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Body language

Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon-Boxes of Daghestan
By Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov and Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov.
Bennett & Bloom, London, £19.99
 

In the southernmost border of the Russian Federation lies Daghestan, a land of ancient villages perched among the Great Caucasian Mountains by the shores of the Caspian Sea. In this rural Islamic society, animist tattoos on women - descendants of the Amazons - and decoration on ritual spoon-boxes share symbols that are believed to protect the hearth and the family. Three experts have recorded this fascinating system of folk medicine, allowing the women’s own voices to reveal the living vocabulary of their hidden body language. The resulting volume ­ which bears the awesome subtitle Magic Medicine Symbols in Silk, Stone, Wood and Flesh - provides a key to the symbols adorning spoon-boxes and other original objects found in Daghestan and throughout the carpet world. More than 120 colour images and 180 tattoos specially drawn by Alex Binnie illustrate this unique and vanishing art.

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From Cornucopia 34

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