The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Encounters with the Zuni Indians

by Barbara Tedlock

Book Overview

Based on over twenty years' research at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico, this honest and respectful book takes us into the heart of one Zuni family and allows us to witness the world through its members' eyes. We see the joys of love, marriage, and childbirth and the tragedies of illness, alcoholism, and death. We rediscover the Southwestern landscape, its plants and wildlife, in light of traditional Zuni teachings. The Beautiful and the Dangerous was...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826323421
• ISBN13: 9780826323422
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, truthful writing

This is a beautifully written, honest, book about a young woman ethnographer coming of age. She first went to Zuni Pueblo as a young woman painter with her anthropologist husband and fell in love with the people and place. As a result she went on to get graduate degrees in Ethnomusicology and Anthropology herself and began working with the Maya in Guatemala. Since then she has written a book on women shamans worldwide: The Woman in the Shaman's Body. These books are worth the time to read.

Wonderful Ethnographic Writing

This book is an example of the new attention ethnographers are paying to writing. Not only is it wonderfully written but it is an honest account of Zuni lives today. Tedlock went to the pueblo with her husband Dennis Tedlock (author of the "Popol Vuh" and the "Rabinal Achi") as a painter and after a number of visits and encouragement from Zuni women she decided to become an ethnographer. During her graduate education she also did work in Guatemala, see her classic book "Time and the Highland Maya." There is now a new book about to appear "The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine." I've seen the advanced copy and it is fabulous! All these books are must reads for young documentary writers and spiritually alive women and men today!

A Great Alternative Ethnography

I really enjoyed reading Tedlock's work. The writing reverses the notion of "participant observation" to the "observation of participation." Instead of a removed, monological account, we are offered a polyphony of voices, including the authors. In fact, the ethnography reads much like a novel; however, these are real people with real stories to tell. The text offers a rich and evocative account of the Zuni people and their experiences in the borderzone between the past and present. Tedlock's work and writing strategies were central to the writing of my own ethnographic account of a Southeastern Native American Tribe in search of a visible past--the Pee Dee of South Carolina (Title: Native Americans in the Carolina Borderlands: A Critical Ethnography, Carolinas Press, 2000). Tedlock's ethnography is a must read for those on the verge of engaging ethnography, no matter the methodological bent, and students and academics interested in Native American Studies, Cultural Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and alternative ethnography.