“It has been rightly said: Color is
the first principle of place.”
A quick
look across any desert reveals a lack of watery blues and leafy
greens. But Ellen Meloy fills that void in her memoir, The
Anthropology of Turquoise. She uses turquoise — the
color and the mineral — to explore desert geology, flora and
fauna, personal and cultural histories and destinies.
Connecting the Sierra Nevada of her grandmother’s life with
the Utah redrock desert of her own, she finds turquoise coloring in
pine needles, mountain faces, mines and reservoirs along the way.
Meloy finds indigo in the azul maya dyes of Mayan civilizations
during a vacation with her husband on the Yucatán Peninsula,
and aquamarine in the oceans while exploring her family’s
genealogy and history in the slave trade in the Bahamas. At
moments, the constant recurrence of turquoise as mineral, pigment,
sky or water feels stretched. But Meloy’s book reminds us
that symbols of meaning and strength can be found wherever we seek
them out.
According to Meloy, most people have severed
their connections to the landscape by failing to submerse
themselves in similar quests. Because of this, she writes, unrest
permeates Westerners’ attitudes towards land management. She
reminds us: “There are people who have no engaged
conversation with the land whatsoever, no sense of its beauty or
extremes or limits, and therefore no reason to question their
actions in a place that is merely backdrop.”
The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape,
Art, and Spirit, Ellen Meloy. Pantheon Books, New York,
NY, 2002. Hardcover: $24. 324 pages.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Tangled up in blue.
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