While in Cameroon gathering information for her PhD, Cooperstown resident Amols was the unwitting recipient of an honor. She was named Mafua Afuahtah-attah, the highest title bestowed upon a woman. Every two years, a cultural festival is held. Amols had no idea she had been singled out for the honor, and snuck off for a beer. She was whisked back from the pub by dignitaries in ceremonial garb to the palace of the highest fon, or chief. The secret ceremony that took place while she was being dressed and indoctrinated is indicative of the mystery in which many African festivals and milestones are cloaked.

"Secrecy is the nature of power," she said. "Who holds the keys? If only a few people have knowledge of something, they are valued even more. This was a great frustration of mine as I tried to learn about a new belief system."

She carried a beaded white horse tail, symbolic of status during dances, and carried a bag for a cow horn, from which title holders drink palm wine. This illustrious point in her stay came after Amols had stayed her course on a long road, learning about how items are infused with the properties of those who believe in them.

Amols started studying voodoo art while living in New Orleans, where masks, costumes and idols abound. While earning her masters degree and now her PhD, Amols focused on aesthetics and, within that, on the sublime. She was hoping to spend time in the Congo, but the outbreak of war thwarted her plans and put her on another path-to Cameroon, situated on the edge between west and central Africa.

Cameroon is saturated with the traces of two hundred and fifty distinct cultures, and learning to communicate effectively was a formidable project as a well as a grant requirement for Amols' studies. French and English are the official languages of Cameroon, but people speak pigeon English that varies greatly in lingo and tone from place to place.

The university with which Amols was affiliated had no books in the library, because being of value, they disappear as soon as they arrive. Illiteracy contributes greatly to the culture, Amols said. Books are hard to come by, to start, and oral history plays into the respect people in Africa have for elders.

"They wanted me to explain why we put our elders in what amounts to a prison in their eyes," Amol said. "They go to their elders for advice, which keeps them vital, on the one hand, but also makes progress more difficult because people become so rooted in tradition."

In the absence of written records, each person becomes an encyclopedia of information. When an elder dies, Amols said, all of that information is, in a sense, lost. But people maintain tight relationships with the dead, and their spirits are consulted, their skulls are covered in ceremonial chicken and goat blood, and they are buried in the compounds of their relatives. From this magic web of ancestry comes the belief that life is a chain, and that the spirits of those related by lineage or affiliation are intrinsically linked. Amols calls the phenomena a metaphysical frontier.

"My sense of obligation has changed a great deal," Amols said. "I have much more respect now."

Amols lived in the bush in a village called Ngoh, without electricity or running water, taking a required anti-malarial drug known for causing delusions and intense dreams.

"The hardest part was a simultaneous feeling of unbelievable loneliness and intrusion on my personal space," Amols said. "From the time people wake up in the morning, they work together. It was considered very strange for me to spend time alone working on my notes."

Amols lived in a polygamous village with the wife and children of a man who had another wife down the road and a third by the time Amols returned to the United States. The lifestyle changes sparked an emotional, physical and spiritual upheaval in her life. She said she remembers standing in the market, looking at the meager selections for soup and cereal and suddenly realizing how crippling the options are that Americans are faced with every day. Now, the sight of too many clothes in the closet or the long sprawl of an American supermarket aisle barely seem familiar.

These aspects of life in Africa affected Amols deeply, but she was there primarily to study the link between art and healing.

"This is a subject of increasing interest to westerners in academic circles," said Amols, whose father is a neurologist. "Botanists and chemists look for specific herbs and remedies. Anthropologists and folklorists look from a social and cultural perspective. Psychologists look at the mind. But very few art historians have looked at the nature of African art and the power of healing. Every healing system is different."

Amols combines parts of each of these views to create her own. She has discovered that to westerners, science has become a religion, at the expense of the spirit just as missionary work has been "very good at killing the spirit" in Africa.

"It's a horrible problem all over the world, the breakdown in communication and the way people question you about your spiritual values," she said. "We all have spiritual natures but some people can access it more readily. Spirit has nothing to do with church."

Amols said that belief can't be separated from the healing process.

"If your belief system states that there are spirits out there attacking you, then they are," she said. "Illness is an umbalance. It's an indication that things aren't going well. Anything that wreaks havoc throughout the fabric of your life is an illness."

Now, back in Cooperstown, Amols is incorporating meaningful pieces of her studies and African life as she works on her dissertation and creates a garden stone by stone, laying steps and planting an assortment of flowers and foliage as a statue overlooks the place where she sits and catches up with people. Only chiefs are allowed to display those statues, she explains.

"Truth is in the eye of the beholder," Amols said. "And reality is what you make of it. I did something very scary and different. But what does it take if you want to learn something? Risk. We're looking for awe-inspiring experiences. That's what a mystical, secret, controlled environment is all about."

She will be giving a presentation at the Smithy-Pioneer Gallery on August 20 at 7:30 p.m.