Customer Reviews

Cloth and Human Experience (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry)

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This is a fine volume of dense anthropological articles. If the reader is hoping for something along the lines of the excellent Elizabeth Wayland Barber's works, they should look elsewhere. I don't know how it rates as anthropology, but the topics are much, much narrower than 'human experience,' confined to examination of particular ethnic and cultural custom in which cloth (widely defined) is involved.

Cloth and Human Experience

edited by annette weiner & jane schneider

1989

431 pages (12 papers presented at a 1983 Werner-Gren Foundation conference dealing with the importance and significance of cloth in societies. includes madagascar, zaire, europe, mexico, kodi, Africa, Indonesia, India, Japan, Mexico and Inka and more. 27 photographs. specific themes that reveal the properties of cloth that underlie its social and political contributions within broad historical time periods

The essays in this book are fascinating and demonstrate compelling links that fabrics play in larger cultural realms. A few of the essays in this collection have been required reading for my undergraduate (and even high school) Fibers and Weaving classes for years.