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![[Black and white photo of native American with mask.]](./img/curtis-3c01843u-380.jpg)
Haschezhini – Navaho
Photo: Edward S. Curtis
By the time of Edward S. Curtis’ death in 1952, his documentation of North American Indians had fallen into obscurity. We’re grateful that this amazing body of ethnographic work shortly thereafter returned into public awareness. Nowadays a lot of Curtis work is freely available online, through the Edward S. Curtis Collection at the Library of Congress, an archive which consists of more than 2,400 silver-gelatin photographic prints.
We have spent some time looking through the collection, and picked out a few photos which are currently our favorites. From these we have selected the ones showing different examples of masks, because – as William Butler Yeats pointed out in 1910 – mask are just so damn cool:
It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what's behind.
These are wonderful, captivating images. Enjoy a stroll through our gallery, and see for yourself.
“It is the anonymous nature of the lapdance that allows for such closeness between strangers. The lapdance becomes a metaphor for this human contradiction: the deep desire for intimacy, yet the simultaneous fear of it.”
Photographer Juliana Beasley worked eight years as a professional nude dancer, using her camera to document the clubs she worked in, her co-workers, and the customers.
“Why are you, with your impeccable credentials, studying nude dancing?”
The question was asked by newspaper reporters to anthropologist, educator, writer and dance critic Judith Lynne Hanna when she did her field work on striptease clubs (also called exotic dance cabarets or gentlemen’s clubs).
“I am an anthropologist,” Hanna bluntly explained. “Anthropologists study human behavior.”
Hanna has been an expert court witness in cases related to freedom of speech and exotic dance in the United States, and in Ethnography Challenges False Mythology she analyzes how localities try to regulate striptease clubs out of business.
“Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine meta physical revelation.”
Thus wrote William James in 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience is a philosophical treasure chest for anybody studying the spiritual quest of humans, so we give you a snippet from James’ chapter on “Mysticism.”
“What do you mean a bad thing? Does it hurt your church? Well, then, let them have it. It’s their church.”
From Marvin K. Opler’s The character and history of the Southern Ute peyote rite.
We have a gallery of New Mexico lowriders by photographer Jack Parsons. Jack is the grandson of pioneering anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, and tells us he has “a soft spot for cultural anthropology.”
The pictures are from Low ’n Slow: Lowriding in New Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 1999).
“Sir, I was just now sitting around working on a Revell 1:25 model kit of a Kenworth® W900, and the absorption and joy of the work put me into some deep, deep contemplation …”
More on our feedback page.
We’re celebrating the remodel of American Ethnography’s web pages, by offering our T-shirts for $19.95. And that’s including shipping, no matter where you are in the world! It’s ridiculous, that’s what it is!
To finance our independent research project – Car Customizing & Outlaw Aesthetics – we created a limited edition serigraph. They’re hand printed by us here at American Ethnography – black ink on 100% cotton fiber paper.
We think they came out good, and you’ll find them in our online store.
Have you got some good stuff you think American Ethnography Quasiweekly should cover? Please send us an email and tell us about it!
