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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
BOOK DISCUSSED
Images of Congo:
Anne Eisner Art and Ethnography, 1946-1958
ED. CHRISTIE MCDONALD
Milan: 5 Continents, 2005,
175 pp. plus 32 color and 30 black and white illustrations, $39.00.
ISBN: 88-7439-220-6, cloth.
This is an outstanding book. Most of the essays are revised versions of papers first presented in the course of a special workshop held at Harvard University in 2002 to examine the art and life of Anne Eisner (1911-1967), the white American woman artist who lived in the Ituri rainforest of the former Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) during the 1940s and 1950s. Anne Eisner's African adventures began in 1945. While working as a freelance artist in New York City, she fell in love with Harvard-trained anthropologist Patrick Putnam and, in 1946, accompanied him back to the Ituri forest where he had lived since the late 1920s, studying the Mbuti. The latter, along with the Aka, Efe, Twa, and related groups, are pejoratively called "Pygmies" because they look much smaller than the average person. Anne married Patrick in 1948, despite the fact that he already had African wives. She quickly adjusted to the new environment, assisting him in running a ranch he had established at Epulu on the edge of the Ituri rainforest. This ranch later became known as Camp Putnam. She identified so closely with the Mbuti that they invited her to join a network of foster mothers taking care of three orphaned babies. All told, Anne spent about nine years at Camp Putnam (1946-1954; 1957-1958) painting genre scenes, compiling ethnographic notes, collecting African art and artifacts, as well as transcribing Mbuti folktales. The camp began to disintegrate when Patrick became physically and mentally ill. He died in 1953. Anne left for the United States in 1954, though she came back three years later, spending only one year before leaving for good after a bicycle accident in which she broke her hips.
Well-documented, full of fresh perspectives and distinguished by high-quality scholarship, the essays in Images of the Congo not only focus on different aspects of Anne Eisner's activities at Camp Putnam, but also attempt to fill critical gaps in the literature on the Mbuti. Until recently, this literature was dominated...
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