Sylvia Ardyn Boone
Sylvia Ardyn Boone (1940–1993) was an African-American art historian specializing in African art, female imagery, women's arts and masks. In 1988, she became the first African-American woman to receive tenure at Yale University
Boone, Sylvia Ardyn
Boone, Sylvia Ardyn
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Description: Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00275
Photographs by Rebecca Busselle and Sylvia Ardyn Boone

The Sande Society of the Mende is a widespread secret female regulatory society that both guards and transmits the ideals of feminine beauty that comprise the fundamental aesthetic criterion in Mende culture. The Sande initiation camp is conceived as a realm beneath the waters, a domain from which beauty and art emerge, a sacred space where women rule. In this eloquent and moving book, Sylvia Ardyn Boone describes the society, its organization, some of its rituals, and finally the mask worn by its members—an archetypal African sculpture called the Sande Sowo head. Her observations are not only an evocative account of Mende life and philosophy but are also a unique approach to the study of African art, an approach based on African conceptions about the human body and the person. Boone's engaging text is accompanied by extraordinary photographs of Mende women by Rebecca Busselle.

After introducing the reader to Mende history and ethnography, Boone discusses the Sande Society as a program for promoting the spiritual and physical beauty of Mende women. She then shows that an examination of the physical qualities and proportions of feminine beauty is a portal to an understanding of Mende ideas of morality and power. Under the tutelage of Mende elders Boone learned, for example, that the sight of a luxuriant head of hair arranged in an intricate style gives pleasure, but that is also encodes at higher levels notions of right behavior, successful social relations, progeny, and abundance. Equipped with this intimate knowledge, Boone is able to analyze in new ways the symbolism of the Sande Sowo head, and uncovers the meaning of this sculpture by viewing it against the background of the Mende natural and metaphysical world from which it emerges and to which it refers.

*The eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date August 1986 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300035766
EISBN 9780300266016
Illustrations 92
Print Status out of print