The Case of the Recurring Wodaabe: Visual Obsessions in Globalizing Markets

The Wodaabe people of the Sahel have been the subject of over seventeen documentary films—indeed, in both 1988 and 2007, three were released (Table 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 (Fig. 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 people, 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 (Fig. 6). Since 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 circulation, proliferation, and reframing of cultural images and about cultural obsession. But the obsessions are ours, even though presented 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 performed internationally in France, Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Morocco, Burkina Faso, and other African and European countries, as a warm-up group for Baaba Mal in Paris (Boesen 2008a:159) and at Eurodisney (Lassibille 2006:116). In Niger, they perform for visiting dignitaries, heads of state, and tourists, at agricultural shows, and an annual post-Ramadan celebration in the Niamey sports stadium (Loftsdóttir 2008:178). Tourists, journalists, 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” (Fig. 7), touring in Europe, North and South America, 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 performances offer a way to understand how cultural resources—in this case visual representations, people, and performances—circulate in global economies. The Wodaabe case highlights complications and convolutions in those disparate circulations and social processes 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, products, 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, and interactions 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 expansion of Wodaabe performance venues to towns, agricultural shows, 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 transnational networks linking performances and development projects; in monetization through photography fees and jewelry sales; and of course, in commodification of images (Lassibille 2006, 2009; Loftsdóttir 2008).5Scholars have analyzed such phenomena by focusing on particular globalizing processes and domains, using models of layered motion to conceptualize systems and networks where parts move, intersect, and transform in different ways. This includes work on marketing identity and tourism and analyses of the politics and production of heritage that show how metacultural 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, where ideologies and ontologies of design, property, and ethnicity might clash (Feld 1996, 2000; Brown 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 dynamics, finding both exploitative cultural imperialism and empowering situations that offer economic opportunities and promote cultural diversity and understanding. Steve Feld 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 transformations across sites, situating actors and dynamics in varied situations (Kratz and Karp 2006). The debate format might suggest 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, popular photo books, and performances are framed by a different narrative. They present a different Wodaabe, described as traditional, unchanging, authentic, “people of the taboo”—not people embedded in global economies who perform internationally. Their culture is portrayed as ancient, connected to rock paintings in the region, and their nomadic life and lack of permanent housing underline exotic contrasts.6 Some late 1980s films comment 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, isolation, primitivism and disappearance 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, then, but not unique. Just looking in the film collection at Emory University, where I work, I found a dozen films about Maasai and eighteen about Both have that include popular films, photo books, and (Kratz and (Figs. 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