Description
In a village in the far north of Thailand, under the stunning light of a tropical sun, surreal women impeccably wearing their ethnic attire, smiling and motionless, offer themselves to the cameras of voracious tourists. Adorned with gorgeous necklaces of shining brass coils, they are the famous “giraffe women”, the epithet commonly used to define members of the Kayan tribe originally from eastern Burma. The vivid contrast between the myths narrating the origin of this ethnic group and their current condition as refugees from the civil war in their homeland provides an outstanding and sharp testimony to life in Thailand’s “human zoos”. A wide selection of photographs taken by the author using primitive vintage cameras from the early 1900s and a poignant short video, shot with Super-8 film, enrich the volume, visually amplifying the unique mood of the written account. ABOUT the AUTHOR: Martino Nicoletti PhD (Perugia, 1968), ethnologist and multimedia artist, has been engaged for over twenty years in ethnography, visual anthropology and visual arts in southern and south-eastern Asia. The author of numerous books on the religions of the Himalayas, multimedia publications, photographic volumes and literary works, he has acted as director and principal investigator for research projects funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Italian National Research Council (CNR), the University of Perugia, the University of Rome II (Tor Vergata) and the University of the West of Scotland. He is Senior Lecturer in Photography at the School of Art and Design of the University of Derby.
