Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007 - (Page 4)

Lafayette Park The Smithsonian’s nomad show When GM made tanks not SUVs Lucy skips Washington • No heroes in the Middle East Leo DiCaprio’s inconvenient truth ART WITHOUT BORDERS Before the recent opening of “ e Art of Being Tuareg; Sahara Nomads in a Modern World” at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art, the exhibit’s curator, Tom Seligman, gave a small group of visitors a morning tour. Seligman is a tall man, looming larger in a rumpled black suit and a full gray beard that flares into scimitars beneath each ear. He is, in fact, not only a great fan of the Tuareg, but something of an advertisement for their art. He wears two bracelets on his right hand. One was made by the Tuareg artist and his longtime collaborator, Salah Saidi, and it was given to Seligman last August at the opening of the Tuareg exhibit at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, where Seligman is director. He received the other bracelet in 1968 from a Liberian when he served there as a Peace Corps volunteer. e Liberian bracelet is a strand of large capsule-shaped glass trade beads from Mirage Island, Venice. It has no hasp and so he has never taken it off. One of several coin silver rings he wears is engraved with the first passage from the Koran, another is a simple ring cast in a stalk of bamboo and joined like hand-built pottery. e exhibition of more than 200 Tuareg items, which closes January 27, includes stunning jewelry in coin silver, the bright reds and blues of handtooled leather saddles, antique swords fashioned from Ottoman blades and brilliant sculptures of saddle bags and camel saddles made a few years ago or a hundred years ago. is largestever Tuareg exhibit in North America introduces art mingled with life for one to five million nomadic Tuaregs. No one has done a very good job of counting the Tuaregs, Seligman said, but their present and past span the borders of six West African countries. 4 Winter 2007 ey are modern-day pastoralists without borders and in his tour you quickly get the feeling Seligman knows most of them. “ ey’ve got SUVs there and they’ve got cell phones. I could call right now and talk to any number of people who are represented right out there in the gallery.” ey are a liminal culture, Seligman said. Not a tribe but a vast collection of extended families that span a portion of the Sahara and exist between other cultures with a certain ambiguity. ey pull up their hand-carved tent stakes and move with their cattle, their goats and their camels. Wood is precious in this climate, and the tent stakes become standards for the fabrics that shade the women when they mount the camels and ride magestically off on handcarved palenquins. e men are known for their leatherwork and their silver. e leather comes from their goats, but the silver comes from trade with other peoples. e Cross of Agadez and other renowned motifs of their silverwork are imitated the world over. eir smiths are so regarded that Hermés of Paris contracts with a guild of 20 Tuareg in Niamey to hammer out belt buckles that sparkle on the belts the French fashion house sells for $600. A Tuareg’s jewelry may have great personal or aesthetic value but ultimately it serves as a mutual fund, money in the bank. e size and weight of a piece of his jewelry trumps its art when a Tuareg needs to buy something: An SUV, perhaps, to help with the camel drives. Seligman described a network of extended families that pick and choose their traditions to keep and the changes to make. He gestured to lighted displays for support: two beautifully smithed sugar hammers for a tea ceremony and a gleaming valve from a Land Rover for the same purpose. Near the end of the tour, Seligman pointed out video recordings of musicians who came to the United States, bought graphite guitars, generators and sound systems and took them back to their desert to play through the night at traditional weddings and three-day camel dances. Above us, the museum sound system wailed a song by Abdulah and the Tinariwen. Abdulah sounds like Tom Waite doing hip-hop. I asked and Seligman explained that many of the freedom songs of today are from the rebellions of the 1990s. Abdulah and others often sing these songs about “freedom,” using a word that the several national governments nominally claiming the Tuareg lands take to mean that Abdulah is singing of the unemployed. We stood at a display of swords whose blades came from the Ottoman Empire. “ e new weapons are AK-47s and surface-to-air missiles shouldered by bands of Tuareg guerillas trying to declare their independence,” Seligman confided. David Arnold TWO WARS As President Bush convened a late September meeting of the world’s major economies to discuss energy security and climate change, several hundred protestors led by Mike Tidwell (Zaire 85-87) of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network deplored the wrongway approach of Bush administration policies. And I found myself reflecting on e War. In this case, not the war in Iraq that grinds at our national conscience each passing day, month and year. I’m thinking about the critically-acclaimed Ken Burns documentary on World War II which was airing the same week as the meeting of economic powers. Similar to World War II, the disruption of our climate presents a UCLA Fowler Museum

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007

Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007
Contents
President's Note
Lafayette Park
Note to Readers
Commentary
Letter from India
Commentary
Letter from Botswana
Letter from Ha Teboho
Letter from Jumbi Valley
Letter from Mununga
Letter from Medellin
Giving Back
Community News

Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007

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