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lack of prayer: ritual restrictions, social experience, and the anthropology of menstruation among the Tuareg
Author(s) -
RASMUSSEN SUSAN J.
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1991.18.4.02a00070
Subject(s) - gender studies , sociology , prayer , menstruation , metaphor , identity (music) , relation (database) , uzbek , ambiguity , race (biology) , anthropology , religious studies , aesthetics , philosophy , theology , medicine , linguistics , database , computer science
Menstrual taboos, I argue, can be understood only in relation to other ritual restrictions, ones observed by men as well as women, and have significant implications for our understanding of female ritual roles. Gender imagery in Tuareg menstrual ritual and cosmology is used as a metaphor for relations between participants in wider socioeconomic contexts, and it forms a symbolic medium of conflict and ambiguity for Tuareg men and women. In this article, ritual restrictions are seen as an idiom through which struggles and paradoxes are presented and individual responses to predicaments are encoded. They constitute efforts to control descent and to protect the statuses of both men and women; they represent a reflection on the subject of the differentiation of noble and nomadic values from other, competing values in Tuareg society. The bases of this differentiation do not fall into rigid polarities between male and female, “official” and “unofficial” religion. Ritual restrictions on women serve not to protect Islam or Tuareg men but to preserve the identity and lifestyle of the traditional Tuareg nobility. [ gender, religion and systems of thought, Africa ]