This is an essay on the means by which man promotes the establishment of social relationships and the maintenance of social interaction through aloofness, removal, and reserve. It attempts, on one level, to present a functional interpretation of a curious Tuareg custom, but, in a more general sense, the paper undertakes an exposition of certain dialectical processes in social life.

The question I have asked of a body of field data is very simply: why do Tuareg males cover their faces so completely that only areas around the eyes and nose may be seen? We will come back to this matter in greater detail, but, for introductory purposes, my answer is that by doing so, they are symbolically introducing a form of distance between their selves and their social others. The veil, though providing neither isolation nor anonymity, bestows facelessness and the idiom of privacy upon its wearer and allows him to stand somewhat aloof from the perils of social interaction while remaining a part of it.

Social distance

It is not my purpose to become involved in a general exegesis on the subject of social distance, privacy and reserve, and I wish in these prefatory comments only to inform the reader of the theoretical framework within which I am operating.