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Three Faces of Beauty: Casablanca, Paris, Cairo

by Susan Ossman

Duke University Press, 2002
Paper: 978-0-8223-2896-4 | eISBN: 978-0-8223-8363-5 | Cloth: 978-0-8223-2881-0
Library of Congress Classification GT499.O77 2002
Dewey Decimal Classification 391.6

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Three Faces of Beauty offers a unique approach to understanding globalization and cultural change based on a comparative, ethnographic study of a nearly universal institution: the beauty salon. Susan Ossman traces the images and words of the beauty industry as they developed historically between Paris, Cairo, and Casablanca and then vividly demonstrates how such images are embodied today in salons located in each city.
By examining how images from fashion magazines, film, and advertising are enacted in beauty salons, Ossman demonstrates how embodiment is able to display and rework certain hierarchies. While offering the possibility of freedom from the tethers of status, nation, religion, and nature, beauty is created by these very categories and values, Ossman shows. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, she documents the various rituals of welcome, choice-making, pricing practices, and spatial arrangements in multiple salons . She also reveals ways in which patrons in all three cities imagine and co-opt looks they believe are fashionable in the other cities. By observing salons as scenes of instruction, Ossman reveals that beautiful bodies evolve within the intertwining contexts of media, modernity, location, time, postcolonialism, and male expectation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Susan Ossman is Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. She is the author of Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City.

REVIEWS

“Ossman’s trajectory is like the braiding and weaving of hair, like a dance of nimble fingers and scissors. She achieves a rare vividness for which anthropologists often strive but rarely attain.”—James Faubion, Rice University

“Susan Ossman lets us hear women’s hopes for beauty and difference—out of or under the head shawl—in Casablanca, Cairo, and Paris. What a pleasure to linger in these beauty shops, where talk, the snipping scissors, and Egyptian songs help open the door to modernity. A delightful and insightful read.”—Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University

"A refreshing new perspective. . . . The book stands out in the burgeoning field of anthropology studies of Middle Eastern women in its approach to an institution that features in the experiences of women of all classes across the cultures discussed. . . . Ossman's lyrical, sensual prose is a delight to read."

-- Deborah A. Starr Comparative Literature Studies

"Elegance and sophistication are widely lauded virtues of contemporary social theorizing. Susan Ossman’s study not only exemplifies these qualities but it also engages with them as critical themes in social practice, identity construction, and globalization. . . . The range of issues raised in Ossman’s work speaks to its sophistication. The quality of writing is elegant and alluring. Indeed, Ossman’s writing is often as seductive as the problems she investigates. . . . I have great respect for the intellectual quality and beauty of Ossman’s text. It should be of interest to a wide range of readers for the breadth and depth of the issues it engages."

-- Brad Weiss American Ethnologist

"Ethnographers must try to find balance without locating the truth in the representative eye and must be attentive to how difference works to create sameness. Ossman here proves that beauty salons are a perfect place to start."

-- Al Jadid

"Susan Ossman’s verbal description of the non-verbal is lilting and illustrative. Few authors so well capture the physical, the ephemeral in text. In fact it is difficult not to string together Ossman’s delightful prose and avoid writing a review altogether. . . . Ossman presents riveting vignettes such as how it feels to be ‘done over’ by the neighborhood beautician or such as how the beauty salon becomes a clinic where the body is compartmentalized. . . . Her work is both a delicious read and a landmark in studying aspects of the popular, the informal everyday culture."

-- Evelyn A. Early Middle East Journal

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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