Dynamic processes and the anthropology of emotions in the life course and aging: Late-life love sentiments and household dynamics in tuareg psycho-biographies

Abstract

In a preliminary way, this vignette suggests a precarious balancing of personal love sentiments and larger economic considerations of benefit to the household over longterm-a reverberating theme in Tuareg love arrangements over the life course. More generally, the topic of love illustrates the limits of participant-observation in ethnography. Love, an affective personal experience whose semiotic signs are expressed in sociability, but are inwardly perceived very subjectively, but also subject to much outsider "meta-commentary" beyond the lovers themselves, is ambiguous. Dynamic study of this emotion poses analytical challenges, but also offers insights into inter-individual and intra-individual variation and change over time, the theme of the present volume. In keeping with this theme and its aim-to bring into one framework various directions of construction of methodology of dynamic processes in the social sciences-the present essay analyzes Tuareg cultural elaborations of late-life love sentiments and attachments in relation to age constructs, thereby situating persons and social groups in their individual cases as they work to produce performance differences (Valsiner, Molenaar, Lyra, & Chaudhary, this volume). © 2009 Springer-Verlag New York.