Ethnology in The Books Store

This sumptuous new book reveals more than 300 fabric "paintings" made and worn by the women of the Kuna, a tribe of indians that live on the coral islands off Panama's Atlantic coast. Lively, varied, original and full of humor, Mola art has an astonishing relationship with tradition but in many ways looks contemporary and is prized by museums and private collectors throughout the world. The lavish images reveal the setting, lifestyle, gestures and beauty of the Kuna women practising their art. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has praised Michel Perrin's brilliant demonstration of the links between Mola textile art and Kuna ritual and body decoration. Perrin depicts the significant events that took place during his field research and shares with us his discussions with the Kuna women and their opinions about techniques and aesthetics. The book also includes excerpts from myths and traditional accounts about the rituals, animals, plants, and objects that have stimulated the imagination and inspired the Kuna women to create these magnificent design

Tuhami is an illiterate Moroccan tilemaker who believes himself married to a camel-footed she-demon. A master of magic and a superb story-teller, Tuhami lives in a dank, windowless hovel near the kiln where he works. Nightly he suffers visitations from the demons and saints who haunt his life, and he seeks, with crippling ambivalence, liberation from 'A'isha Qandisha, the she-demon.

In a sensitive and bold experiment in interpretive ethnography, Crapanzano presents Tuhami's bizarre account of himself and his world. In so doing, Crapanzano draws on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and symbolism to reflect upon the nature of reality and truth and to probe the limits of anthropology itself. Tuhami has become one of the most important and widely cited representatives of a new understanding of the whole discipline of anthropology.