United Nations Working Group of
Indigenous Populations of the Subcommission on Pre-
vention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities
of the Commission on Human Rights in 1982.

31 Gardner’s films are distributed by Documentary
Educational Resources and the Royal Anthropological
Institut, education-oriented organizations. Festival

showings for Deep Hearts include the 1980 Melbourne
International Film Festival, A 2008 Gardner retrospec-
tive at DOCDSF, Mexico City, und ein 2013 Gardner
focus at an American Film Institute festival in April
2013. Loizos says Gardner’s films are among the most
widely viewed by anthropology students (1993:139);
Ruby declares them among best-known ethnographic
films (2000:95; vgl. Barbash and Taylor 2007).

32 See also Nichols (1991:38–39). The Millennium

series and book (Maybury-Lewis 1992) were also
critiqued in the academy. Some lauded Maybury-Lewis
for taking anthropology to the public (Benthall 1992);
Millennium was reviewed widely and expected to
reach 40 million viewers (Ritter 1993:22). Viewership
extended with classroom adoption. Others were critical
of its “collapsing wildly different societies in one mushy
‘tribal’ image,” lack of “attention … to the range of
experiences and situations of indigenous peoples today”
and contribution “to the formation of tribal ‘chic’” (di
Leonardo 2000:35; Ritter 1993:23, original emphasis).
Beidelman calls it “intellectually muddled, glib, mis-
leading, sententious work” (1992:508). But Millennium
widened circulation of Wodaabe images and bridged
öffentlich, scholarly, and educational domains.

33 Including The New York Times, Los Angeles

Times, New York Newsday, Village Voice, and TV Guide
in the US.

34 Zum Beispiel, the Herzog retrospective in London
at the NFT toured nationally in 2001, gleichzeitig
that the Edinburgh International Film Festival offered
a retrospective of his documentaries. New York’s Film
Forum did a major Herzog retrospective in 2007.

35 This includes three versions of African Ceremo-
nies: a two volume edition (1999), 100 selected images
in a exhibition tour published as Passages (2000), und ein
concise version (2002) (http://africanceremonies.com/
books/, zugegriffen 14 Februar 2011). The fourth is Faces
of Africa, issued in two trim sizes (2004, 2009). Nomads
of Niger was reprinted in 1993, but the publisher could
not provide lifetime sales numbers because their royalty
tracking system changed twice over the years.

36 I was unable to secure permission to reproduce
the National Geographic cover image, but it can be seen
at http://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-Oc-
tober-Nigers-Wodaabe/dp/B0030IZTWS (zugegriffen
27 Oktober 2015). Exhibitions were at the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Carnegie Museum of Natural
Geschichte, Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Borges
Cultural Center of Buenos Aires, National Museums
of Kenya, and other venues in Australia, Europa, Die
Vereinigte Staaten, and Japan (http://www.africanceremo-
nies.com/about/, zugegriffen 16 Marsch 2011).

37 On processes of decontextualization and

recontextualization, see Bauman and Briggs (1990)
and Silverstein and Urban (1996). Photographic rights
are a continuing issue. European tour organizers often
retain rights and control of photos of touring Wodaabe
dancers (Loftsdóttir 2008:198). Beckwith and Fisher
created a foundation that assists communities where
they worked. Beckwith may donate some proceeds to
Wodaabe, but agreements are not publicly available
(http://www.africanceremonies. com/foundation/,
zugegriffen 16 Marsch 2011). The School for Advanced
Research contacted Beckwith and Fisher’s agent when
I presented this paper as a public lecture. The fee for a
nonprofit educational organization to use one image
on the lecture flyer was $1500.

38 It is a cropped version of the photo on pp.

154–55 of Africa Adorned.

39 See http://designarchives.aiga.org/#/entries/
Ornette%20Coleman%20%E2%80%9CVirgin%20
Beauty%E2%80%9D/_/detail/relevance/asc/0/7/10615/
ornette-coleman–prime-timevirgin-beauty/1, zugegriffen
29 September 2017.

40 Scholars of French cultural history (Judo-
vitz, persönliche Kommunikation; Müller, personal

communication) thought these costumes were inspired
by seventeenth century French theatricals or court
Mode, and that the image itself recalled Carnival, or a
masquerade theme ball in the 1930s or 1940s.

41 Searching for the collection credited for the
photograph on the CD cover, the collection of Prince
Jean Louis Faucegney, returned no further informa-
tion. Jedoch, results with a different variation of
the name, Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, seem to
confirm my colleagues’ provenance for the scene. A
blog identifies him as attending and hosting some of
the most memorable costume balls in France between
the two world wars (https://nursemyra.wordpress.com/
tag/costume-ball/, zugegriffen 2 Juni 2015) and he is also
the author of a 1987 book on famous costume balls
entitled Legendary Parties, 1922–1972.

42 http://www.benetton.com/coloexb/web/con-

tent_press.html, zugegriffen 16 Dezember 2010.

43 For instance Manu Chao’s 1998 album Clandes-

tino uses Wodaabe images (Lassabile 2009:114).

44 Wodaabe women also became traders in the
dry season. They use proceeds for consumer goods
and items for their household displays. Boesen notes
aesthetic parallels between the gleaming brightness
preferred in displays and similar qualities sought in
personal appearance and the line of yaake dancers
(2008B:587, 595).

45 The government-created festival for Western
visitors is sponsored by international corporations like
Coca-Cola. One Wodaabe noted, “It is more and more
of a circus. The government sets the date artificially,
decides who gets to perform, and creates a structure
none of us understand” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Cure_Salee, zugegriffen 18 Marsch 2011).

46 See http://www.djingo. net/en/index.htm

(zugegriffen 11 Oktober 2014).

47 The Assembly is not just for tourists but also
an occasion when Wodaabe lineages hold meetings
and where connections are made with NGOS and aid
Organisationen (http://www.djingo.net/en/index.htm,
zugegriffen 11 Oktober 2014). The Sahara of Cultures and
Peoples project may further transform and expand
both Wodaabe performances and circulation of their
Bilder (Lassibille 2009; UNESCO n.d.a, n.d.b).

48 See http://fidjomusic.com/etran-finatawa.html,

zugegriffen 27 April 2015. Cf. the Tuareg performance
ensemble Tartit, who tour internationally and “fashion
themselves as both extremely exotic and essential
figures of a nomadic lifestyle that flourished in a spell-
binding desert realm a world away” (Straker 2008:82).
49 The new researchers include Lassibille, Loncke,

Loftsdóttir, and Boesen.

50 In other Wodaabe films I have seen, only the
soundtrack of the Disappearing World series’ Wodaabe
episode also consists entirely of ambient sound and
subtitled interviews.

51 Ähnlich, Loftsdóttir sees geerewol as a contest
for prestige and power among men as much as about
winning women (2008:188).

52 It now has a US distributor: http://www.

berkeleymedia.com/catalog/berkeleymedia /films/
environmental_issues/dance_with_the_wodaabes,
zugegriffen 11 Oktober 2014.

53 Geerewol sequences themselves vary consider-
ably: from where they first appear, to how they are cut
in throughout or concentrated in sections, to how they
are filmed.

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