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Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art (Yale Publications in the History of Art)

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Few people in the United States, even people with African ancestry, know much detailed information about the cultures of the African continent. Blurred by romanticization, many people assume they know without actually having looked. Furthermore, those who have scratched the surface on information about African cultures have surely discovered that the volume of information on men far exceeds the volume of information on women. Radiance from the Waters: Ideals Feminine Beauty in Mende Art actually offers much more than the title suggests, providing us with a window not only into the life and thought of one of the largest and most important ethnic groups of West Africa, but also into the female experience and its social construction within that culture. The author, an African American art history scholar from Yale, now deceased, who studied the Mende language with a linguist in England before heading to Sierra Leone to conduct her fieldwork, actually bridges the fields of art history, anthropology, history, Africana studies, and gender studies in this carefully researched work. Unlike most classical fieldwork, which has been conducted by individuals whose own identities bear little resemblance to those of the people under study, Boone can claim a common race x gender intersection with her community of study, making certain kinds of observations and interpretations possible that would have been impossible otherwise, even through the lenses of cultural (African American vs. African) difference. In her text, Boone uses art historical analysis as a jumping off point for cosmological reflection, offering us not only deeper insight into a particular worldview that prizes beauty in ways almost unthinkable in our Western commodification-focused "looks-ist" society, but also some alternative ways of thinking about physical appearance and sexuality. While it is impossible to read this text without engaging contemporary debates about the practice of female genital cutting, one must remember that this debate had scarcely begun at the time Boone conducted her fieldwork and had certainly not peaked when this book was published in 1986. Thus, we must read it through a historical light that allows us to develop more subtle and nuanced understandings about the practice, even if those understandings are used to refine arguments against and fortify efforts to end the practice. The beginning of all sound and effective action is knowledge and deep reflection, and this book promotes both.

If you are going to judge the actions of the people in this book with your own personal biases, I recommend you put the book down. Coming from the USA, immediate the thought of Genital Mutilation puts me in disgust, but I put it into perspective with the beautiful culture of the Mende. As in Western/developed societies where people do what is the norm, it is the same the world over, even though norms are different. From what I've learned, the general opinion used to be that African cultures had no aesthetics, because they do not completely mimic popular US trends, etc. The author made this book in an attempt to prove to the Western influenced societies that African cultures do have standards of beauty and acceptance.

I understand that this book was written in the late seventies, but still, trying to rationalize one of the central rituals of the Mende culture, the forced, surgical removal of the clitoris of teen and pre-teen girls as a pre-requisite of their entering the adult community, is horrifying. Did the author perhaps get too much sun as she was doing her field work for her Ph.d from Yale in this community? How can she not condemn this aspect of female life in Sierra Leone's tribal communities, and seem to condone,or ignore, this most extraordinarily monstrous practice around which the whole society is organized. Perhaps the book is an interesting study of standards of feminine beauty in in a west african community, but to me, as a woman, I just couldn't get past the fact that this miserable ritual is at the heart of their society. The book is well written and full of interesting and exotic information, and is worth reading if only to raise your blood pressure, be you male or female, as to the sorry state of women in the world even in this, the year 2000.