Three Faces of Beauty: Casablanca, Paris, Cairo

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 204 pages
• Published by: Duke University Press February 2002
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0822328968
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0822328964
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 12.3 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Ossman, an ethnographer at the American University of Paris, looks at here the cultural production of beauty in the salons of Casablanca, Cairo and Paris, seen as a process of the "en-lightenment" of the "heavy" the "heavy" signifying tradition and fatness, "en-lightenment" implying freedom and modernity. Beauty parlors are about "deconstructing and putting the body together again," and visiting one is a "flight from gravity" with significant implications for the "geography of shame," "mimesis" and other postmodernist terms. Buried under the jargon, the careful reader may excavate some interesting detail the juxtaposition on salon walls of phrases from the Koran and movie star pinups, women getting elaborate hairdos and then covering them with the traditional hijab, stylists who stub out their cigarettes to roll out their prayer rugs but Ossman takes such ironies for granted. Unfortunately, she rarely discusses how hair is dressed or how legs are waxed in these different countries; specific details about actual beauty practices, which would have filled out her descriptions, are missing. In the end, Ossman refuses to analyze how salons have developed in the different cities; mapping out such "geographies of taste" would violate the fluidity she celebrates. Still, readers who enjoy playful anthropomorphizing ("the mirror participates in the entire process of elaborating a style"), digressions on the philosophy of optics or the significance of mirrors to the Greeks may find this work "en-lightening." B&w photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Review
"The quality of writing is elegant and alluring. . . . Ossman’s writing is often as seductive as the problems she investigates. . . ." -- Brad Weiss, American Ethnologist

"Three Faces of Beauty may be read as pleasurable as a novel [or] as detailed as a classic ethnography. . . ." -- Alec Balasescu, H-Net Reviews

"[R]iveting . . . . Her work is both a delicious read and a landmark in studying aspects of the popular . . . everyday culture." -- Evelyn A. Early, Middle East Journal --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.