cover image THREE FACES OF BEAUTY: Casablanca, Paris, Cairo

THREE FACES OF BEAUTY: Casablanca, Paris, Cairo

Susan Ossman, Susan Ossman, Ossman, . . Duke Univ., $18.95 (216pp) ISBN 978-0-8223-2881-0

Ossman, an ethnographer at the American University of Paris, examines 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. (Mar.)