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

Popular primitivism and exoticism are historical phenomena with diverse visual histories. They include visual proliferations occurring at different times, under different conditions, with 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, I identify structural features of visual proliferations where cultural resources circulate in global economies.⁹ The process seems to have four components, though the fascination with Wodaabe images is overdetermined by coinciding cultural, political, economic, and visual factors.

First, there may be enabling factors, local conditions that draw attention to certain images or practices. Second, a set of associations, affinities, resonances, and logics pave the way for potential extralocal reception and popularity, creating what I call a “receptive imaginary.” A particular cultural 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 conjunctures—cultural, historical, and political economic conditions that together create circumstances congenial to those resonances and logics being activated on a wide scale. Finally, there are sparks—precipitating events, objects, or encounters that catapult the images into a wider range of settings and uses, igniting wider circulation. Of course, these four aspects overlap, interact, and blur.

Let me now tell the story of how this Wodaabe-rama developed, 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 themselves (Bovin 2001:46–48, 50, 52; Boesen 2008a:151–52) (Fig. 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 arresting spectacle of Wodaabe dances (Bocquené 2002:153–54).

The associations, affinities, resonances, and logics that created a “receptive imaginary” for Wodaabe images combine three interwoven aspects. First, 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 genealogies goes the second: the more specific, longstanding romance with the figure of the pastoralist as an independent, sometimes mysterious individualist. Certain ethnic groups became regional exemplars—Maasai, Zulu, Himba (Kratz and Gordon 2002).¹⁰ But these were semi-nomadic peoples, agro-pastoralists, and the 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 colonial 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 frequent 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 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 widespread 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, voguing, cross-dressing, and flirtatious adornment and seduction. Though based on glaring cross-cultural misreadings, these are the memorable images eventually recycled in the media, magazine advertising, commercials for McDonalds, and elsewhere. I return to this later, but now to the first conjuncture.

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 conjunctures and sparks to consider. The first starts in the 1950s, with a confluence of new attention to Wodaabe in research, documentation, and prominent performances.

Professional anthropological research with Wodaabe started in the early 1950s (Table 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 same time, Jean Gabus, director of the Swiss Musée d'Ethnographie de Neuchâtel, sent filmmaker Henry Brandt to Niger for six months (Fig. 13). Brandt produced Nomades du Soleil, the first film about Wodaabe, and then a book by the same name, the first 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, marriage, and politics (Stenning, Dupire, Hopen) and has circulated mainly in scholarly circles. Some facets are taken up in development 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 practices (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. Notably, though, 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 ethnographic portrait of social relations, marriage, and the importance of domestic herds. Brandt's book has poetic descriptions of Wodaabe life across seasons. As in the Habbanaae film-tape, 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 (Fig. 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 subsequent 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 gathering follows, with descriptions of dress and adornment similar to recent ones, but young women and men alike are described as beautifying themselves (Fig. 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, after evocative portrayals that stress the songs’ hypnotic effect. Finally, Brandt's book does not sexualize the event like more recent 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, only 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, and lack of emphasis on sexual encounters is distinctive.

Jean Rouch calls Nomades du Soleil a classic and counts Brandt among the handful of pioneers at the time, as 16 mm format and synchronous sound recording forged a technological revolution in portability that made possible the combined role of ethnographer-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; cf. 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; de Heusch 2007:367, 370). Stenning's monograph footnotes it with admiration (1959:157), 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.

For instance, Robert Gardner saw Brandt's film in the late 1950s (Gardner 2006:184). In 1971, seven years before filming Deep Hearts (1981), he said,

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 anthropologist 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, then, 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 influence 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, however, in 1959, at independence 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.

The 1980s began the second conjuncture—a second, greater confluence of attention to Wodaabe, including eight new films between 1980 and 1992, influential coffee table books, and two new researchers who worked with visual projects. Things get 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. First, devastating 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 incorporated “seasonal urban activities” into their pastoral rounds.

Second, 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 gender and sexuality in geerewol interpretations (cf. 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.

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 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).²⁴La 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 television. Note that these films put Wodaabe on television in three countries, available for wider distribution. Geerewol figures in the first two, but dominates neither, and neither comments on sexual opportunities at the dance.

Herzog's film, however, 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 beauty, 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 further. 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, since 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 gestures: 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 is Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato of the Vatican (Cronin 2002:214; Prager 2007:184). Later scenes have similar musical juxtapositions 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 promiscuity and cross-dressing. The same review observes breezily, “camels nothwithstanding, [it] 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) (Fig. 16). In fact, 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) of “Desert Drag Queens” (Jolique 2000).

Gender can be visually ambiguous and unstable. When we don't recognize contextual signs that disambiguate gender identity, 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.) (Fig. 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 central; 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 (Fig. 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

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). These trends carried to other marketing spheres and stoked an appetite for images and experiences related to indigenous peoples. 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 (Fig. 19), on billboards, and 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 commented 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, changing politics of gender and sexuality, and greater interest in and marketing of indigeneity and diversity—reoriented the receptive 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 consider 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 settings, but Deep Hearts also shows in film festivals.³¹Deep 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; 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 regularly 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 book, Nomads of Niger is the third spark (Fig. 3), though the spark might better be seen as Beckwith herself as a phenomenon. Three years before, her first book, Maasai (1980), appeared with gorgeous photos that amplified stereotypical 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 (Fig. 20). Next Beckwith went to the Wodaabe, photographing for eighteen months—pictures that brought Wodaabe still images into popular circulation worldwide. She was later involved in film projects. First, in National Geographic's Way of the Wodaabe (1988), Beckwith was onscreen cultural guide, sporting a Wodaabe coiffure (Fig. 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 imagery, with a formidable PR and marketing arm. Of sixteen books, one focuses on Wodaabe, and Wodaabe feature in four other collections between 1999 and 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 market 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 (Fig. 22).⁴⁰ It is a juxtaposition that raises provocative questions about beauty, gender, dress, and performance.⁴¹

Even as the Beckwith-Fisher Wodaabe images circulated prolifically, 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 (Fig. 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 (Fig. 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 photos and exotic-seeming practices, and provided portable versions of stunning pictures that could be reproduced across domains of practice. The decade's end brought new impetus to the proliferation. Herzog's Herdsmen of the Sun brought artistic stature to international television presentations between 1988 and 1992 and has sustained a filmic Wodaabe presence ever since. Beckwith and Fisher continued to produce new books with Wodaabe images. 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 (Fig. 25), and 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 images, with shifts in Wodaabe dance performances, social organization, and international engagements as they and others in Niger shaped and responded to growing interest in their performances and images. Let me briefly outline these developments, as well as the latest Wodaabe films.

“Wodaabe have learned to market themselves, i.e., their craft products, … cultural performances and … exotic nomadic way of life” and are now “a folkloristic emblem of their country” (Boesen 2008a:147; cf. 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 performed 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, performances 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 ceremonies Wodaabe have done for generations; cultural festivals, agricultural shows, or diplomatic occasions in towns; and international festivals (Lassibille 2006:116).

I already mentioned changes to adapt international performances 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. By 2004, there were sixteen such associations (Boesen 2008a:156–57; Lassibille 2006:117, 2009:312); now there are over thirty.

In 1998, the Nigérien government integrated into the tourist 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 attraction, and where Tuareg controlled tour group access and fees (Lassibille 2009).⁴⁷

Etran Finatawa is another product of intersecting interests in world music, nomads, and tourism (Fig. 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 (Fig. 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 performance, 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 migration, trading, music, and tourism and bringing new insights to contemporary Wodaabe circumstances.⁴⁹ New films appeared after 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 ethnomusicologist Sandrine Loncke's 2010 La Danse des Wodaabe, awarded the Prix Nanook-Jean Rouch. Its treatment is different, with fresh images and commentary. 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 traditions, with explanation, commentary, myth references, and a far fuller sense of the occasion beyond the dance (Fig. 30).

Entirely in subtitled Fulfulde,⁵⁰ the film describes geerewol as ritual war and a lineage 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 and other interlineage events (Fig. 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 space, not just vast desert sand. The first animals on screen are not majestic cows, but donkeys; the last are goats. Finally, 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. Overall, 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, to 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

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. By 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 images, with umbrella shade right across dancers’ faces (2001:105). This seems intentional, when it is on the cover of a book (Fig. 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 (Fig. 33). Are they even recognized 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 loops, jumps, eddies, and quirky transformations involved. It mapped how a convention—at times seeming a visual obsession—becomes established in a global media space, then returns 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, new 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, for instance, as well 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, viewers 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, sexualized, 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 images, but they have been able to turn their visual fame, at least 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 analyzed how circulating images form “a visual grammar that over time, through successive reproduction and repetition, defined” the Bahamas as “tropical” (Thompson 2006:34; cf. Kratz and Gordon 2002, Kunzle 1997). These episodes are different but at the same time part of a common history of visual encounter and representation 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 structure 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.